Katherine Barber, editor-in-chief of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, in 1998.handout
Eric Démoré is a high-school teacher in Toronto.
It happens in the night, silent and unbidden. A sudden opening – the unfurling of petals. The waxy green blades, which only days before just pierced the soil on the boulevard, now yield clumps of bright purple, baby pink and vibrant cups of crimson. Inside, where the fiery petals converge, there are dabs of butter yellow. From the centre, wiry stamen emerge; by morning, they probe the air like antennae.
As I happen across it in the early hours of the day, this floral spectacle of colour is bathed in sunlight. At once mysterious and perfectly natural, I’m struck by a sudden curiosity to know the names of each new flower that’s emerged in the garden. And I know just whom to ask.
This is Katherine’s garden, this patch of earth between the sidewalk and the street. Her green thumb has tended this humble plot for three decades. Not only does she know each of its inhabitants by their care regimen, she has all of their names (and the origins of those names) stored in a mental lexicon of garden flora. She is, after all, not only a consummate gardener, but the founding editor of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.
Katherine Barber is the Word Lady (so named for both her profession and the title of her blog) and my neighbour. I ask her for the name of a new arrival, recently emerged from beneath the soil but not yet apparent in shape.
“These?” Katherine says, stooping to palpate the new shoot, “Tulips!” Is she bemused by my ignorance? Or enthused by another opportunity to enlighten?
She lowers herself again, scanning the earth for familiar friends, for strange new guests, for alien weeds. “Sometimes the squirrels get to the bulbs first.”
She stands. “Lovely splash of colour.”
Other neighbours have emerged like shoots after a long winter. The sun is a welcome warmth on our faces. This month is for stirring up, for greeting the sun, for more life.
So it is not without some irony – or perhaps simply a reminder of the dispassionate cycles that govern us all – that Katherine departed this world after a difficult and valiant battle with cancer. It was April, and her tulips had just bloomed. She was 61.
Katherine was an excellent neighbour. The day we moved in, she delivered a banana bread (she was also an excellent baker). Later that week, the sound of my piano playing must have bled through the thin lath-and-plaster party wall that separates our homes. There was a knock at the door. A noise complaint, I thought; instead, she complimented the Bach – and requested some Chopin.
Wait, what was that term – “party” wall? Is it not a “shared” wall? “Common” wall? This is precisely the kind of question Katherine took delight in investigating. She published her favourites on her popular blog. She had a brilliant mind and an insatiable etymological curiosity.
One late-June day, I found her in the boulevard garden, kneeling on her foam weeding mat. When I told her I was off to proctor a high-school exam, she let out a sharp laugh.
“‘Proctor’ makes it sound like you’re about to perform a colonoscopy!” she told me. The word proctor, she explained, is the cousin of proctologist. “Back home we tend to say ‘invigilate.’ Invigilate, like ‘vigil.’ To keep watch over.”
Home was Winnipeg. It was from there, her sister later told me, that Katherine uprooted a clump of the family irises to transplant to her own garden in Toronto. And for the irises, she planted some neighbours: lilies-of-the-valley and forget-me-nots, nasturtiums and peonies.
Katherine was particularly fond of flowering cosmos plants, whose sturdy stalks shoot up as tall as a person. By July, the garden patch is usually teeming with them, their feathery blooms purple and pink, their bodies bending in the rain so that passersby have to part them to make way – a sidewalk rainforest.
For 30 years, Katherine curated the boulevard garden with care. On early mornings, when it was still cool, I would find her scanning the earth, looking for her Michaelmas daisies, for new floral openings, for weeds, for words.
“Chrysanthema,” I try.
She winces a little, and gently corrects: “Chrysanthemums.”
Over the years, her plantings migrated over to our side of the yard; no party walls in a garden. We hastened the process – she showed me how to transplant hearty tufts of green-and-white leaves with small purple flowers: geraniums. The ones that smell like pepper.
As the summers slip past, the words, too, have become perennial. They take root in the brain and return in the spring: mini pinks, lamium, mint.
Katherine stepped out one cool morning, cutting a slow path through the boulevard patch, which was already showing spears of new green. I watched her stoop carefully into a taxi. She was going to the hospital for tests. She didn’t look back. It was April.
Later that week, the day Katherine breathed her last word, I stepped onto the sidewalk to scan the earth and search for the words to describe my sorrow: sadness, disequilibrium, the gratitude for having met her. Is there a word to capture all three at once? Could we simply call it grief? Instead, I found only the butter yellow and flashes of red, purple, pink.
Words unfurl and propagate; they are heralds of intention. We use them not for their own sake but for what they represent, for the meaning they hold. With words, we name the world. So we seek out the best ones, the words that fit close enough, that do the trick.
It’s April again, and the dormant roots are stirring, bringing forth their new iterations. Soon the boulevard patch will be filled with the leaves and stems of Katherine’s plants: the lilies, the peonies, the daisies, the sage. And the ones I struggle to name.
I’ll do my best to tend them, to watch over their curious unfurling. Later, we’ll see the forget-me-nots and the people who pass by, brushing against the boulevard cosmos.
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