How Green Were His Values
My brother, John, and his best friend, Chip, were so cute in their baggy cutoffs and surfer shirts that no one could resist them, two breezy 9-year-olds with a gardening business. Picture the innocent sweetness of the mid-’60s, streaky blond hair chopped into bangs, the Kinks playing on the tiny radio John was hoping to junk once the money rolled in.
He and Chip knocked on doors. Soon, as they weeded borders or wheeled a mower across a lawn, people stopped and asked their price. Before long, they had more clients than they could handle, mostly families with lazy kids who lolled indoors all summer long and watched TV.
In my house, you didn’t loll. It was either garden or go to summer school, which my sister and I, stupidly, in John’s opinion, had agreed to do. But John had plans. They involved freedom. Specifically, he yearned to be his own boss and thereby duck my dad, the Mad Gardener, to whom the outdoors was a battleground and who for years had deployed us to help him yank back creeping greens to the butched edges of his domain.
Thanks to my dad, we all knew something about gardening, though none of us really liked it, especially John. While my sister and I labored steadily to prune roses or rake leaves, John dawdled over a box full of weed scraps carelessly plucked. When he finished, his patch might look clean, but it wasn’t. Undisturbed underground, the roots would sprout again in a day or two.
Time after time, hoping to teach John discipline, my dad sent him back with a hoe to do the job right. But this never changed John’s attitude. What did was the lure of cash. He would work, not for “love,” my parents’ currency, but for things, such as a better radio. How hard could it be? Get out of bed, mow some grass, pull weeds, collect money, go home. The rest of the day he could pitch a tennis ball against the house or lie on the couch in front of the TV.
He and Chip--corralled to keep John company--biked to their jobs, arriving punctually at 9. They really worked. And they were so much cheaper than the competition. Mothers watching from their kitchens brought them lemonade and issued vague orders: “Neaten things up” or “Be sure and sweep the path.” Most, having inherited a garden with their house, knew nothing about plants and only wanted them to bloom or stay green or at least not fall over and die. John and Chip argued quietly over who got to mow when and which green sprout was a weed and which wasn’t. Usually, they erred on the conservative side, wisely doing less instead of more and getting home in time for “Dialing for Dollars,” their favorite show, which was also a vehicle for winning cash.
Things might have gone on like this: happy clients, happy parents, money piling up in John’s sock drawer. Except that one day, for mysterious reasons, Chip suddenly got ambitious. Maybe, like John, he just got tired of taking orders. But instead of weeding as he’d agreed to do, he grabbed some loppers and started hacking a hedge until eight feet of growth had shrunk to a lumpy, pathetic three. When John saw the damage, he tried to smooth it out, but the more he clipped, the more chewed it looked until the client--not some know-nothing this time but an actual gardener--swooped out, shrieking like a demented crow: “I planted those myself! They’re like my children! You’re fired!”
On the way home, with the silhouette of that hedge and those awful words in his head, John told Chip the partnership was finished. Later he told his clients and my parents that Chip had gone on vacation. Some of his clients went away themselves, and John limped through the rest of the summer gardening alone. By the middle of August, he had enough money to buy his radio.
On hot, airless nights, my sister and I, in our room next to John’s, would fall asleep to the hypnotic chug of “You Really Got Me” leaking out from under his covers. In September, he hardly complained when school started, and my dad confiscated the radio so that John would Buckle Down and Get Serious. He did.
John grew up and became a lawyer. He makes more money than anyone in the history of my family. What does he spend it on? Plants. He has 50--10 of them trees--in his New York apartment, and he tends them all himself.
To most of the world, he’s a guy in a suit. In his own world, he’s usually in his underwear, misting, feeding, potting, hands in dirt, newspapers fanned out across his wooden floors.
“My plants are more important to me than anything,” he told me recently. “Without them I couldn’t be happy.”
It’s a lesson he learned early: Some jobs you do for money. Others are better done for love.
