Tonys Benaries

My Secret Garden

Anthony & Shelly Baller, Belleville, Michigan

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“New seed is faithful. Its roots deepest in the places that are most empty”

- The Faithful Gardener by Clarissa Pincola Estes

"Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow." - Helen Keller

Shelly & Tony Baller with Dozer

"The Journey is my home." -- Muriel Rukeyser

Wildflower patch out back (left) and luxurious celosia and cleome (right)

Tony & Shelly live in Belleville, Michigan, not far from Detroit and the bustling airport. This area is unusual because it sits on the lowlands carved out from the glaciers that covered Michigan thousands of years ago. The soil is rich and brown, a sandy loam. Lift a spade full of dirt and it crumbles to the ground. At first look, a gardener might wonder how it could support anything green, but the consistency of the soil belies its generative properties. "Redbud East," as we call the Belleville Ballers' place, sits atop what used to be a great swamp, until early farmers drained them to grow crops in the rich soil.

Cleome in white tipped with purple (left) and deep purple (right)

Growing season 2001 was one of the strangest ever -- we planted around Easter (very early for Michigan); we got good heat and sun until the week before Memorial Day weekend. Then came the DAILY torrential downpours and very little sun for three weeks! A couple of evenings, scattered frost took everyone by surprise. And if that didn't wash out the rows and do in the tender sprouts, the next several weeks surely would -- the heat quickly became oppressive, and it did NOT rain more than a drizzle for 5 weeks. The earth grew hotter and hotter under my feet, and the heat from it radiated up my bare legs as I worked in the rows or watered to desperately try to save our crop at Redbud West in Stockbridge. Tony & Shelly kept working their garden. The great Zinnias kept growing, and the celosia and cleome competed with the wildflowers for "best in show."

Weekly, I'd travel to our son's to check progress, and weekly, his garden was much more beautiful than ours. The secret? WATER! Tony took a spade and showed me how he could dig down one inch and find moist, rich soil. We still didn't find it at the Farm at eight and ten inches down! Another factor in having exquisite flowers: KNOW HOW. I told Tony not everyone can grow things like this. It's a gift. An art. Maybe we're even born with this knowledge locked deep inside until it's called out. I watched him peacefully watering the long rows of colorful Zinnias after a long, hot day at work in his day job, and I was glad I had shown him how to grow Zinnias.

Celosia, Irish Bells, and wild flowers Goin' Wild!

As I drove home in the twilight that evening, I thought about Gip's grandfather and my great-grandfather, both farmers. I wondered if the ancestors could look down and see Tony & Shelly in their gardens. And I smiled as I thought about how our kids would bring their first buckets of flowers to the farmers' market that weekend, taking their place in a long line of ancestors who would peddle their wares in the summer's open markets. If I had died that moment, I think I could have been satisfied, because I knew we would have left a little something of ourselves behind with our son and his wife: the ability to command life to spring from the Earth. And I wondered if they, too, would one day teach their daughters or sons to plant Zinnias.....