She Sowed, and Reaped Life’s Lessons
In Mary Lou Heard’s green world, handfuls of seeds fast become wildflowers coloring an empty stretch of dirt. Bare-root roses bloom through wrappings of sawdust and burlap, and saplings spread into broad patches of summer shade, panoplies of red and yellow in the fall.
Yet Heard’s garden is empty today. Gone are the display beds, the broad swaths of color and contrast. Missing are the plants she so adored: salvias, lychnis, spiraeas, viburnums, hostas and clematis campanulas, herbs, parma violets and old-fashioned hollyhocks. A few stragglers, growing in containers, lay on the gravel and weed cloth, and the weathered shacks that housed supplies and accessories are silent after years of conversation and laughter.
After a 17-year run, Heard’s Country Gardens has closed. But it is not an occasion for sadness, for no one knows the lessons of gardening better than Heard. Ask the dying woman what lies ahead, and her answer is simple: She’ll tell you that she’s going home.
Located in Westminster, in the midst of the blow-and-go lawns and stucco homes of western Orange County, Heard’s Country Gardens never had the mass appeal of an Armstrong Garden Center or the elitism of Roger’s Gardens. It was instead an emporium of Heard’s vision of gardening, where she could triumph the virtues of the small and unusual--early-blooming peonies, for instance, low-chill lilacs, dogwoods and even blueberries--and develop a nursery that had less to do with selling pretty plants than teaching you how to plant. No wonder, then, so many items were sold in six-packs and easily affordable.
Sunset magazine frequently highlighted its stock. “More than any other nursery I know, Heard’s was stamped with the owner’s personality,” said Sharon Cohoon, a senior garden writer for Sunset. “Mary Lou saw no reason you couldn’t have a slightly wild, slightly country garden in the middle of suburbia.”
And a recent issue of Los Angeles magazine--printed before Heard made public her decision to close--listed the nursery as No. 41 in its Best of L.A. issue: “an American dream of an English garden club, knowledgeable, chatty and open to all.”
Its closing--and the demise of its newsletter, spring home tour and seminars--is a loss made all the more poignant by the fact that Heard has cancer and doesn’t expect to live to the end of the year.
An attractive woman of 56 with porcelain skin, and wispy black and gray hair, Heard has an easy smile, a friendly laugh and an unabashed enthusiasm for plants. As she ran around during the final days of the sale, only the rattle of pills in the side pocket of her blue and yellow smock suggested something was wrong.
Standing at a cash register, she stopped to admire a customer’s selection. It was an ‘Annabelle’ hydrangea, only 4 inches tall, its wide lush leaves topped by a white pompom bloom. She admired the selection so much that the customer wondered if she would let him buy it. Of course she did.
“If people are going to be interested in gardening,” she said, “there has to be something to anticipate, something exciting. If they are going to be pulled outdoors, there has to be something different or unusual. I didn’t think this notion was so radical at first, but I guess it was.”
When someone asked for a recommendation, she pointed to a mere seedling, a Rudbeckia ‘Herbstonne,’ three ragged leaves growing from the smallest stem barely rising from the dirt in a small pint-size container. Never plant two of these side by side, she warned, and be sure to give them plenty of room. She insisted against all doubt that in a year they’d be more than 5 feet tall and covered with bright yellow flowers.
Or, if you can wait three years, she added, there’s always Baptisia australis, a small single-stem, reed-like plant that was a mere 6 inches tall. It’s not much to look at now, she admitted, but in time, it will become a cluster of delicate green leaves, spiked by light periwinkle pea-shaped flowers.
“You have to learn to trust when you start gardening,” she said. “Nowadays, most nurseries do nothing to teach you this. They sell plants in full bloom, which makes for an easy sale, but it means you’re buying the plant at the end of its life cycle. I champion the ugly ducklings of the plant world and simply ask you to take care of them and wait. This is something that my mother’s generation of gardeners knew instinctively: Plant in the fall, wait until spring.”
Heard came to gardening in a moment of crisis. Her first plot was a small abandoned garden in West L.A., covered with weeds and old flowers. Restoring it became her mission.
She was 31, a patient at a psychiatric hospital, and the memory of those months--stealing away from the crowded hallways and cigarette smoke and delighting in the solitude of that small patch of earth--still brings tears to her eyes. “I was busy and productive,” she recalled. “I tied up the sweet peas; I asked for some flowers and over the course of months I planted them. When you’re preoccupied, you have time to heal.”
Ten years earlier, Heard had been living in Ohio. She had married young, become pregnant and one day her husband told her he was leaving. He never contacted her again. She moved in with her parents, trying to hold down a job and caring for her baby. She was in her early 20s and desperate. California was an opportunity to begin again.
Settling in Anaheim, she took a number of office jobs but was overwhelmed trying to raise a daughter by herself. When she fell in love again, she thought that she might have been given a second chance. But her second marriage soon failed, and her world collapsed.
A doctor suggested she talk to someone. She took another route, but the police arrived before the Seconal had fully taken effect. After her recovery, she entered the psychiatric hospital to be treated for depression. To this day, she still despairs when she sees a young mother trying to raise a child by herself. “You see the poverty,” said Heard, who is a generous supporter of the Sheepfold in Orange, an organization that operates safe houses for abused and battered women and their children. “You see that she is having to make choices. The car has bald tires. The children have bad teeth. Nothing is well-kept. They live with a silent broken heart, but they go on.”
After leaving the hospital, Heard still struggled to find the will to live. Then one night her 10-year-old daughter woke up crying from a nightmare. “I was calling your name,” the girl told her mother, “and you were walking away. I called and called, and you kept walking away. And there was nothing I could do. You were gone.”
Heard saw her daughter as herself: alone and abandoned. It was an epiphany. She promised she would never leave, but she knew her life was out of control. She had nowhere to turn, and she started to pray. “Dear Lord,” she remembered saying, “I just made a promise to my daughter, a promise that without your help I can’t keep.”
She prayed all night, and when she rose in the morning, she felt a weight lifted from her soul. She started attending church and taking horticulture classes at Orange Coast College. On weekends, she sold color baskets and herbs at the swap meet at the Orange Country Fair Grounds, and they were selling out.
She soon needed a place to keep her inventory, and when she drove down Edwards Street in Westminster and found this vacant lot--covered with cars, boxes, trimmings from trees and a few run-down boarded-up shacks--her future suddenly opened up. She negotiated a lease and carted away the debris. What had once been an abandoned chinchilla farm, with a car shop in back, became an oasis, the result of biweekly trips in a van to a grower in Carpinteria who was her source for unusual perennials.
“Any claim to retail ability would have been pretentious,” she claims. “I just wanted to sell the plants that I loved.”
What Heard didn’t know when she opened Heard’s was that it would fulfill a need in the gardening community for plants and designs that were untamed, extravagant and unusual. It was, at its heart, an old-fashioned, eclectic, cottage-garden approach to gardening that was just starting to have a wide appeal in the mid-1980s.
“There were no guidelines,” she said of the early years at the nursery. “I was allowed to grow slow. My focus was not on money, but rather on that packet of unusual seeds. I thought at first--I was wonderfully naive--that if we sold them, we’ll be rich. I thought we could do anything that our hearts desired.”
Heard also brought to this sensibility memories of growing up in Ohio, of gardening at a time when nurseries--as we know them today--didn’t exist, when slips of plants were passed from neighbor to neighbor and seeds, ordered from catalogs, from friend to friend. A garden became a way to connect with the soil and with the community.
“Mary Lou’s philosophy was simple,” said Dustin Gimbel, propagator at Heard’s. “Don’t believe what you read until you plant it yourself. Peonies, clematis: Everyone thought that you couldn’t grow these in Southern California. But we did. We had this wonderful what-the-hell attitude, and we just kept at it.”
“Every lesson in life I’ve learned, I learned in the garden, even the stillness,” Heard said. “I’m not afraid of death. I am not afraid, simply because I walk so closely to God and have learned to trust. I may want total control over the things in my life, but I can’t have that. Now I can rest and know that he will give me only what is good for me.”
Two years ago Heard was diagnosed with colon cancer that had spread to her liver. She tried chemotherapy, buying some time, but has given up on the painful and expensive treatments. They were stealing her vitality and energy.
Last winter, there had been a discussion of giving the business to the employees, but everyone agreed that shutting was the better decision. Selling plants--even with the most innovative stock--is tough in a competitive market, and without Heard, the place wouldn’t be the same.
The closing sale lasted three weeks, not much time to say goodbye to a business of nearly two decades but enough for her to catch a glimpse of the reflection of her life in the lives of so many others. Now she waits at home, visiting doctors and taking calls from hospice workers.
Though she apologizes for her own garden (“just like the cobbler’s children who go shoeless,” she says with a smile), she is content to know that a little part of her is in hundreds of gardens throughout Southern California.
“We are not called upon to think about how close to death we are,” said Heard, “but rather to consider the gifts that have been given to us.”
When Heard thinks about heaven, she can’t tell you the names of the flowers that are growing there, but she knows exactly which ones she hopes to find.
“The ones that are the most challenging to grow and take the longest time before they bloom,” she told me. “The ones that require the most patience, the most endurance and understanding. These are the ones that when they do bloom, it is pure heaven.”
