The Garden That Wasn’t Entirely Growing

There was a house at the end of a road that the traveler recognized without remembering having seen it before.

Its garden was enormous.

Some of the plants were unmistakably alive.

Others were not.

The traveler knew this immediately.

There were flowers whose colors were too precise, leaves whose surfaces never moved in the wind, and three tall cypress trees standing together near the wall.

They looked ancient.

They also looked like statues.

The traveler stood among them for a while.

Then they found the hose.

They turned on the water.

No particular reason.

They watered the living plants first.

Then the strange ones.

Then the three cypresses.

Water gathered briefly around their roots before disappearing into the soil.

The traveler wondered whether that meant anything.

Perhaps the real plants needed it.

Perhaps the false ones did not.

Perhaps the distinction mattered enormously.

Perhaps it mattered not at all.

They continued watering.

At the far side of the house, something moved.

The traveler looked up.

For an instant, the entire garden seemed to change.

The plants were no longer divided into living and artificial things.

Everything seemed to occupy some position between the two.

Some things grew.

Some things remained exactly as they were.

Some things had been made to resemble growth.

And some things, the traveler realized, might simply have been growing in a way the traveler did not yet recognize.

The hose slipped slightly in their hand.

Water continued running.

The traveler smiled.

They had been looking for the answer to the wrong question.

Not:

Which things are alive?

But:

What happens when I care for a place before I know what everything in it is?

The garden did not answer.

It kept growing.

Or pretending to.

Or perhaps both.

And the traveler kept watering.

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