The Hemlock Class
The hemlock is still poison. The violet still blooms. The billionaires still won't let us use their bathrooms.
“When wealth and pride have built their nest, The eagle’s brood will scorn the rest.”
When I got my first fine gardening job, I didn’t know exactly what the “fine” part meant for quite awhile. The “fine“ part, at least to me about five months in, just meant that you work for mega-millionaires and billionaires. In some twisted way, I can say that I’ve met some happy mega-millionaires (who I would define as being in the hundreds of millions), though I still don’t think they should exist, either. But I have never met a happy billionaire. Despite everything, I’m still a pacifist, and I don’t think they should be killed by us or something like that. But there are two things I believe after working for them for several years: They should pay immense amounts of taxes, and they truly do not think of the rest of us as people.
Before gardening, I worked primarily as a writer, editor, proofreader and sometimes a kind-of court reporter for over 10 years, while also doing a whole plethora of service, stagehand, creepy, and very unusual, one-off jobs within that timeframe. I’ve been working since I was 13, sometimes under the table, often on the books. For all of those years, I had always been able to find another job within one or another field I had experience in within a couple of weeks, no matter what. In 2020, I had a feeling that many of the types of jobs I used to find quickly and easily were drying out because of the rapid advancement of AI. They did, around 2021. As of 2020, they hadn’t yet, but as I live in New England, and since I am almost too-nocturnal, especially when it was kind of cold out (which, of course, is a lot of the time in New England), when I saw an ad for state-run paid job training for doing trail maintenance in local parks, I thought maybe it was the time to turn towards manual labor. Not only would I get some forced sunshine, but I’d have some job security, because robots can’t garden, and probably won’t be able to for awhile yet. I did the training thinking I’d end up having a job for the Department of Environmental Management or something, but at the job fair at the end, minus one position making compost, which paid about $15 an hour, the only jobs available were for fine gardening companies.
I landed on my own definition of fine gardening, but a little after that, a coworker told me that the “fine” part, the part separating us from landscapers (who I often envied because their crews always seemed more relaxed, despite doing a little more heavy labor) is that we don’t have to mow and blow – as in mowing lawns, blowing leaves – but that was only half-true. I never had to mow a lawn, but I had to blow leaves and debris six, seven, eight, times a day, because the number one thing to know about being a fine gardener, and probably any type of servant or servant-esque person for the elite class is that it is preferable – nay, expected on the lowest to highest level – that all the work you do, once you’re done with it, should leave no trace at all, and you are not to be seen. I justified this by giving it a magical tint: It should look like the sparkling, glimmering breeze of the fae has quietly swept through the environment, and voila! There are no weeds, the roses are deadheaded, the foliage trimmed, the spring bulbs taking off, or cleaned out, and some new bright stock is coming in strong.
In the early spring, when me and my two or three fine gardening coworkers first see the early bulbs emerging on the sides of their driveways, which always take a minute to drive down–we’re talking thousands of crocuses, daffodils, irises both rare and prolific, that we planted meticulously in the fall–we all feel a little happy, because it looks so beautiful. When the billionaires visit their properties for Memorial Day, Fourth of July, or Labor Day (usually no more than two of those dates), there are no inklings of footprints on the blue slate, on the fake white marble on the veranda, or real white marble around the pool. When there are guests around on those couple of days and they need you to cut flowers from the cutting garden, or pick some herbs or vegetables for their chefs, you feel like a Victorian-era jewel thief, ducking below windows while walking backwards and crouching down every other step to lean over, squatting on your toes, manually wiping down each footprint with a dampened rag because they have company arriving within the hour and they absolutely can’t bear the idea of seeing signs that there were non-moneyed people there making this happen.
Of course, one should always clean up after one’s work. The added intensity, though, comes from the fact that they don’t like seeing you there, and you are explicitly instructed by your boss to not look them in the eyes if they see you on site. Regardless, if you have to fill up a bucket with water to fertilize their roses and hydrangeas and the spigot happens to be under the window in a kitchen of their 100 million dollar house, you better not raise your eyes up and look at the extremely expensive modern art on display reeking of remarkably poor taste. To have The Help, many of us who have writing or art or music degrees, witnessing their or their interior decorator’s bad taste in imitation-Warhol-style early-2000s pop art about MOTIVATION and MAKING IT HAPPEN, is inexcusable. The couple times I accidentally looked into one of the most expensive of these houses, or talked to a coworker quietly while we were figuring out how to de-pot a whole tree that had to be transplanted (after we’d just planted it) while some South African billionaire owner was on the phone in their glass-walled office leading out to poolside, I got chastised by my boss for days afterward.
At least in America, we are at a historical low point. I think that’s obvious to anyone in the world who reads the news right now. Maybe it’s nostalgia, but I remember hearing about how some old money people in New England used to donate money to museums, schools, the like. I don’t think that happens much anymore. Maybe I haven’t worked for a lot of billionaires but I’ve worked for more of them than anyone else I know – by my count, around 12 of them. I’ve worked in Newport and Watch Hill in Rhode Island as well as Boston. Sometimes the elderly old-money Bostonian billionaires were nice enough to nod to us or give us a cup of water sometimes, but the new billionaires, the tech and biotech people, were beyond awful to those of us who made their homes magazine-worthy. No one let us use their bathrooms, which is illegal in both Massachusetts and Rhode Island, but something not spoken of or acknowledged. If you call attention to it, you won’t exactly be fired, but you will be scorned to the point it may be an extremely unpleasant work environment. Still, I held on. It’s the kind of job where you might get paid $30 an hour if you’re lucky, but you know your boss is getting over 100 grand per contract sometimes with only two employees, and it’s just how it is. Unless you’re starting your own company and don’t mind these people and their ways, you don’t have much say.
On the subject of bathrooms, you really have to bite your lip and find creative ways to piss on luxury properties that all have many, many cameras all over the place. Sometimes you piss in the dump truck if it has a cover and a tall-enough gate; sometimes you get yelled at by your boss, because she has a tracker in your truck and time is money, and you stopped at a gas station between going to properties; sometimes, you piss behind a tree and have some decrepit old billionaire stumbling out to you, wasted at 11 am, to remark that he saw that “you visited the trees” the other day, with a wink, and without any offer to let you inside one of their ten bathrooms or to put up a port-a-potty somewhere hidden on the back of the estate. The one property I got to use a bathroom on was one where the wife, who had a Mid-Atlantic accent and never had a job in her life, bred championship dogs. The dogs had a standalone one-bedroom apartment, and I had to take my shoes off before entering. Every day we were there, the lady got screamed at by her angry husband, who was a yacht broker or something, and so she’d come out of her house and talk our ears off while we pruned her hundred assorted flower bushes. I liked that lady, but it was a pretty low bar.
To be a billionaire, you have to go beyond making the mega-millions that others make; there’s no reason to need that much money on a practical level. A mega-millionaire can support several of their Hapsburgian generations and beyond with investments and the like, or so I’m told. Billionaires want more power, more private jets, more weekends around the world, more exotic trees shipped from Japan to places they shouldn’t be, because they can and it is novel; because the whole point is to have a moat and a wall around themselves so if the world is burning around them they don’t have to see it. That’s why they don’t want to see the workers that they employ–full time gardeners, landscapers, construction people, and so on. They don’t want to see you and they want to know that you never see their secrets, and if you do, that their secrets are kept secret. And the thing is, none of them seem to have hobbies or interests, other than making money. They spend so much time making that amount of money that by the time they have it, they’re just paranoid. They didn’t look at art seriously or talk to people out of curiosity, or take the time to learn another language for a reason other than commerce or political solidarity, which will lead to them having more money and power. But still, a few of them talk to you, and other than the lonely dog-breeder lady, it’s usually strange and uncalled for, like the winking lack-of-bathroom guy.
Perhaps going against NDAs that I don’t remember, I’ve seen the following at billionaires' properties, and these are some of the more mild ones:
Paying off purveyors of lists about the wealthiest people in the world, so as not to appear on them. Supposedly it’s because they don’t want their kids to be kidnapped. The ultra-wealthy are not the ones you read about, and they operate on their own systems of confidentiality and privacy.
Ancient artifacts. I’ve been on several properties that had antiquities all over the place: gates from China over 1000 years old, looming stone heads from ancient temples, bookending a never-used bocci court; vases and mosaics from ancient Rome abutting an unused terrace, and so on. Maybe they were legally or semi-legally found, but I’ve also heard secondhand that some of the owners were bragging about them being illegally acquired. Whether or not that’s true, I don’t know, but judging from how many of them do business, I’m inclined to think that this is true. I do know that I have never once seen any of them hanging out in these parts of their properties, and I have never seen any of them play bocci.
There was one billionaire who (for fun, as he said to us) shot and killed crows, and then nailed them onto the fences of the gardens we tended to. He fancied himself a farmer and said it would keep the pests away. There was no food growing at this place and the crows were doing no harm. The landscaping group I worked with at the time saw this–they were a group of guys from Guatemala who were always kind, crossed themselves when they saw the sight. They quit en masse that day, and I never saw them again. We had to work with the corpses of rotting crows hanging three feet away from us in the hot sun. My coworker at the time, who was 19, said that she’d never believed in vampires, but if she did, it would be that guy. He wore a wide brimmed, black straw hat, and always wore a dark shirt buttoned all the way up to his neck. That guy is friends with a certain internationally infamous person.
I once helped install upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars of full-grown imported trees, because this billionaire, out of spite, wanted to ruin another one-percenter’s ocean view. Helicopters that monitor this sort of thing for the town found out, and all of the trees had to be ripped out and disposed of. Seeing this was tragic, in regard to the trees themselves. To think that they were ferried and driven halfway around the world, just to complete a death trip, was awful to me.
I most likely will continue working for these people, at least until I can find something more rewarding that actually pays a living wage, but there is a darkness looming over the whole business, as foreboding as a tidal wave in dreams: cartoony-gloomy, 100-feet tall, suspended like it’s about to crest over you and crush you to bits, but it’s just rewinding and hanging there. It’s never quite crashing but it’s always about to.
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
I think of Keats, who said this–Keats, who lived and died poor, and who dwelled in the realm of beauty but dealt not in absolutes. Maybe there’s some solace to be found in that the bees, the butterflies, the trees, the flowers may all appreciate our work, and most of them will thrive once we have all obliterated ourselves. In the meantime, the people tightening your pockets while bloating themselves with more, more, more will keep on driving their Range Rovers with bulletproof, blacked-out windows; ignoring their untrained, unloved goldendoodles nipping at the heels of their laborers; and comparing their giant stone urns they all seem to own nowadays, which in my imagination are filled with the ashes of the poor people they stepped on to acquire their obscene levels of wealth.
Percy Shelley, the disgraced nobleman who lived and died as a friendly fiend amongst people and a fiendish friend of the Earth perhaps said it best:
“Like the plant which while it derives the accident of its size and shape from the soil in which it springs, and is cankered, or distorted, or inflated, yet retains those qualities which essentially divide it from all others; so that hemlock continues to be poison, and the violet does not cease to emit its odour in whatever soil it may grow.”
Long live the violets!