Free Outer Banks by Anne Rivers Siddons Page B

upstairs crow’s nest we added, and the dunes that shielded the first story from the sea were the tallest and wildest on all that coast. I started the garden before we even moved in.
    At first I had a rich sweep of perennials in the border behind the dunes and beach plum, and I built up a tier of weatheredwooden boxes and tubs so that passersby on the beach below could see them far above, like pennons on a rampart. We planted black pines, sedum, juniper and glossy privet to shield the deck and garden from the punishing torrents of salt wind, but I kept them shaped and clipped. Outside, on the dunes, were beach grass and sea oats, beach morning glory and sea rocket and dune spurge and panic grass…a subtle palette of wild gray-green that set off to perfection my carefully nurtured perennials. I hauled black soil and compost and fertilizer all one summer, and the next I had yarrow and bellflowers and delphiniums and lilies and iris and geraniums and feverfew and a full spectrum of the gaudy poppies. I loved the flowers and loved showing them off; we began our series of deck parties even before the house had a proper kitchen. I hauled food and liquor and ice out to Sagaponack from Bridgehampton and sometimes Manhattan for three summers, and everyone we knew and some we didn’t came to have drinks in my twilight garden by the sea. I always loved my flowers best when the pearl-gray evening light ignited their colors to radiance. Stephen was just-born then, and the garden was a celebration, a destination. I was not even aware when it became a fortress.
    When I had my first miscarriage I stopped some of the parties and let the shrubs grow wild, for I could not seem to get my strength back that summer. Two years later, when our daughter was stillborn, I enclosed the side approaches from the road to the garden in privet hedges. After that you could get to it only from the house, but you could still see the flames of the perennials from the beach, and I worked as assiduously to cultivate the garden for just the three of us as I had when passersby regularly saw it. We still had an occasional party, and our guests still loved my garden.
    When Stephen died I let the black pines grow tall and wild and the juniper overrun the side yards, and we did not have the parties anymore. When they found the ovarian cancer and I came home from that first surgery, and the chemo that followed, I took down the tiers of tubs and pots that were visible from the beach,and put up the fence, and concentrated on my borders. It was about that time that I tired of perennials, and began replacing them with the annuals I have now. There were two exploratory surgeries after that, both with negative results, and the acute fear I had felt at first slid into chronic anxiety and then over into a kind of level white peace that was most pronounced when I was in the garden. Soon I was spending most of my daylight hours there. In winter I spent them at my desk in the alcove off the living room, that looked directly onto the sleeping garden. That was nearly five years ago, and all the perennials are gone now except the poppies. Now I have blanket flower, annual phlox, gazania, lantana, gerberer daisies, purslane, larkspur, statice, zinnias, marigolds, blackeyed susans, and a glorious rank of sunflowers, like sentinels, like Swiss guards at the Vatican. Each autumn I rip them out. Each spring I replant them.
    â€œDon’t you think it’s okay now to plan further ahead than three months?” Alan said last spring, when I came home from the nursery with the bedding plants. “It’s been four and a half years. In October you’ll be officially cured. You can afford to look ahead now. I miss the iris and the lilies, and I miss seeing the colors from the beach. Now, when you’re down there, it’s like there’s nothing at all up here behind the dunes. Those flowers always had a nice, go-to-hell look about them: look, world, Kate and Alan