We northern gardeners often drool in envy at the photos here on Saturday Morning Garden Blogging from our southern and western neighbors, who have the luxury of gardening all year, or almost all year. Sitting in our frozen igloos up here in the north, we peer out on frozen or snow covered terrain for months, our gardens hidden and dormant. No amount of “winter interest” can truly substitute for living, breathing plants. So what is a Northern Gardener to do?
Some go south, of course, the snowbirds who flock to Florida or Arizona, leaving their winter gardens behind. Others enjoy the cold and snow and seem to forget about gardening altogether. But what about those of us who, for one reason or another, are unable to leave, or are a little too creaky for cross country skiing? What do we do? Speaking for myself, I pour over seed and iris catalogs and renew my acquaintanceship with garden writers.
As you all know, very broadly speaking it’s possible to divide garden writing into two very broad groups, the “HOW TO” volumes that deal with various horticultural skills, and the kind of literary garden writing I am talking about today: stories of real gardens told by gardeners, full of personal anecdotes and musings on life in their very own gardens. Of course there is overlap and there are sub genres (think of the beautiful coffee table books of famous gardens, for example), and the best garden writers will invariably give advice along with their more philosophical thoughts; thus the best literary garden writing can warm up a cold northern winter better than almost anything.
As in any genre, there are classic writers, and essays about a few of them can be found in Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation across Two Centuries by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers. But a historical overview is not today’s goal: I simply want to share a couple of my favorites and hear about yours.
He may or may not be a misogynist, but just the same, my all time favorite literary garden writer is Beverley Nichols. From the Foreword to his first gardening book, Down the Garden Path, published in 1932:
I know that unless I write a gardening book now . . . swiftly, and finish it before the last bud outside my window has spread its tiny fan . . . it will be too late to write it at all. For shortly I shall know too much . . . shall dilate, with tedious prolixity, on the root formation of the winter aconite, instead of trying to catch on paper the glint of its gold through the snow, as I remember it last winter, like a fistful of largesse thrown over a satin quilt. Just as the best school stories are written by boys who have only just left school, so, I feel, the best gardening books should be written by those who still have to search their brains for the honeysuckle’s languid Latin name, who still feel awe at the miracle which follows the setting of a geranium cutting in its appointed loam (9).
Nichols went on to write sequels to Down the Garden Path — A Thatched Roof and A Village in a Valley and books about his second home and garden Merry Hall with sequels Laughter on the Stairs and Sunlight on the Lawn. There are two books about his final garden: Garden Open Today and Garden Open Tomorrow. All of these books are full of interesting characters and amusing vignettes in addition to the travails and triumphs in his gardens.
Nichols’ prose is vivid and witty, and his impulsive enthusiasm is very endearing. From Merry Hall:
Then came the spring, and the almost unbearable excitement — which can only be enjoyed in an ancient garden — of discovering where the previous owners had planted their bulbs. Of all the treasure hunts in which men have ever engaged, this must surely be the most enthralling . . . to wander out on a February morning, in an old garden which is all your own and yet is still a mystery, and to prowl about under the beech trees, gently raking away a layer of frozen leaves in the hope of finding a cluster of snowdrops . . . (170)
. . . As we all know, the only way to plant daffodils is to pile them on to a tray, and then run out into the orchard and hurl the tray into the air, planting them exactly where they fall. There may be other, less orthodox methods; if so they should be spurned. The tray, the ecstatic gesture . . . that is the only sure road to success (171).
Nichols’ books are full of “ecstatic gestures,” and well worth your time if you are unfamiliar with him. The books were reprinted several years ago by Timber Press, and I reread them every so often, something I do with very few books. They are perhaps best read in order. Many of you will be glad to know that he was a cat lover as well! If you have had the companionship of a cat in the garden, or the experience of a friendly paw on the keyboard as you type, you will appreciate Nichols’ Dedication page in Garden Open Tomorrow:
Dedication
To the Memory
of
Certain Feline Companions
who
While this Work was being Completed
were
Constantly by the Author’s Side
Not only in the garden
but
At his Desk
Giving to his Words
The Approval of their muted Purrs
and
The Authority of their muddy Paws
Another of my favorite garden writers is Henry Mitchell. Mitchell wrote the “Earthman” gardening column in the Washington Post for over two decades. Some of his columns are collected in The Essential Earthman, One Man’s Garden, and Henry Mitchell on Gardening.
Mitchell often writes with dry and acerbic humor, as in the beginning of his essay “On the Defiance of Gardeners” reprinted in The Essential Earthman: “As I write this, on June 29, it’s about time for another summer storm to smash the garden to pieces, though it may hold off until the phlox, tomatoes, daylilies, and zinnias are in full sway.”
From There is Much to be Done, we Must Get to it reprinted in Henry Mitchell on Gardening, in a section on the spring mystery of crocuses appearing and blooming where they weren’t planted, Mitchell goes on to write:
When other gardeners tell me of similar mysteries I am aware that gardeners, as a class, have very poor memories and probably just forgot where they planted something. I too keep forgetting where I planted something. Only last year I moved the great ligularia ‘Desdemona’ to a better site and forgot it, and only after several months realized that all of a sudden ‘Desdemona’ was missing. She is nowhere to be found. It is incredible, in a place as small as mine and given my enormous fondness for the plant, that it could be misplaced. Possibly some criminal stole it. That is the best thing to think if you are missing a plant.
I have known cases in which somebody stole something like ‘Desdemona’ and then, in a cowardly way and probably in the dead of night, sneaked back into the garden and put it back in some strange place (50).
Several summers ago, my dear husband spent several hours and tons of sweat digging out a ‘solar flair’ baptisia, which was too close to a clump of irises. I replanted it in an open spot behind the black garden bench close to the garden house and cut it back. Late that same fall we removed the top of our garden fountain, a large and heavy circular resin basin, because it was leaking and could not be repaired after several attempts. We moved it to an open spot behind the black garden bench close to the garden house; I filled it with dirt and planted annuals in it the next spring. A couple of years later I remember asking myself, “Whatever happened to that yellow baptisia we transplanted?”
Given my currrent obsession with irises, I am especially fond of the following sentences from “Where iris is, I’m smiling” reprinted in the same volume.
The danger of growing a few irises is that the gardener will start chopping up the lawn for additional space for irises, and then the daylilies, roses, and everything else will be dug out to make room for yet more. Within ten years, however, a few other plants will be allowed back (107-108).
I will close with another memorable passage from “Gardening is a Long Road” in the same book:
All gardeners are at different stages. They must be gone through. Sometimes the gardener is stopped at some stage and never gets past it. I am that way with members of the agave family. I doubt I shall ever get over them and their cousins the furcraeas and dasylirions.
But I am over the fat petunias. I have no truck with them. I hew to the elegant tough wild kind that is so sweet at night, that grows with such vigor and that retains such neatness all summer.
Gardening is a long road, with many detours and way stations, and here we all are at one point or another. It’s not a question of superior or inferior taste, merely a question of which detour we are on at the moment. Getting there (as they say) is not important; the wandering about in the wilderness or in the olive groves or the bayous is the whole point (137-38).
What stage are you in, fellow gardeners? Where are you wandering? And do you have a favorite garden writer as a companion on your journey?