It seems we are on a parallel path, my mother and I, of reliving the past – her in her memory and me in my research. Sadly, we each walk alone.As Unearthed opens, Alexandra Risen is saying goodbye to her father as he lays comatose in his hospital bed; noting the fact that in the twenty years she lived at home, the brooding, reclusive man may have said one word to her per year. Now that her father was almost gone, Risen knew that those twenty or so words would be all she ever got. At about the same time, Risen and her husband decided to buy a rundown home in downtown Toronto; enchanted by its one acre of overgrown heritage garden property. With her mother suffering a series of strokes back in Edmonton, and feeling guilty and helpless and ever more despairing that she would never be able to mend her relationship with her one remaining parent, Risen throws herself into restoring her new gardens; reconnecting to the happiest times in her childhood – when her parents' fighting sent the young girl off to explore the wild ravines behind her house – and attempting to forge a new bond with the mother who spent most of her nonworking hours in her own gardens. Restoring a garden is a perfect metaphor for both mending a relationship and digging into the past, but it's almost too perfect: Each chapter followed the same pattern – Risen unearths another plant that reminds her of her personal history, flashback scene, back to the present and dealing with contractors and landscape architects, dealing with her growing son in Toronto and her deteriorating mother on the other side of the country, concluding with a recipe or craft for utilising the inspiration plant – and it began to feel formulaic; copy-paste after-the-fact; if this didn't all actually happen to Risen, and if it wasn't actually all pretty interesting, it may have felt forced or corny.
I lived in Edmonton for several years, and one time when we went to the comedy club Yuk Yuk's, the host opened with, “It's great to be here at Uke Uke's”, and the audience went wild with laughter. I didn't get it and had to ask someone at the table why that was funny and he explained that it's because there are so many Ukrainians in Edmonton, and “Uke” is a racial slur for them. That's funny? I guess you actually have to be from Edmonton to get why there would even be a racial slur for Ukrainians. From Edmonton like Alexandra Risen: as the much younger second daughter of Ukrainian immigrants (the accidental child who disappointed by not being born a boy), Risen was mortified when her mother would get huge loads of fresh sheep manure delivered for her gardens; when her parents would make homemade sausage and the neighbourhood would reek of garlic. Risen knew that her parents were from somewhere in the Ukraine, vaguely knew that her mother had worked in Germany during WWII and that her parents met in a DP camp there after the war, but as for her parents' history or families or self-reflections, nothing was said and questions were discouraged. When their mother eventually needed to be moved into a nursing home and Risen and her sister cleared out the apartment she had been living in, they found an envelope of official documents; the first clues to the family history they had ever stumbled upon, and Risen took them home to begin a tentative investigation.
Meanwhile, the garden in Risen's back yard was both more overgrown and more magical than she could have imagined. Weeks of hacking away at giant Knotweed and bamboo revealed three ponds (complete with long-forgotten ornamental koi), a mossy bog, redwood and apple trees, centuries-old oaks, and a towering, crumbling pagoda. There was evidence of deer, foxes, raccoons, and ducks, secret paths and flowering specimens. Through restoring every part of the garden, Risen was conscious of trying to prove something to her mother, and while she had always planned to fly her mother out when the project was complete, it took ten years, and in the end, her mother became too frail to fly. Throughout the process, Risen was also very conscious of involving her son in the work – in giving her tech-loving boy the nature-based family time she had craved as a child herself – and she's self-aware of the irony of attempting to be a better mother than her own was by making her child cry as she locks up his computer games or throws his iPod out the window. And her husband, despite the obligatory grumbling comments about the bills piling up, was always happy to roll up his own sleeves and grab the pruning shears.
It occurs to me that somewhere in between the dead shrubs and struggling peonies, it's become more than about saving money. Whatever we can master alone, we will, because that's what happens when love and challenge cross paths.Like I said, the garden is a great metaphor for a memoir: through following the seasonal cycles of her plants, and adding the life stories of beloved dogs, and ultimately, what she learns of the life stories of her parents, Risen is able to plot her own position within the circle of life; birth, growth, decay, and death are the fate of us all; the earthworm and the oak. On the other hand, there's something not quite universal about this particular story: Risen's husband Cam might balk at the expense of restoring the crumbling pagoda, but he's a Toronto banker who wears silk Hermès ties; these are people who hire an expert to come in and show them how to throw pottery when they discover clay in the garden; people who bought a ravine-backing acre in downtown Toronto, no matter how neglected. During the course of the book, they host David Suzuki and his wife for an impeccably sourced dinner at their home:
During dinner, David asks me if tapping for sap damages the maples. Chef Jason has been promoting our maple syrup. I'm surprised that as an elder, he doesn't know the answer. I assure him we take only 10 per cent of the sap, and I explain the process, and how the Natives first discovered sap when it froze into “sapsicles” from winter tree branches. He's fascinated, now that he's assured that the trees are unharmed, and the rest of the conversation flows because he respects the Natives' closeness to nature.(My better angels tell me to put that passage there without comment, yet I can't help but add that I am tired of people thinking that “as an elder” David Suzuki is some all-knowing guru.) The book ends with a garden dedication ceremony involving a smudge-stick wielding geomancer. (That I will leave without further comment.) Unearthed is interesting enough, but won't be universal to everyone's experience or bizarre enough to really teach anything new about the world. Yet, it's an undeniably neat little package about the lessons Risen learned from her garden, and with a likeable voice and a willingness to bare herself, she succeeded in creating something worthwhile and enduring from her experience.
