The Garden of Horrors

Halloween morning. Thunder crackles and lightning breaks up the sky as you approach the iron fence that surround the Garden of Horrors, clutching your ticket. A crowd has already gathered, full of men and women in formal dress, with a spattering of children clinging to their parents’ hands. You are astonished that anyone would bring children here. You aren’t sure you want to go in yourself. You’ve heard….things. Terrible, terrible things. They say a man went mad inside and tried to put his own eyes out with a packet of beet seeds. He didn’t succeed, obviously but still….beet seeds…One wonders what would have happened if he’d had access to kohlrabi.

At the stroke of ten, the gates creak open. A figure emerges, a tall saturnine man wearing a black sun hat. The hat is definitely black. The rest of his clothing may have been black at some point, but is now so encrusted in dried mud, dirt, and bits of dead leaves that it has become an indeterminate brown. He carries a rusted trowel, and his eyes burn with unholy fire.

“Welcome, brave souls, to the Garden of Horror! We are about to venture into the black and ill-mulched pit of despair, from which none return completely whole. I may offer you this one chance to turn back…no? Very well, then.”

Somebody in the crowd asks a question. The figure laughs. “Me? You may call me…the Dark Gardener.”

As a group, huddled together behind the Dark Gardener, you pass through the wrought iron gates. They slam closed behind you. The Dark Gardener laughs again, the sort of laugh that generally involves slabs, lightning, brains and the phrase “IT’S ALIVE!” When he speaks again, his voice has dropped so that everyone must crowd closer to hear.

“We pass now through the lesser horrors of the Garden…the imps of our particular hell. You may gaze upon these with impunity, though even now, it is not quite…safe.”

The garden is a series of clearing between high boxwood hedges. A brief calculation of how much clipping and trimming is required to keep those hedges immaculate fills you with unspeakable dread.  Somewhere in the distance, you hear theramins.

In the first clearing, the Dark Gardener waves his hands over a graveyard of broken tools. “Behold! The Clippers You Left Out In The Rain and Now The Mechanism Has Rusted!”

The crowd gasps and recoils, but this brings them closer to the horror on the other side, a series of heavy black corkscrews—”The Soaker Hose That Won’t Uncoil! And its terrible sister—The Kinkproof Hose That Isn’t!”

The dreadful paradox of the non-kinkproof hose drags at your eyes. Madness threatens. You tear your gaze away, back to the figure of the Gardener.

“By now, my dear friends, you may find your knees getting weak…but don’t sit down. For this is the Porch Chair That You Sat In Maybe Five Times And Then It Got Covered In Cobwebs And Spiders And You Really Ought To Hose It Off But Why Bother, It’s Just Going To Get Spiders On It Again!”

Guilty shudders run through the crowd. The chair, a grim Adirondack, is chained to an iron ring sunk in the ground. It looks like it could go for someone’s throat at any moment.

“And now…” breathes the Gardener, “…we move on to some of the Greater Horrors…”

The next clearing has an immaculate green lawn. It’s thick, plush, and springy, like green shag carpet. Somebody starts to take off their shoes.

“I wouldn’t do that,” said the Dark Gardener. “Behold the horror of…the Well-Watered Lawn In A Completely Inappropriate Climate!”

There is a lengthy pause. The audience waits for the punchline. Nothing happens.

“Fine, fine…” mutters the Gardener. He pats at his coveralls and pulls out a stack of papers, which he brandishes at the crowd. “Behold the water bill!”

The paper is passed around. Faces go pale. “So many gallons!” cries a woman, and falls down into a faint. “The water barrels do nothing!” A man staggers past, gasping “You can’t read it! It…reads…you!”

Just a glimpse of the numbers makes your head spin. When the hedges have stopped whirling, the Gardener is ushering your group into a large clearing lined with cages.

“They obey no law of god or man. They spread faster than a snail can gallop. They cannot be killed, only temporarily inconvenienced. Welcome…” he intones, “to the Hall of Weeds!”

Each cage is set on a concrete pad, which holds, in the exact center, a small terra-cotta pot. Large woodchucks wearing black coveralls are dripping fertilizer into the pots with eyedroppers at the end of very long poles.

“Woodchucks?” asks a man wearing a purple top-hat. “I’d think with the size of this operation, you’d use Oompah-Loompas.”

“They’re not cold-hardy,” explains the Gardener. “Oompah-Loompas only go to zone 8. Otherwise you have to take them inside come fall. We figured the woodchucks were there anyway, might as well make use of them.”

The Hall of Weeds is terrifying. Chickweed snarls from inside its cage. Mint attempts to persuade the more gullible members of the crowd that it’s a harmless herb, nothing more. In one corner, a Norway maple is fighting its handlers, who struggle to keep it chained. Japanese stiltgrass bangs a tin cup over the bars. Chinese wisteria hangs purple streamers over the bars and tries to look ornamental. The kudzu is eating its cage, and woodchucks carrying riot gear run past you, shouting at it. Japanese knotweed grabs a woman’s purse and rifles through it, looking for loose nitrogen. Japanese honeysuckle is doing something eldritch, or possibly non-Euclidean, in a corner.

“Honeysuckle? But it smells so ni—” begins someone in the crowd. The Dark Gardener gives her a look that could turn sand into glass. She gulps and falls silent.

“That brings us to the end of this morning’s horrors,” says the Gardener. “We have many more, but some of them only come out at night. Return, if you dare, in the evening, for the terror that is The Unseasonable Frost!—”

“My tomatoes!” sobs a man in the crowd.

“—The Patio You Swore You’d Finish Before It Snowed!—”

“There are children present!” cries a concerned citizen.

“—The Thing That’s Probably A Weed But You’re Not Sure So You Don’t Want To Pull It All Out Just In Case It’s A Wildflower Or Endangered or Something—”

Many in the crowd are driven to their knees.

“—The Winter Interest That Your Garden Doesn’t Have!–”

A woman next to you begins gnawing on her own shoe.

“—and The Plant That You Bought On A Whim That You Now Have To Find Room For In A Garden That Is Already Standing Room Only!”

The world spins around you and turns grey as you claw your way to the exit. No more! You have looked upon horrors that man was not meant to see! You must find your way out now, or wander these halls of the damned forever!

Behind you comes the terrible laughter of the Dark Gardener, which is interrupted after a moment by “What? The Tree-of-Heaven got where? And it did what with the running bamboo? Bloody hell, get me a flamethrower before the next tour starts…”

(Your own suggestions for exhibits in the ghastly garden enthusiastically welcomed!)

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