The Bloody Beginnings

*Note: The path less taken can be messy. Messy messy messy. Wear gumboots.

C'mon kids. It wasn't bloody at the very very beginning.

I worked at a garden centre after my first year at university in Victoria. I rode my bicycle actually, and picked up a garden on the side, though I mainly remember sweeping a long driveway. I really loved working at the centre. I remember thinking it was a little odd, how much I liked it. Something about being surrounded by flowers in pots, having water fights and getting paid for it. It must have appealed to the poetical side of an English Lit/History major. Nevertheless, it wasn't a "real" job. I was in academia.

Roughly five years later, I walked into a North Vancouver garden centre, a disillusioned English Lit/History major with a couple years of co-op jobs in bureaucracy/copywriting/art gallery programming, an Altered Perception of Life, and an extended period of bohemia under my tightening belt. Yes, I was broke, but even more the fervent idealist, and talented, I swear, with waaay too much runaround energy to sit behind a desk.

Quelle surprise, I loved it. (Again). This time, I decided to go for it. I signed up for a horticulture program starting the next fall at a local college. Meanwhile, during the garden centre's habitual lay-off period of new employees in the dormancy of August, I flyered a cul-de-sac of elaborate homes, informing them that I would be in the environs every three days to tend gardens. On my bicycle. It got me through to September. Nevertheless, it wasn't a "real" job.

I took the horticulture course and returned to the garden centre for three more years, learning my plant and disease identification, and very much enjoying the humour and creativity in the gardening community. Also travelled one summer to work in a perennial plant nursery in Shropshire, England. Spent most of that time jouncing about to flower shows in a "lorry" and inadvertently learning about the invisible but heavy stratifications in the English gardening world. Yeesh, I thought. I just like flowers. Kew, peeuw. Back to the fresh wilderness of gardening in the New World.

Well, I reasoned nerdily, four years of hitching experience with a green thumb was equivalent to a degree in the School of Life. So, in the spirit of One Whose Time Has Come, I graduated myself from the garden centre, leapt into a truck and started my own business in the spring of 2001.

This is where The Bloody Beginning starts.

I did spend my time at the garden centre trawling for potential mentors in the whole business of gardening. I was daunted, as poetical idealists should be, about launching a business solo.

Ultimately, however, the staunch and practical approach--get a lawn mower, some bread-and-butter maintenance, an arsenal of blowers and pesticides etc.--didn't give me the kick to start. What did was a shambling Pied Piper of a man who appeared frequently, besot with one creative project or another--Seedy Saturdays, children's gardening camps, bizarrely-themed garden designs--and exuding the aura of a medieval storyteller. He wanted my help. High on inspiration, we made our plans, neither one of us noticing that the other was not exactly the business head the other sought.

It wasn't until I was careening free of secure employment that I realized I had to take care of myself in every respect. As it turned out, his idea of our understood partnership was leaving me to garden while he went...elsewhere. Yeesh, I thought, I might as well be on my own. Since I had my own truck, and work offers were coming my way, I tactfully peeled away. It wasn't until I had "tactfully peeled away" that I realized I was in business solo. Uh oh.

The new stresses that come with sudden entrepreneurship seemed to have no effect on my stubborn creative and environmental streak. I shall not mow, I said. I refused the bread-and-butter of lawncare and regular maintenance. I shall do projects, I said, flourishing my shovel like an artist's paintbrush, or perhaps a fountain pen. Renovations, designs and installations are the thing! I relied on my many contacts through horticulture school and the garden centre for referrals, and launched myself, full-frenzy. I discovered new levels of stress as I sought the next project even as I laboured with the challenges of the current one. Oh, the learning curve of cost and time estimates, logistics, bookkeeping, and product sourcing when you are also the #1 labourer, day after day! I'd never worked as hard in my life. But I still liked flowers.

Then the August doldrums hit--the baking dormancy when no one dares to lift a root from the soil. I panicked, and with truck/loan/insurance/rent payments looming, I finally did a reasonable thing. I sought staunch and practical Mentor #2--in his office at the far end of a cavernous shop, lined with every hand and power tool known to the garden industry. It was a walk of contrition, Dorothy to the Wizard of Oz, needing a little bit of everything. Just please, please, I begged, don't make me mow.

Well, he never did. And for all the eccentricities that seem to come with folks in the gardening industry, he was also an excellent teacher and avid plantsman who instilled high standards in his crew. Seven years later, that original crew--now all owner-operators of garden businesses--remain my gardening comrades in one way or another.

I worked part-time with The Crew, and kept cultivating my own clients--I even managed to help the Pied Piper with the children's gardening camps the next summer. He was (is) truly gifted with children. It was a wonder-full experience.

But back to the bloody beginnings.

Trouble was brewing. My truck, despite its clean BCAA check, was chronically choking up body parts. It had a digital link to my bank account and seemed to sabotage me on cue. In one infamous incident, the front-wheel ball-joint sheared just after leaving the highway, and the whole thing keeled over like a dead horse. Very rare, mechanics assured me. In another, the (parked) truck was sideswiped by a bandit during a police-chase in a pastoral rural setting. Sorry 'bout that, little lady, the constable said. Next time, I said, corner your bandit somewhere else.

I was happy to be alive, and I still liked flowers, but the world of academia was beginning to look better from this angle. I broke up with the boyfriend who had helped me find the truck in the first place. (He also taught me bookkeeping so I forgive him everything.) Our final break-up coincided with the slow disintegration of the truck's starter. I had to go back and borrow a hammer so I could crawl under the engine and give it a whack to get it going. Well, he said, good luck with that. I peeled away.

I signed up at the local college to add the credits I needed to my degree to qualify for teacher training. A little back-up plan. One week before school started, there was a cloud of smoke (*the oil was fine*) that destroyed the starter I had just replaced. Other things vaporized as well. Mechanics could not explain it. It's supposed to be a good truck. They scratched their heads. The bill would have been in the thousands.

I traded my truck to my scavenger/handyman landlord for a semester's free rent. I was, funny that, still paying off the loan.

Okay, everyone can take a break for a stretch and put the kettle on, etc.

...


Of course, there was a "glitch" in my plans. I had intended to work my way through school and now my modus operandi was gone. I relayed this news to my clients, and they said--Oh for crying out loud. Just get here: take the bus, ride your bike, whatever. You can use our tools. Just get here.

So there you have it, future bicycle-gardeners of the world: Make them think it was their idea. Stage an elaborate start-up, and an even more spectacular break-down. Be earnest.

But really. Bicycle-gardening got me through school without taking a loan. By May I was ready to start full-time gardening again after a winter of "improvising". Clients asked if I was getting a truck soon. Um...no. I was still working part-time with The Crew, still paying off my Dead Truck loan (ten grand in two years is not bad, given the circumstances), germinating ideas to work with kids and one day apply for teacher training...and technically, I was doing the work my clients needed a la bicyclette.

It was the summer of 2003, and though I felt the burdens of perception, there were glimmerings of the Theory of Elimination: take away Stuff We Think We Need in order to discover we don't need it at all. It was the beginning of creative living, outside the box.