Léon and I were definitely not the best friends in the world.
When I entered the community garden, he was all smiles. As president, he kept the garden clean like cleaning a hotel room. Any gardener who dared to let a plant protrude, a weed rear its head or a lettuce plant go to seed was exposed to reprimands, a warning and possibly expulsion.
The guy had a bad temper.
Yes, of course, Léon could have a cheerful temperament, but that ceased the minute he was contradicted. And contradiction was my cup of tea. A tireless worker, he sometimes took a short break, his arm resting on the metal tomato stakes. He went there for a good chat while lighting his cigarette, and took great care, once the thing was toast, to rub the mego into the hole of the metal tomato tubes. That he took my garden for an ashtray irritated me deeply.
JI admit, I have never been a fan of square-tidy-tidy gardening. Léon made it his motto. So he had a bit of a grudge against my lazy gardener ways. In this regard, in order to eradicate unwanted weeds in a rather passive way, I had the fabulous idea of spreading wood chips as mulch. The next day a notice was pinned to the garden gate:
It is prohibited to spread wood chips in your garden or adjacent paths.
My second fabulous idea was to replace the shavings with dead leaves. The next day, the following notice was pinned to the garden gate:
It is prohibited to spread inert matter in your garden.
My third idea was to let the vegetables go to seed to see what the result was. The door was again covered with a notice:
Letting seeds grow is a capital sin, which proves carelessness and phlegm in the face of the desired righteousness of gardening. (well it wasn't written quite like that but my memory isn't too good for the details.)
The model gardener had to be constant, passionate about his straight paths, working tirelessly to repel chaos and put this untamed nature back on the right path. The Quebec priests of the last century had nothing to envy of Léon.
In short, being quite young, I also sometimes liked to push his limits and I often made him lose his temper.
I became persona non grata…
One day when the tone had risen a little, I was shown the garden door. Immediate expulsion without right of return. This is how I became persona non grata of Montreal community gardens. I quickly pulled myself together: there was no way we were going to stop there, I had a bruised ego and a little taste of revenge in my throat.
The same evening, taking advantage of the darkness, I slipped into the garden (here, I will avoid describing my technique because it was as childish as it was illegal and totally thoughtless; I still feel guilty for the destruction of the collective good that was the closing). Very nervous because it's not in my nature to do bad things (meh), I slipped to Léo's garden, and…. I stole all his tomatoes. I knew what his favorites were: tomatoes as big as a pea. In fact, they were so tiny that they ultimately took me ages to pick and I forgot so much about the plant that he didn't even notice my debauchery in his garden the next day. My nighttime escapade was perhaps not the brightest of my ideas after all.
No label displayed the name of this small tomato. Anyway, it was dark, I couldn't see anything.
And I did what every fan of weird varieties does, I saved the seeds. But how to name it? What's better than Léon.
Some time ago...
Some time ago, I met an old garden friend at the grocery store who told me that Léon had died. Ironically, it is me who will make his tomato survive and who will introduce it to hundreds of gardeners.
Following my expulsion from the garden, I had to do something. I decided nothing more and nothing less to create my own garden. The Terre Promise company was born from a banal conflict between an angry smoker and a gardening rebel. We fight wars for less than that!
For over ten years, my flowerbeds have been filled with shavings, dead leaves and seeded vegetables! More than 350 varieties grow, flower and multiply to the delight of everyone.
I would dare to evoke here the old adage according to which when life sends you a Léon, you make lemonade!