Three Perfect Days

The last day of September was picture perfect, and found me in Chester County, provisioning for the next day's horticultural adventures.

 October 1 found me in Center City, finishing three very rewarding urban horticulture jobs.

I shouldn’t have been startled at the end of a long workday to look up and see Liberty Place casting a long shadow down 16th Street, but I was. A week past the equinox, autumn’s rapidly shortening days creep up on me still. So immersed was I in despairing over dishearteningly compacted soil, untangling a pot bound liriape’s circuitous roots, and various other horticultural duties, I forgot for a moment I was in a city. The skyscraper’s sudden long shadow jarred me back.

Not that the day lacked urban excitement: a near miss with the notorious Philadelphia Parking Authority, axe-wielding firemen responding to a conflagration at a neighboring highrise, and, of course, the endless cavalcade: nosy neighbors, prospective clients, and just plain oddballs all having something to say to the dirty overall-clad guy carrying holly trees across Spruce Street.

But still, it is possible to forget. After a while you tune out the honking cabbies, the pedestrian cellphone chatter, the whirling med-evac copters, and it’s just the work: all-consuming, intensely rewarding, and just plain hard.

I only do it a few times a year, but my Center City landscaping days always feel epic. The logistics are half the battle: procuring the materials, conceiving a central drop point, lugging plants…soil...stones…everything…from homebase to the four properties I maintain in a few blocks radius. Everything must be brought in. For the most part, I am making stuff grow where nothing lived previously. And that is rewarding, so it’s worth my hassle

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I walk two blocks east to deposit hard-earned money in the bank. I look up to see Broad Street illuminated. Standing on the island in the center of Philadelphia’s longest street, I realize that moments ago, so immersed in the zen of work, I forgot I was planting in a metropolis. Because the work is the work, and once you get past the surface noise, it feels basically the same wherever you do it.