After a lifetime of traversing continents and cities, Mariam Pirbhai found herself in Waterloo, Ontario, and there she began to garden. As she looks to local nurseries, neighbourhood gardens and nature trails for inspiration, she discovers that plants are not so very different from people. They, too, can be uprooted, transplanted - even naturalized. They, too, can behave as a colonizing or invasive species. And they, too, must learn to adapt to a new land before calling it home. In Garden Inventories, Pirbhai brings her scholar's eye, her love of story and an irrepressible sense of humour to bear on the questions of how we interact with the land around us, from what it means to create a garden through the haze of nostalgia, to the way tradition and nature are bound up in cultural ideals such as 'cottage country,' or even the great Canadian wilderness. Roses, mulberries, tamarinds and Jack pines wend their way through these essays as Pirbhai pays close attention to the stories of the plants, as well as the people, that have accompanied her journey to find home. Throughout, she shows us the layers of history and culture that infuse our understandings of land, place and belonging, revealing how a garden carries within it the story of a life - of family, home, culture and heritage - if not also the history of a world.
How long has it taken me to see, to really begin to see, this land? How long to stop looking over my shoulder, in the sometimes-bitter-sometimes-mournful-sometimes-yearning-sometimes-snivelling window of nostalgia? As I gaze outside my window at the little clump of lanky Jack pine trees we inherited on this property in the city of Waterloo, in southwestern Ontario, and the white pines we’ve planted as the Jack pines dwindle in number, I know that I have only begun to see theland that is on a timetable that is uniquely mine. Seventeen years.
Seventeen years and counting. Seventeen is such an unremarkable number. An odd number in a society that often celebrates evens. Numerologists might disagree: 1+7=8. Eight signifies balance, harmony. Seventeen years ago, my husband, Ronaldo Garcia, and I moved from Montreal, Quebec, to Waterloo, Ontario. Seventeen years ago, we bought and settled in our current home, where we recently celebrated twenty-five years of togetherness. (And who would denytwenty-five its numerical clout.)
Seventeen was also the age at which both Ronaldo and I immigrated to Canada as our parents’ dependents – his family arriving from Guatemala and mine, via a rather circuitous route, from Pakistan. One might even say that seventeen years, for Ronaldo and I, has twenty-five-year currency – that is, it’s a veritable milestone for two people who had never before lived in any one house for more than three or four years apiece. In fact, thefirst seventeen years of my life were lived across three continents (Asia, Europe and North America), five countries (Pakistan, England, the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines and Canada), seven cities and, yes,seventeen different dwellings.
Is this, our house in the suburbs, complete with land ownership and title deeds, the sum total of every migrant’s dream? Is this material stake in the land our passport to belonging? And yet, the questions persist: Are we rooted here? If all acts of naturalization are made equal, how do we know that we are rooted? How long does it take to feel rooted, anyway? That old catalpa tree across the street, its arms now reaching out to kiss a Norway maple on the other side, might say fifty years or more. The first generation might say it takes the next generation to feel truly rooted. Is rootedness, then, enjoyed exclusively by virtue of birthright – that is, being born in a place, where things like family, genealogy, heritage and home are as securely anchored as glacial sediment veining Precambrian rock? Or can we arrive at such states by other channels and means?
Over the last seventeen years, Ronaldo and I have tended this little square pocket of land that is our garden in the northernmost edge of the Carolinian life zone, a semi-temperate climatic region hugging Ontario’s southwestern border. We have brought our own stories of land and homeland to this garden, as we listen carefully to the stories it has, in turn, shared with us. We live in a region known for holding the warmest average annual temperatures and highest levels of biodiversity in Canada, but where much of this natural abundance has been lost to colonization, agriculture and urbanization, in what is also the most densely populated cradle of the nation.1 We live in one of the richest forested terrains, where black walnuts and oaks were guided to regenerate themselves by acts of Indigenous fire stewardship, such as “cultural burning” practiced by the Anishinaabeg or, in this stretch of Ontario, by the Missi
