Spring/Summer 2006: Land

Yard

By Lucy Burningham

The hosta plants began to appear in our arid Utah yard like crop circles. Almost overnight, the shade-loving perennials with big, back-bending leaves formed strange rows, curving in perfect order through former rose beds, under ornamental junipers, and around a patch of oak brush. Soon, the lawn began to disappear, replaced by neatly spaced varieties of the same green, leafy plant.

As a teenager, I preferred to keep the hosta explosion a mystery rather than try to understand why my stepfather, Burton, was spending every minute of his free time in coveralls, digging with a well-worn, wooden-handled shovel and gently pushing starter plants into the ground.

Unlike Oregon, where hosta thrive, the dry, high-altitude climate in Salt Lake City, Utah, destroys the nonnative plant while it nurtures things like thistle, cheatgrass, pricklypear, and Cyprus trees. But Burton didn't seem to notice. He rigged an extensive watering system made of PVC pipes and stubbornly planted trees mid-yard, where the equally thirsty Kentucky Bluegrass once covered the ground like plush carpet. Burton forced the branches of the new trees into unnatural horizontal positions by attaching them to boards, wires, and more PVC pipe. The shady effect was disconcerting in Utah's desert clime--our neighbors began buildings berms and fences to block their view of our yard--but the shade was just what the hosta needed to survive. And while the water bill could have funded a second mortgage, my mother just shook her head in amazement.

My stepfather was born about a hundred miles east of Salt Lake City, in Roosevelt, a brown, barren, windswept town defined by dust and harsh weather. His parents raised livestock and grew hay for feed and so did Burton for most of his early life, a difficult existence dependent on weather, crop diseases, and luck. When he left Roosevelt as a young man, he discovered that lush, green plants could grow under the right circumstances, in greenhouses and in well-maintained yards. In his mind, the color green became a symbol of control, the result of landowners who had the luxury of pursuing aesthetics instead of a livelihood based on the land. For Burton, every shade of emerald became beautiful.

When he married my mother, he inherited a yard, and somehow, Burton decided on the hosta as his shot at redemption. By nurturing their veined leaves, he would control the elements that once threatened his family's survival. Where there was no rain, Burton soaked the ground. Where the soil fostered only the toughest root systems, he introduced the delicate. The yard became the place where he covered the memories of dust storms and drought with rich, fertilized soil and rows of fresh, blooming plants--the kind that didn't even belong. As a child, Burton had endured the cruel irony of living off the land where the land barely lived. In sweet redemption, he created his own version of utopia, in perfect, green rows.

Published in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2006 Oregon Council for the Humanities