I loved the strenuous labor, the smell of the upturned soil as I planted a seed, and learning from her how to shepherd a plant through its life cycle.
The day I met Carole, I was determined to hate her.
It’s hard to embrace a stepparent, harder still to keep adjusting if your father, like mine, married many times. Carole was his fifth wife; their marriage bestowed on her the thankless title of my fourth stepmother.
I was 22. My mother had been my father’s first wife. The opposite of Carole, Mom was a frail woman who locked herself in her room to write and never left the house without earrings and a hat. When I was 7, my parents divorced and Dad left us in New York to move to California. While Mom raised my sister and me, he became the founding director of the Berkeley Art Museum. He married and divorced three more times. When I graduated from high school — between wives No. 3 and No. 4 — he’d beckoned, “Come to college in California.”
It was not the father and daughter reunion I had imagined. A steady parade of his girlfriends streamed through our lives. By the time Carole arrived, I was sick of women moving into his house with their cats and cozy furniture, wanting to be my “friend.” As soon as their relationship with Dad fell apart, they’d disappear, along with any semblance of friendship.
Dad’s previous wives had revamped the kitchen. Carole focused on the rock-strewn front yard where Dad and I had attempted to grow agave and ice plant. “Ice plants attract slugs and snails,” she declared as she ripped out the neon pink flowers. “We can do better.”
Carole was all about renewal. She volunteered for Berkeley’s Parks and Recreation Commission. She ran a watershed project whose mission was to reopen streams and creeks that lay beneath Berkeley’s city streets. I did not want to be another restoration project.
I was used to running wild. My father had lax rules. Most weekends, before Dad married Carole, I drove the two hours north, with my troop of friends from the University of Santa Cruz, where I attended college, to his house in the Berkeley hills. We drank his wine and partied in his living room. As long as I didn’t interfere with his dating life, he didn’t care if I passed out on the couch. Carole didn’t like this arrangement. She wanted me to call before I arrived. She wanted me to “be safe” when I went out at night.
“You’re not my mother,” I snapped. The last thing I wanted was to be cared for by someone who I was certain would soon leave.
“No, but I’m your stepmother, and this is now my home,” Carole replied calmly.
It was her home and she transformed it. After graduating from college, I left for a year abroad. When I returned, the barren front yard was adorned with climbing vines of bougainvillea and princess flower trees, a subtropical evergreen with deep purple flowers as soft as velvet. Where once fluorescent ice plant had struggled to take root, spears of scented lavender, woolly thyme and trailing rosemary flourished. At dinner, Carole sent me outside with garden shears to cut chives for the salad. I couldn’t help but be impressed.
Three years into the marriage, long past the time when previous wives, frustrated with Dad’s philandering, had vanished, Carole stayed. When she got mad, she stormed off for a walk, but she always returned. Saddened, disheartened, but not defeated. As I watched her hold her ground no matter what chaos my dad threw her way, my resentment against her withered away. I recognized the anguish of being enticed and then ignored by my father.
One day she found me sitting on the front steps crying. I’d just broken up with an unfaithful boyfriend. “How can you stand it?” I sobbed, meaning infidelity.
“Sometimes I can’t,” Carole admitted. Then she handed me a trowel. “Dig. It will help.” She had a box of species tulips to plant. “They’re not as flashy as hybrid tulips,” she said, placing a bulb in the earth. “But they’re reliable. Every year, they return and multiply.”
By then, I was living in San Francisco, working as a receptionist. I hated answering a phone in a stuffy office. Gardening with Carole became my weekend release. I loved the strenuous labor, the smell of the upturned soil as I planted a seed, and learning from Carole how to shepherd a plant through its life cycle.
After Carole started a landscaping business and realized that I was immune to poison oak, I became her go-to person for clearing properties. She bought me pruning shears and a garden belt to wear around my waist with pouches for my tools. Up and down the slopes of Berkeley, I swaggered beside Carole in heavy boots as she recited the botanical names of every plant we encountered. Rosemary was of the genus Salvia. Lavender was the easy Latinate Lavandula, and the glorious princess flower tree was Tibouchina urvilleana. “It’s native to Brazil.” Carole said, “but it does well here.”
“Why do you care about knowing every name?” I asked.
She stopped beside a Helleborus bedecked in nodding burgundy flowers. “I was lonely,” she said. “But once I learned the names of plants, wherever I went, I recognized things I knew. I saw friends.”
Carole might have looked as sturdy as a tree trunk. In fact, she was riddled with the same insecurities that plagued me. In that new house, with a contentious stepdaughter and an impulsive husband, she was often angry. She was lonely and lost. Plants were her signposts in an alien landscape. They comforted her and helped her orient and navigate. The early blooming hellebores meant spring had arrived; a purple Tibouchina signaled the climate was mild; and even though a blooming Agave heralded the plant’s demise, it also meant the succulent had prepared for death by propagating “pups” at its base.
Unlike Carole, I never again chose a faithless partner like my dad, but I’m thankful that Carole’s commitment to us endured. She was the reliable Tulipa, the species tulip in our tumultuous home life. She was not just my fourth stepmother; she was my final stepmother, her marriage to Dad lasting 36 years. He is now dead, and Carole suffers from late-stage Alzheimer’s — the same disease that ended my mother’s life in 2010. Yet Carole persists.
Separated for this last year because of Covid, I was finally able to visit her again. I wheeled her along the streets of Berkeley. Though Carole could no longer remember the names of her beloved plants, I could. Bending over, I held a sprig of rosemary to her nose.
“Salvia rosmarinus,” I said.
Inhaling, she smiled in recognition.
Gabrielle Selz is a writer, art critic and the author of the memoir “Unstill Life” and the forthcoming biography “Light on Fire.”
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