48 pages • 1-hour read
Garden Spells
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Part 1, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of physical abuse, emotional abuse, rape, and death.
Part 1: “Hindsight”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Claire Waverley works in her garden during the night and thinks about her childhood. She and her mother lived a transient life until Lorelei, her mother, had Sydney when Claire was six. For Sydney’s birth, Lorelei brought them to Bascom, North Carolina, where Claire’s grandmother lived. Lorelei left the girls to be raised by their grandmother and died in a car crash a few years later.
It is known around town that the edible flowers that grow around the apple tree in the Waverley garden can affect a person’s thoughts, emotions, or memories. This has given the family a reputation for oddity, but Claire likes being identified as a Waverley. She grew up with her grandmother and has been content living alone in the Waverley home since the year her grandmother died, and Sydney turned 18 and left.
Claire’s cousin, Evanelle Franklin, visits. Evanelle is 79 and the only other Waverley still living in Bascom. While all the Waverley women are known to have “gifts,” Evanelle’s gift is to bring people things that they always end up needing. She brings Claire a Bic lighter and laments that summer break at the college means there are no longer young men with shapely posteriors running on the track.
Claire runs a catering business and sells the products she makes from her garden, and she brings Evanelle along on her errands. Once a year, she makes one bottle of rose geranium wine, which “signaled in the drinker a return to happiness, remembering the good” (12). Claire delivers this year’s bottle to Fred, who runs the grocery.
Fred has grown apart from his partner, James, with whom he has been for 30 years, and he hopes the rose geranium wine will help them recapture their happiness. Fred reflects that many families in town are considered to possess particular qualities, but Claire is the first of the Waverleys to use the food she grows as a solution to people’s problems.
Claire arrives at a house on the Orion College campus, where she is catering a party. Claire is working alone, since she is wary of hiring help; they usually are trying to get at her apple tree, the apples of which are said to tell a person what the biggest event of their lives will be. Claire notices a man at the dinner party who identifies himself as the neighbor who just moved into the house next to hers. As she is leaving, the man is standing outside in the yard and asks her for a light. Claire “felt like she had water against her back, ushing her toward the deep end, as she walked toward him and extended the lighter” (19). He introduces himself as Tyler Hughes, a new art teacher at the college. Claire is unsettled by Tyler. She tells herself she doesn’t want to let anything more into her life and risk getting hurt. Claire returns to her house to find Evanelle on her porch with two packages of new bed linens and a box of strawberry Pop-Tarts.
Tyler returns to his house thinking about Claire. He sees a neighbor, Mrs. Kranowski, chasing her dog, Edward. Tyler reflects on how he ended up in Bascom after meeting another art professor who worked at the college. As he walks through his yard, he regards the tall, pointy metal fence around the Waverleys’ yard and wonders why he caught kids trying to climb the fence to steal apples. He sees apples on the ground on his side of the fence, so he picks one up, eats it, and has a dream.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Ten days earlier. Seattle, Washington.
Sydney wakes up her daughter, Bay, who is five, and sneaks her out of the house so that their neighbor doesn’t notice and report to Sydney’s boyfriend, David. David runs a restaurant and is currently away on a trip. Another woman she met at the park, who noticed Sydney’s bruises, gives them money and a car to help them escape.
Sydney reflects that dangerous men used to be her specialty, but she wants her daughter to know security. Sydney lived in several places and had several boyfriends before she met David, and she only stayed with him when she got pregnant. She tried leaving David before and enrolled in beauty school in Boise, Idaho. David found her through Bay’s daycare. He showed up at the school, beat Sydney, and raped her. For the past two years, she has lived with abuse, but after smelling honeysuckle and roses in the air, she decides to take Bay to Bascom.
Now, one morning, Claire finds ivy in her garden. She believes that “[t]he garden was saying that something was trying to get in, something that was pretty and looked harmless but would take over everything if given the chance” (35). Tyler enters the garden carrying a box of apples that fell in his yard. As she digs a hole to bury the fruit, Claire explains that the tree blooms in winter and throws apples. As Tyler asks questions about her life, Claire thinks he is like the ivy, getting in. He tells her she has guests, and Claire goes to the street to see Sydney and Bay.
Sydney looks fragile. Claire believes Sydney never realized what a gift it was that she was born here; instead, Sydney rejected the Waverley name. Claire hasn’t seen or talked to Sydney in 10 years. Claire tells Sydney she can’t leave Bay with her, and Sydney answers that she would never leave her daughter. Claire wonders if she made Sydney hate being a Waverley.
Sydney tells Bay not to eat the apples from the tree. She also rehearses with Bay about how she is not to tell anyone about their past. Sydney reflects that Claire has changed: “[S]he no longer had that greedy, selfish way about her” (45). Claire feeds Bay Pop-Tarts and gives them bedrooms.
Back in her old bedroom, Sydney reflects on how, after their mother left, she slept with sheets tied into a rope so she could leave when her mother came back for her. She couldn’t wait to leave this town. Now, Sydney sits on her old bed and falls asleep.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Evanelle walks downtown and sees Fred in his shop, looking rumpled. She imagines he’s at a loss without James; she knows Fred cares what people think of him. Evanelle is accustomed to her gift, which prompts her to give things to people, though it sometimes frustrates her that she doesn’t know what they are; she thinks, “Her gift was like an itch, like a mosquito bite in the center of her body, and it wouldn’t go away until she did what it demanded” (54). She was married for 38 years but is now widowed. She goes into the store and realizes Fred is hoping she will give him something that will tell him what to do about James. Evanelle buys Sydney a shirt.
Sydney finds Claire and Bay in the kitchen. She is shocked to realize that she slept for an entire day. Sydney fears she is a bad mother and thinks, “This place messed her up. She was never sure of who she was here” (56). Sydney had always thought of Claire as pitiful and herself adventurous, and now Claire is taking care of her.
Claire offers Sydney a job helping with her catering business. Sydney is curious about Tyler, the next-door neighbor, and Bay says he belongs here. Sydney explains that Bay has ideas about where things belong but warns Claire not to try to force a Waverley gift on Bay. Sydney always wanted to be normal, not a Waverley.
Evanelle visits and gives Sydney a slip of paper with Tyler’s phone number, then the shirt. Sydney introduces Bay, who Evanelle says must be a Waverley because she looks like Sydney’s grandmother.
Sydney helps Claire cater a dinner and thinks that it feels good to work hard and earn her money honestly. She loved working at the salon in Boise. Sydney visits Tyler and sees that he’s interested in Claire. Tyler says he had a dream about Claire. Tyler notes that Sydney has been away for 10 years and doesn’t have any old friends she wants to catch up with.
Part 1, Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The title for Part 1, “Hindsight,” reflects the amount of time the narrative and the characters spend looking back, thinking about their pasts and the ways these pasts have shaped their lives. Identity is established as a major theme in the novel, and The Influence of Place on Identity is introduced in these early chapters by dwelling on the relationship between the Waverley family and the town of Bascom.
The setting of Bascom emerges as a rural North Carolina town where many families have come to be defined by certain qualities or characteristics. The Waverleys are perceived as odd in town, a reputation that causes conflict for Sydney. The town is large enough for a college, a downtown area with a luxury spa and women’s clothing boutique, and Fred’s Gourmet Groceries to appeal to the more sophisticated customer. The character of the town differs from the larger places Sydney tried to escape to, including Seattle and Boise; Bascom offers a sense of intimacy as well as opportunities for growth, connection, leisure, and security, which becomes a central preoccupation for several major characters.
The Waverley house is key to this setting, and much of the action in these first chapters takes place there, making the Waverley identity and family heritage central to the novel’s conflicts and themes. The apple tree is introduced subtly but accrues symbolic weight through its various appearances, exercising its abilities to “throw” apples and inspire visions in anyone who eats the fruit. The high fence Tyler notices and Sydney’s warning to Bay suggest that the Waverleys consider this family gift dangerous, introducing the theme of The Appropriate Exercise of Talent. Claire’s efforts to eliminate the apples by burying them signal how, despite loving being a Waverley, she also works to control and even repress the power of the Waverley home and heritage. The sense of menace attributed to the apples adds a note of suspense to the novel, as does the emphasis that the Waverley reputation has distinctly unpalatable associations.
The novel is written from an omniscient point of view, moving among the thoughts and memories of each of the main characters. Claire is the central protagonist, and the novel begins with her dreams and memories. Her character is established in these chapters as being guarded, reserved, and reluctant to grow close to others. Like the high fence surrounding her garden, Claire has been protecting herself and trying to keep people out for fear that they will hurt her. This provides productive ground from which her character can grow and evolve, facing her past to move into the future and developing the theme of Healing Generational Wounds.
Sydney is Claire’s foil and opposite, the sister who had what Claire wanted: a home and a hometown. Ironically, Claire craves being identified as a Waverley and identified as belonging in Bascom, while Sydney did her best to escape both the town and her Waverley identity. Evanelle is a foil to both sisters, appearing as an older, almost maternal figure with her habit of gifting people things they will turn out to have use for. Evanelle’s ability is the first to be described in terms of a gift that is a uniquely Waverley inheritance, although Evanelle has no control over her gift and rarely knows the reason a certain person needs a certain thing. Her gifts serve as foreshadowing as the Bic lighter, the sheets, and the Pop-Tarts anticipate the entrance of Tyler, Sydney, and Bay into Claire’s quiet and well-ordered life. Evanelle’s acceptance of her gift and her Waverley identity offers a model to Sydney, Bay, and Claire on how to best integrate the family legacy into their lives.
While Sydney’s gift is hinted at in her facility with styling hair, and Bay has a sense of where things belong, Claire’s gift is described in more nebulous terms. Her talent and passion for gardening are established, and the success of her catering business hints that she is able to prepare dishes using the edible flowers from her garden in ways that can influence the people who consume them to experience particular memories or emotions. The rose geranium wine Fred buys is an example. Fred describes Claire as sharing her gifts of herbal influence with the community, almost as the archetype of the wise woman, healer, or witch. However, burying the apples illustrates that Claire is not yet prepared to fully acknowledge or use the gifts she possesses, and neither is she currently prepared to admit joy and sensuality into her life.
While Fred provides a parallel to Sydney, who has separated from her partner and feels displaced, Tyler represents the stranger who doesn’t yet understand the undercurrents of the town and so is not yet influenced by them. For instance, he eats one of the Waverley apples—which the tree makes a point to provide him—without knowing what it means, or the importance of the dream he has. This innocence and his creative nature, which includes the ability to see a new perspective, provide the different outlook that Claire needs—even if, in the current moment of the story, she compares him to ivy in her garden, invasive and unwanted.
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