Performative
Nethery Wylie
The garden is a stage with walls all around. The audience peers through doors, windows, and gates. When the ambulatory venture onto the scene, they must choose: are they performers too? Stagehands? Costumers? Perhaps they are the Director, the Producer, or even the Creator. Or are they interlopers passing through for a glance at the show?
Miss Ilex opaca, Prima, stands near the center, holding up her skirts. (The program names her Nellie Stevens, but the gardeners insist on her native origins). She’s almost alone on center stage now. Quercus, her sometime dance partner, has fallen and is gone. She misses the shade they gave.
Her sinuous arms stretch out in the graceful port-de-bras she has developed over decades. But her arms, they are so tired. The costumers have discreetly and cleverly laced her heaviest limbs so she can stretch them ever outward, never drooping. To lower them would disrupt the beauty of the line. Spoil the performance. She is too well-trained to let that happen.
Her cousin, also known as Opaca (but never Prima!), presents a decorative skein of green in the far corner past the pools. This Opaca is allowed to let her branches grow every which way. One would think she’d be happy in her sprawl, but her leaves are slightly yellow as if her roots are bitter. Both Opacas ignore the English (I. aquifolia) that flank the south gate. There’s a divide. Their berries are off-cycle.
They are closer to Lexie, although she stays stretched flat against the South Wall. She doesn’t flaunt her lines even though her pose, twisted and threaded into the supports, is lovely. She is content to be a small sidenote on the set.
All the hollies inside the walled garden are berried. Mr. Ilex sits outside—a wild, tangled globe at the end of a clipped boxwood hedge. Nellie isn’t sure of his parentage, but he associates with stray strangling grapes and rogue mulberries. Up the hill, under more boxwood, another Ilex sleeps in the shade.
The hollies’ bright berries will steal the show in winter's grey cold. But for this season, it is the agile herbs like Bonnie Verby (Verbena bonariensis) and Annie Toms (Eriocapitella tomentosa ) that sway and twirl in every corner, charming the bees and catching the attention of the flutterbys.
The walled-in stage sets the performers apart. They are special and protected. But if they fail to perform as required, they may be removed—replaced by the vivid new varieties of rudbeckia and echinacea in a summer’s afternoon.