ERIC FEEGEL, D.C., A DOCTOR OF CHIROPRACTIC, explained every action as he slowly moved a lot of things around, both in and attached to my spine. Nerves, muscles, tendons, bones were in incorrect positions after years of poor posture. Playing a piano from age 4, I'd begun stretching my right leg to reach the damper pedal much too soon. The teacher, fearing I'd injure my hands, asked the gym teacher to excuse me from softball and basketball.
I missed doing the running and jumping that build strong muscles for life. My pelvis tilted toward the right, hips and shoulders were at different heights, as Mom and the Montreal dressmaker noted.
Two discs ruptured when Valium caused my spine to curve like an archery bow. An X-ray showed two clouds of tiny fragments which Eric said would gradually be "adsorbed". But because discs are shock absorbers between vertebrae, and these two were where sciatic nerves gather, I would probably feel pains for the rest of my life. Not true since about age 70, IF I don't carry anything weighing more than half a kilo.
He urged me not to take pain medication because it damages the kidneys and liver while masking what is happening. Medication wasn't an issue, though, because I accepted Mom's dictum: "When you have a pain, figure out what caused it and don't do that again". The only way to monitor an internal problem is by feeling it. Over the years, my spine and I have learned to negotiate and cooperate.
I put absolute faith in Eric from the first time he "read my back" with his fingers and palms before each treatment. I believed I would come through in the best possible condition -- not perfect, not quickly, but in the best condition possible in the circumstances.
Eighteen months later, the years of going from bad to worse were behind me and I charged into Life again. Well, not exactly. Eric insisted I proceed gently to avoid irritating tissues that were healing, fragile. Making a needlepoint cover for a hall bench would involve only sitting, no deadline, so I borrowed Mom's Gobelin tapestry frame and designed a pattern I could work quickly.
When I could move more energetically I added gardening, both indoors and on the balcony. Being 20 feet long (6m) and 5 feet (1.5m) deep, it could accommodate a lot of flowers and edibles in containers.
The public library's picture books about container gardening were written in New York or California, not for Toronto's climatic zone. The Civic Garden Centre (since 2003 called Toronto Botanical Garden) had plenty about our zone, but not about apartment conditions. The Centre fostered specialized clubs, but again, not for us.
The librarian referred apartment questions to Master Gardeners Jim Boyd and Jim Blair, called "Jim" and "Mr. Blair" respectively. Neither had ever lived in an apartment, she said, and they always invited callers to start a club, but all declined. I phoned Jim and said I'd like to start a club for apartment gardeners. The long silence that followed as he grasped my offer made both of us laugh.
The Centre's Board of Directors approved a club called Highrise Gardeners of Toronto, and set up a bank account. More than 50 women and men attended the inaugural meeting, I was elected president, and Jim would be our liaison with the Board. When I outlined executive roles, a dozen persons volunteered.
An agent of Gage Publishing (I recognized the name from my schoolbooks) came to the Centre's library one day when I was there, and asked the librarian if she knew anyone who could write a book about apartment gardening. She pointed at me. I told him my credentials, we agreed that I would deliver a draft in two years, and shook hands.
The research for it was the most challenging I'd done since The Canadian Register in Kingston and The Challenge in Montreal. Toronto offered superb resources, not just at the Garden Centre but at my first alma mater, the U of T. I decided to begin with basic botany, learn what plants needed, then identify what apartments offered and fit the two together. It didn't take long for my attitude toward plants to change from mild interest to awe and deep, lasting affection!
I think of them as "green beings" because they do absolutely everything animal beings such as humans do, but without moving except as they adjust leaves to take advantage of available light. They are simple reactors, and gardening is a science: Applied botany. Bonsai is the artistic expression of that science. A key eureka moment came when I realized that I lived with a dozen climatic zones ranging from cool shade to brilliant heat with strong gusts of wind, and bonsai instructions explained plants' reactions to all of them.
Some books -- e.g. about North America's poisonous plants, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden's handbooks -- gave me ideas for articles I offered to newspapers and magazines...whose editors weren't interested.
Every couple of months I called the Gage agent to report on my progress. The first draft of The Highrise Gardener's Book was finished in the summer of 1974, before the deadline, and quickly approved by the Jims, who had been generous guides. When I happily phoned the agent, he casually said there no longer was a market for a Canadian apartment gardening book because newspapers and magazines were providing advice.
I was stunned. What one or two "newspapers and magazines" offered was an occasional feature, not regular practical information.
Highrise Gardeners' second annual weekend show and sale of products related to balcony gardening, in the Centre in February, had recently attracted almost 1,000 people, twice as many as the first. Our three model balconies in the annual spring show of the elite Garden Club of Toronto in the vast Automotive Building of the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) attracted 200 new members (at $15/year), plus phone calls and letters.
My agreement with the publisher's agent was made on a handshake; I had nothing in writing to support a request for compensation for two years' work. The Jims were upset because they were swamped by requests for information. They'd avoided referring inquiries to me while I wrote the book, but were anxiously waiting for it! We all tried to interest other publishers in it but none accepted.
Less than a year later another major educational publisher brought out a pocketbook, Gardening off the Ground, by a man a few years younger than I who worked for a nursery and also belonged to the Civic Garden Centre. The jacket blurb described him as an expert on apartment gardening but the Jims knew he had never lived in an apartment. His book didn't mention windows facing only one direction, lightweight soil mixtures, indoor temperature zones, potential balcony problems, etc. It was just another book about container gardening!
Nor could he provide lists of flowers and vegetables for balconies with different exposures. I had them in an appendix, courtesy of Highrise members who shared such information for the newsletter I published monthly. We were enthusiastic about something that gave us great pleasure. Several of us even spent evenings lecturing to horticultural societies in and around Toronto, in the Horticultural Building during the CNE, and in the Garden Club's annual shows. We weren't paid, not even gas money. We simply enjoyed sharing our pleasure.
I had joined the Women's Press Club of Toronto, the Writers' Union of Canada, and the Freelance Editors Association of Canada with hopes of getting leads to assignments. At meetings I asked specific questions and learned about book-publishing in Canada, its politics, offshore owners, vulnerabilities. The 1970s were not a good decade for the business. My timing was bad, as usual.
In The City, Toronto Star's Sunday magazine, in 1978, Eve Drobot wrote several thousand admiring words about Highrise Gardeners after attending an executive meeting and visiting some members' apartments with a photographer. By then, newspapers and magazines carried columns about gardening, and there were radio and TV programmes too.
I moved on from Highrise Gardeners because I had a full-time job again.
CHAPTER 48 of GLIMPSES -- 30
YOU ARE READING
GLIMPSES of how Canada worked: a writer's memoir.
Non-FictionDuring the first 30 years of my journalistic career in the second half of the 20th century, good jobs of all kinds were available all over Canada. Those of us born in the 1930s and early '40s were in great demand because our generation was very smal...
