SOUNDING OFF: Miller and Lang: two spirits of the garden

I confess to having met Hortense Miller and Fred Lang — two Laguna Beach locals revered in gardening circles — only once; a brief meeting 20 years ago. Yet the circumstances around our encounter, what I brought away from it, have stayed with me, shaping the way I look at plants and, by extension, the world.

Miller needed a bit of work done in her garden, which occupied a few acres of hillside terrain in North Laguna. Fortunately, it was only a small section that I was called upon to attend to.

We met, and my first thought was how someone so old and frail could manage such a large and challenging garden. She was hovering around 80, in full command of her wits, and pleased to give me a detailed rundown of all the different areas she had planted over the decades. Her only grievance was her inability to garden with the vigor she had when she was younger.

A mutual friend had suggested that I might be just the man for the brute work of tearing out some old azaleas in preparation for new plantings. Hortense was there briefly to oversee the work, showing me what areas to dig up, which was a space roughly 20 feet by 15 feet and shaded by a grove of bamboo. The azaleas were a few decades old, sparse and very woody, with feeder roots protruding over the hard ground. I told Hortense I’d have the job done in a few hours.

She smiled like someone who knows better, wished me luck, and wandered off to another part of the garden.

A few hours later, the smile behind the smile became clear to me. The surrounding bamboo were of the runner variety, and the roots of these sturdy plants had virtually taken over the azalea garden.

The roots of the azaleas and bamboo had become so entangled that it was impossible to remove one without the other. If azaleas are one of the easier plants to dig up, running bamboo are surely the most difficult. The roots are stitched into the ground and make a ripping sound when hauled up, as if the seams of the earth are being torn asunder.

Pulling bamboo roots up from the dirt, six inches at a time with two hands tugging over a 20-foot run, gives new meaning to the word exhausting.

Midway through grappling with one particularly long root that had taken on the personality of a reluctant anaconda, it occurred to me that this was a job for someone with a strong back and weak mind. My unique qualifications bothered me, but I was too tired to care.

Coated in sweat and dirt, my hands were blistering through torn gardening gloves, muscles aching from the strain. The work at hand had become no longer a gardening job, but an epic struggle between earth and man and roots for dominance. As all men know, it’s easy to assign larger-than-life meanings to a project — be it plumbing or gardening — when what appears to be a simple task gets the better of you.

The day wore on, with no end of roots in sight. I had to either admit defeat or regroup. Since the work was prix fixe and not hourly, I decided to take a breather, reasoning that a catnap would do me good and, in this vein of logic, serve in everyone’s best interest. I sat down at a nearby bench, in the shade, and contemplated the mayhem of upended roots and plants, not one of them (with apologies to Dylan Thomas) going gently into that good night. I soon dozed off.

Some time later, I was awakened by the sound of tea being poured into a cup. The garden was so quiet you could hear such things. There sat Hortense with a tray of cookies and cups of tea. She showed no sign of being annoyed by my siesta and was almost apologetic in waking me. But she thought I could use some refreshment, and in the tradition of gardening spread throughout the world by the English, that meant tea.

She looked at the mass of unruly roots and commented, “Well, that explains why the azaleas haven’t been doing well these past years.”

“Yes,” I murmured, “That probably explains it.”

The tea tasted cool and refreshing and washed away the bits of soil between my teeth. She made herself comfortable and talked about gardens.

Her interest then was in a certain Japanese gardener/philosopher who held the earth to be so sacred he thought it sacrilegious to so much as till it. Instead, one had to prod the soil with a stick until a hole suitable for a seed could be made. No more than that should be done. No weeds should be removed, no plants disturbed, no earth turned. She wasn’t so much agreeing with his method as she was giving the philosophy and world view behind it the consideration it was due.

We pondered the mess I was making in her patch of earth and she said, “Let’s walk for a bit around the garden.”

She talked and I listened and it felt like a privilege to do no more than that. We passed under an arbor over which a very old climbing rose had grown.

A tangle of branches as thick as my wrist supported the flowering canopy overhead. I almost commented that the vine could use a good pruning, to better view from below the foliage and flowers.

Before I could, she said, “A group of students from the university were here recently, and one of them said to me that I should prune this vine. Can you imagine him looking up at those magnificent branches and thinking that? He only saw the top, not the rest.”

I looked up at the immense vine, growing undisturbed over the years, and felt that not only was I a fool, but a blind one at that.

She pointed at the underside of the vine, “Why would anyone want to prune this? It’s beautiful as it is.”

She saw what I hadn’t and was opening my eyes to something I couldn’t see before. The flowers were the decorations and what our eyes are drawn to, but the whole vine, even the undersides of the leaves and branches, was a thing of natural beauty. It seemed so clear — a plant epiphany — once she had pointed it out.

Having shown me what I needed to see, Hortense retreated to her house and I returned to my work. Some time later, I was declaring a pyrrhic victory over a thick bamboo root I had dislodged from under a boulder, when I heard a movement in the brush.

Out from a wall of greenery stepped Fred Lang, the renowned landscape architect and teacher. Wearing gardening clothes and hat, holding a pruning tool in one hand and plant cuttings in the other, he looked to be in his 60s, but had the stride and stamina of someone much younger. One look and you knew he came from rugged stock.

He smiled approvingly at my work, as if it were the kind of project he’d done when he was younger just for the fun of it. Then he introduced himself and showed me the cuttings he was collecting for the plant identification class he taught at UC Irvine.

“It’s better to show the students what the plants look and feel like,” he said. “They’ll remember them better.”

He asked me what I did, and I told him I had a nursery in Laguna. He brightened at this information, and continued talking about plants. Compared to this giant of horticulture, I knew absolutely nothing. But he apparently mistook my nodding silences for understanding (or else he was taking a breather from hiking around the hillsides) because he lingered and talked for a while.

Over the course of our conversation it became clear that I had a long learning curve ahead of me. At one point he said, “Write it all down, if you don’t you’ll be surprised at how much you forget.” Then, like some garden gnome on a mission with his clippers and cuttings, he disappeared into the thicket.

I was struck by his parting comment. In it was the humility only the truly accomplished have, along the humbling observation that, no matter how much you know, time and age and forgetfulness will not be denied.

I eventually finished the job and no longer remember what I was paid. Hortense and Fred have since passed away. When I hear people in Laguna lament about how the town is changing in ways that no one likes, I think of these two people as tangible reminders of what we bring to others in this life and what slips away from us.

What I do remember was, in that short day, each of them — Lang and Miller — taught me something all of us wish to achieve: to see the world, however briefly, in a different way.

KEVIN NAUGHTON lives in Laguna Beach.