Whatever Stefan said, it worked, and soon, he was heading up a small crew of church volunteers, mostly grandfathers, planning then planting a series of new gardens and choosing the ornamental plantings for the interior. Despite my record as a lapsed churchgoer, I knew the minister well, and so I went over there several times to see what Stefan was doing.
He was as proud as a new father, giving me a tour of the grounds. “You try to match the plantings to the architecture and the colors. I mean, what do I know about that? But, like, if you had a modern, industrial building, you would have lots of evergreen and sturdy red geraniums. This structure is modern, but it’s also got the feeling of the old Byzantine church, so you can have more elaborate flowers that are still delicate.”
Clematis arched over raised beds filled with fuchsia, catmint, campanula, delphiniums, foxgloves, hardy geranium, herbs and lavender. My son had recently found a pair of old stone birdbaths with hooplike trellises over their tops and he persuaded two of the men to bring them to the garden in one of their trucks. Then he wound these with pussy willow stems and filled the bath hollows with cliff roses and crocuses, both native plants in Greece.
“Listen to these names: Russian sage, ice cap, lady orchid peony,” he said to me. “The names are like perfume.” He pointed out how the lavender and rosemary scented the air around the gardens, and explained the sequences in which the plants would flower. The raised beds were edged in artemisia and green boxwood, and through them were veins of gold and purple stone. “The shrubs and the little trees add structure, like the frame on a painting,” he told me.
“How did you learn to do all this?” I asked him.
“I looked it up on the internet. Then I started streaming gardening shows at night on my computer. I figured out how to hit garage sales and where the cheapest places were to buy stuff and get the church a big discount. I find a lot of it from people’s trash, too, frankly.”
He said he was now maybe thinking about studying landscape architecture the following year. “It’s the perfect blend for me. You get to think and move your body around. You don’t get as much of a chance to be depressed because you have to go outside all the time. And you can start your own small company and bid on jobs. People’s houses. Small businesses. You can get a riding mower. People don’t care who the guy is who shows up to do the landscaping. They don’t say, hey, have you got a record? Then maybe someday, I can get contracts for whole subdivisions and parks. There’s this woman online who only designs garden seating. She only designs park benches. And she’s famous.” Once the gardens were completed, he said, he would maintain them as he did the interior of the church.
He starting working longer hours at the church, sometimes close to forty hours in one week, and wished he could work more. Soon he even had a company car. My sister Amelia sold him her old Mitsubishi Eclipse for $500—which I thought was charity until I found out that those cars hadn’t been manufactured since 2008. Still, it got him around. He first stuck rakes in the back, but soon he got help to mount a tow on the rear and was pulling an old boat trailer around onto which he added some planks and a pretty snazzy donated riding mower （apparently, like the waterbeds of a previous era, they were a much-repented purchase）。 Then one evening he came home with a very old but very theatrical pickup truck on which he had stenciled the image of a globe spilling over at the top with tulips and sunflowers and the words THE WHOLE BLOOMING WORLD, along with the words * Plant Environments *.
“I figured that environments covered everything,” he said proudly.
“It seems like it might be a lot to take on.”
“Just this truck and the mower, and maybe I’ll add a part-time high-school kid to work for me.”
“What about bonding and insurance and all that?”
“Mom, for real. Do you think everybody who drives past here with some rakes and a mower on a pickup truck is bonded and insured?”
“Probably not. But if you are going to advertise, you’ll need to at least look into it.”
“I’ll get to that if this is a go. I’ll be very, very careful. If it isn’t a go, then, oh well.”
It seemed to be a go, however. Within the month, through ever-resourceful Julie and through word of mouth, Stefan had six regular landscaping clients, then ten. Stefan’s eye had been healing nicely and so he was gradually able to lift and tote things safely. The crowning achievement of those initial efforts was being hired to landscape and caretake The Luck Institute, a beautiful building in town with an indoor atrium that housed offices, a jeweler, a bakery and a high-end luggage store. One of Stefan’s jobs would be to create a rotating indoor display that reflected the season. The idea thrilled him. Stefan pitched the theme of boats and sailing for the midsummer season and positioned a derelict old row boat in the middle of the plaza that foamed with dusty-blue buckets of coneflower and particle hydrangea, while sailboats planted with orange and red and blue sedum marched up the outside of the staircase. An old fish trap was festooned with small pots of gerbera daisies and veronica. Strategically hidden clip-on grow lights, set on timers, switched on at night to give the flowers an artificial drink of sun.