The park was still under construction: the paths weren’t yet laid, the future greenhouse was just a pit of tepid water filled with mosquito larvae, they were only beginning to haul in the dirt for the rolling hills of the upper gardens, and the busts of the generals were still being forged at the official foundry. But he must have sensed how fully I understood the beauty of what he intended, a wildness barely contained. He must have sensed, too, my willingness, the wholehearted way I was prepared to throw myself into the work. I had no other loyalties: no parents, no children, no ambition other than to exist among leaves and Latin names. That first day I sat beside him taking notes he dictated to me as he paged through the plans, and I didn’t miss a thing, didn’t need to be told how to spell Trochodendron aralioides or Xanthorrhoea preissii, and when on occasion he mistook one plant for its cousin I made the correction without drawing attention to the mistake. At four he dismissed me and told me to return with clean nails the following day. At eight o’clock sharp I took up my place again by his side. I had only the greatest respect for him. I felt that I had been—what was it? That I had been chosen, above all. Without being told, I knew when to shadow him and when to make myself scarce, when to provide the word he was looking for and when to absorb his words like a heavy rain.

What do you want me to say? he used to shout. I’m a realist and a man of the earth, both of which require few words! If I hadn’t become what I became, I might have become a poet. I respect them enormously, the poets, he used to say. We each have to work with what we have, I with the once rich flora of our country, so much of which is now teetering on the brink of extinction, and they with our language, which is suffering the same fate. When I was a boy there were many more words, he’d say, but one by one they’ve fallen out of use. History has reached the point where language is sliding backward; one day we will be restored to speechlessness, and then, as if to prove the point, he’d go sit on the veranda and collect from the garden a gloomy silence. But he never managed to remain silent for long. Sooner or later, the words still left would burst out of him.