Families crowded the glass entrance as I walked slowly toward them, and I did not go in. I stood out by the bike racks like a man waiting on somebody.
The director found me in about ten minutes. He had a phone in his hand and a look I have seen on a lot of men who have just found out what they do not know.
He asked me about the elm.
There is a bonsai in the east house that is two hundred and forty years old. Japanese elm, collected in 1786, and it came to Spokane in 1991 out of a private collection in Portland when the woman who owned it died.
She did not leave it to the city. She left it to the city on conditions, and the conditions are three typed paragraphs in the gift file, and the second paragraph is the one nobody in that office had read since about 2004.
The tree is not given to a building. It is given to a person, and the person may name their successor and no one else may. If at any time the conservatory has no named keeper for this tree, it returns to the American Bonsai Society for placement elsewhere, and I ask that nobody be sentimental about that.
Marguerite Doyle named Harold Vance in 1991. Harold named me in 2003, in writing, on a form, with a copy in that file and a copy in mine.
Nobody had taken my name off anything but a door. On paper I have been the keeper of that tree twenty-two years and I still am. The society had already called them Wednesday, because they get a report every year and this year nobody sent one.
He asked me what I wanted.
What I wanted was the watering schedule handed to somebody who could read it. That elm takes water twice a day in July and once in January and it does not forgive you, and it had been on the automatic system for six weeks.
I went in through the service door in my own clothes and I spent four hours in the east house with the festival going on forty feet away through the glass.
It lived. It is not what it was and it will take two seasons to come back and it will come back.
They put me on contract in May. Two days a week, keeper of the collection, a title Harold made up in 1998 and which I kept because he made it up.
My name went back on the door in June. I did not ask for that either and I would have been fine without it.
I have named my successor. Twenty-nine, out of the horticulture program at the community college, and she has been on that tree with me since August. The paperwork went to the society in October with her name on it and mine on the line under it.
He was right that guests come to see the plants. Everybody does. That is the whole point of a gardener, and it is why a woman in Portland in 1991 sat down and wrote three paragraphs making very sure there would always be one.