Chapter One
Yarrow: A flowering herb in the aster family with lacy umbrellas of blossoms whose soft, mossy scent aids healing
ONE MONTH EARLIER
When I awaken one morning in early spring and discover that the air hums with the peaches-and-cream scent of gardenia, the warm amber wash of sandalwood, and the straw-like aroma of linseed oil, I am certain of two things.
First, that my mother visited me in my dreams. Her scent is a specific bouquet that I would recognize anywhere, at any time, in any life. I close my eyes and inhale deeply, trying to hold on to her perfume even as it slips away, and as I do I remember pieces of my dream: my mother beside me, bending her head toward mine, whispering of Bantom Bay.
I open my eyes.
My second certainty: I must go home.
Returning to Bantom Bay is never easy for me, but the thoughtof my mother calling to me, beckoning me, fills me with a desperate sort of longing. The last time I was home was for her funeral six months ago, and though I stood beside my father as we spread my mother’s ashes in the sea, I still have trouble believing that she is truly gone. I haven’t been myself these long months without her; there is an unsettled, rootless feeling at my core, a hollow ache that not even working in my beloved gardens soothes.
At the end of the bed, my enormous dog, Gully, lifts his head and gives me a questioning look. I stroke his silky tan fur, thinking. I finished installing my latest garden in Santa Barbara yesterday, transforming my clients’ backyard of patchy grass into a lush oasis of decadently fragrant bee’s bliss sage, nightshade, and rock rose, a sanctuary where the aroma of flowers stirs the spirit and worries slip away for a spell. I haven’t yet accepted another job, and I haven’t paid next month’s rent on my tiny, furnished apartment. This is how I have lived for the past decade—never accepting one project until I’ve completed the last, never staying in any town for long, never forming strong attachments, and never returning to Bantom Bay for more than a few days at a time.
But as the last hints of my mother’s scent drift through me, I feel that pull again, that certainty that she is calling me home, so I rise and pack everything I own into the bags and boxes I always have on hand. I don’t own much—some clothes and linens, my favorite novels, Gully’s bowls and food. All of my landscaping equipment is stowed in the locked storage bins in the bed of my truck.
By late morning, Gully and I are on the road, our brief little life in Santa Barbara growing ever smaller in the rearview mirror.
Bantom Bay, California, is a sliver of a town that curves along the coast between the Pacific Ocean and the densely wooded Bantom Ridge, some twenty miles south of San Francisco. I’ve always imagined that the town gathers the sea and the forest to it possessively, like a child pulling blankets up to her chin, and it gathers people to it in the same way. Most who discover Bantom Bay never leave. For all the ways that my mother and I were similar, this was one of the ways that we weren’t. She had no desire to live anywhere else, while I have moved up and down the West Coast, forever leaving one place for another.
By the time I arrive in town, it’s late in the afternoon. I pass the small library I visited weekly as a child and then my old elementary school, still painted the creamy pink hue of a Sarah Bernhardt peony. When I pass the community center where my mother taught painting classes, the truck is suddenly too warm, my heartbeat loud in my ears. I open the windows, and the air that pours in smells of coastal wildflowers, forest, and sea—yarrow, bay laurel, chaparral, sagebrush, and brine, as familiar to me as a lullaby. Beside me, Gully rouses himself and hangs his head outside, his eyes half-closed and his expression blissful.
Along Miramonte Drive, shingled buildings in salt-scrubbed pastels bear the names of shops and restaurants that have been there for as long as I can remember, and longer still. Corde’s Hardware. Pacific Surf Shop. Bantom Bay Books. Sakura Sushi. Miramonte Pizza. Las Olas Taqueria. I can’t help smiling when I spot thecheerful red geraniums and trailing sweet potato vines that spill lavishly from the window boxes of the Shark Bite Café. I planted them myself a couple of years ago, and the café’s owner, Roger, was delighted to find that business ticked up soon after.
My smile falls when I pass the building that once housed the Seadrift Gallery. It’s a music store now, with a row of guitars glinting in the window. I look away, my thoughts spiraling darkly back to a day that I would do anything to erase. On the wheel, my knuckles are pale, and I’m barely able to resist the sudden, long-ingrained impulse to turn my truck around and leave.
But I think of my mother’s scent moving through me this morning, and I press on, driving a half mile up Bantom Ridge, along a road that curves below a canopy of outstretched live oak branches. It’s bittersweet to arrive at my childhood home and see that it is as charming as ever, its peaked roof and white clapboard tidy against the backdrop of dense green forest. At the end of the driveway, the yellow doors of the freestanding garage that my mother used as a studio appear freshly painted. I turn off the engine and just sit for a moment, torturing myself with memories of all the times I’ve looked up from this exact spot to see my mother opening those doors and hurrying out to greet me, her smile dazzling in its warmth.
Apparently I’m not quite done torturing myself, because my gaze shifts to the left of the studio. There, a stretch of carefully mown grass shows no sign that it once held the first garden I ever planted. The white tuberose flowers, so violently crushed on that day that haunts me, are long gone. No hints remain of what occurred here a decade ago; my guilt is a secret buried within me.
Had I known what would happen in that garden, what I woulddo there, I never would have planted it. But I was only ten years old and blithely hopeful about the future when I first dug those flower beds, my interest in plants newly piqued by the herb garden my fourth-grade class created at our elementary school. I remember even now the innocent excitement I had felt as I lined up in a row with my classmates, each of us pulling on our gardening gloves while we waited for our turn to receive an herb from our teacher.
“Rosemary,” Mrs. Maple said, placing a tiny, green-needled plant in my outstretched palm.
Rosemary.I breathed in. Its fragrance was woodsy and herbal, rich and savory and layered with olive oil and pine. By that age, I’d been aware for years that my sense of scent was highly attuned; everywhere I went, fragrances whispered to me, telling me of the world, revealing to me insights that were hidden from others. But it wasn’t until I held that rosemary in my hands that I began to understand my powerful connection to plants and their scents.
The soil of the school’s herb garden was so soft that I didn’t use a spade to dig into it. I simply sunk my gloved hand into the dirt, scooping out a little hole, and gently settled the rosemary into place. I patted the soil around the stem, and then instinctively drew a circle with my finger, leaving an indented moat around the plant that would hold water and disperse it slowly.
My classmates watched me and mimicked my action, drawing little circles around their own herbs. Twenty circles. Twenty plants. But I noticed that only my rosemary grew half an inch even as we stood there on that first day.
I visited my plant, caring for it, every day at recess. It continuedto grow quickly, and was soon twice the size of the other children’s. Clusters of beautiful, small, pale blue flowers appeared along its branches where all the other plants had none.
And then one day, as I stood in front of the plant, puzzling over its unusual size and the strange connection that I felt to it, I sensed the rosemary’s earthy, green, complex fragrance intensifying, lifting above all of the herbs’ scents, pressing so close to me that it felt like breath against my skin, a murmured answer to my questions. The aroma was so strong that I could almost see it, gossamer and shimmering in the air.
It was intuition, I suppose, or some old, inherited knowledge that made me bend close to the blossoms and draw in a deep breath. The rosemary’s scent slipped through me in long, silky tendrils.
In an instant, I was no longer in the schoolyard; I was with my mother on a fog-strewn afternoon in the Garden of Fragrance in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. We were roaming the paths, and I was burying my nose into every plant. I was unsteady on my feet, only just walking, and my mother held my hand gently but firmly. I wore soft shoes that thumped along the path. My mother read each plant’s name aloud as I breathed in its scent, her clear voice floating down to me through the milky fog.
Pineapple sage. Shore juniper. Lemon verbena. Rosemary.
I registered every fragrant note, realizing that I knew these names even before my mother spoke them. The plants were familiar to me—old friends, newly met. Their scents cradled me in the same gentle, firm way that my mother held my hand, leading me, showing me the way forward. I felt delighted and content, aware that the garden made my heart sing in mysterious ways.
And then… I was back. I was standing again, somehow, besidethe rosemary plant at my elementary school. All around me, children were running, playing, just as they had been. It was like nothing had happened, like no time at all had passed.
My mind spun. I should have been scared, but instead I felt the emotions of the memory still moving within me—connection, delight, the comforting presence of my mother. What I experienced had not felt like a remembrance; I had been there again. I had been a toddler in the Garden of Fragrance. The fog had been cool and damp on my skin. I had felt my mother’s hand, heard her voice, smelled the individual scent of each plant.
