Container Gardening  

Maya Quirino   

Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irrespective of size or wealth. 

– V. Sackville-West’s Garden Book 

In this garden the size of a small stage,  
a handful of yellow-bellied sunbirds come  
to drink from the heart of a dwarf banana plant
I had some idea would bear fruit.  

Perhaps catching a petal of color, a mariposa 
scales (past the other tenants’ clotheslines 
and nuclear-family laughter) the four storeys 
of this building clouded with dust trapped 

by rainwater. Arriving, it will hover over the paper 
flower whose thorns tear the skin of my preloved dresses. 
It stays awhile before crossing next door, 
where the dama de noche is about to scent the dark. 

Dry and wet spells leave their signature marks: 
the leaves of Chinese bamboo curling and then hardening 
like cocoon, the tarragon’s sterile flowers fluttering down
all at once—a display room of nature’s commandments. 

Tonight, I tell you about Atelopus zeteki vanishing  
in the Panamanian rainforest (a sign of cataclysm underway). 
Standing dead-center in the garden, one with the shadows 
of the greenery, you wait for me to fix you your poison

of choice. You tease me about propagating the blue pea, 
an herb for breaking fevers and for holding puja rituals 
in India that to you is but a glorified weed. 
When I tell you I’m joining a virtual bloom watch

of the Queen of the Night in the US, you fake-pledge 
to hunt for one in the nameless jungle where you will sleep 
to birdcall, the rush of waterfall, and the face 
of a mountain being sculpted into pathways to nowhere. 

“Are you going to start making potions now?” you crack. 
You have my library of plants in containers to thank 
for this lushness one wouldn’t find were a child’s 
treasure map made of the village. Here transplanted 

is a scene as old as desire: 
you’re a hero on a journey, 
I become every woman 
who has always known  

how to heal men’s wounds.  

Maya Quirino is a non-profit worker and independent film producer.