Dinosaurs, Chalk Cliffs, and Me: My Life As a Garden
My raised bed at Hogge Park measures six feet by 18. Bigger than a coffin. Not by much. A metal fence runs along one side of it — put up, in roughly equal measure, to keep out deer and non-gardeners. Close enough to touch if the fence weren’t there is a Greek Orthodox church, its dome catching the morning light while I stand at the bed pulling the rare weed that manages to take hold. They do resurrection over there — incense, icons, a body that doesn’t stay dead. I do mine over here, with a trowel and a bag of composted leaves, and mine takes all season and ends every fall in a heap of black rotted matter that doesn’t look like resurrection at all. It looks like the floor of a well-shaded forest — dark, loamy, unremarkable — the kind of ground you’d walk across without a second thought, never guessing what it’s about to become. Hogge Park sits in suburban Washington, barely a mile from the spot where Abraham Lincoln once rode …
