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Remembering an Old Garden

3/27/2014

One of the goals of an ornamental garden is the creation
of a sudden impression — a striking moment when plant and setting, light and air combine to produce pleasure or sudden interest. This might be visual but could also be olfactory. The effect of a bank of German irises in full hue includes the scent. Oriental lilies can be as striking in the dark as in the daylight; the rich large molecules they disperse through the air to signal moths, I suppose. But at any rate, a good garden causes sudden pleasure or interest, visual or otherwise. The specifics are a matter of particularity, but very soon the particular details become vague in memory, and one recalls the pleasure of the garden as a whole,
more than particular scenes within the garden. In time all one remembers perhaps is the sunlight through the
leaves, a few favorite kinds of flowers, the fresh floral brightness of an early summer morning, the cool shadows of the garden in the dusk. The point of a garden may be particular plants and flowers, particular moments and scenes, but in time the main achievement of a garden is a remembered atmosphere.

Scale seems irrelevant to this observation. If one is fortunate enough to be, for example, the Emperor of Japan, and have an alley of ancient Cryptomeria 230 feet tall in one’s garden, the sudden pleasure or interest goes without saying, but modest beds of moss may well be as beautiful, striking, and interesting, without ever reaching an inch in height. Miniature gardening and architectural landscaping have a lot in common, except for the bulldozers.

This train of thought brings to mind some favorite garden adages:
-- Gertrude Jekyll’s observation that formal gardens are about masses of color, and that gardening is akin to Impressionist painting.
-- Zen gardening, where a particular effect depends on the particular angle of viewing, and the naturalistic effect is staged.
-- Romantic gardening, or the creation of a tangle, as opposed to specimen planting, where each plant has a place and every plant is in it.
-- And that saying of old rosarians , it is better to put a $5.00 plant in a $10.00 hole than a $10.00 plant in a $5.00 hole. Actually the idea that you could find a $10.00 much less a $5.00 rose of any note tells us just how old the old rosarians were. But over the years I have taken this adage strongly to heart.

In my last blog I mentioned my original “Dog’s Grave” garden plot on Cottonwood Avenue, back in 1988. In my memory that initial gardening foray was followed by a long slow garden evolution culminating in a sort of climax, the ultimate climax of every garden, which is its abandonment. On sober reconsideration, there was no long slow evolution. Every year included at least two major gardening projects. The inner ring of flower beds around the
house was followed by an outer ring of flower and shrub beds. Those beds were redesigned or expanded every year, as I began my rockwork on the hillside. My brother Alan and I constructed, step by step, a flight of stairs and their adjacent terraces, and then a circular rock garden, filled with whitened pebbles and bordered by azaleas (my “Zen garden”), and finally a second set of more massive terraces, at which point we sold the Cottonwood Ave house and moved to the country. The next step would have been the lower slope of the forested hillside the house was on.

This was just a small city ranch house lot, and none of the beds were very large. The area of all the beds and associated rockwork put together was not terribly large. However, the garden was increasingly enveloping, and fairly soon buried the house in climbing roses, blooming shrubs, and raised rock beds that were fairly carefully landscaped for one visual effect or another. Each year early spring flowers were replaced by late spring flowers, spring blooms by summer blossoms, summer by fall. The beds metamorphosed throughout so whatever there was to be seen appeared to have grown there, with no reference or sign of the spring bulbs sleeping under them, waiting for their day to return.

The climax of a garden is the walking away from it. The plants must find their way. Or else another gardener takes over. But if the successor is not a gardener, or is strictly an annual gardener of pansy and petunia inclinations, then the established plants are on their own.

So, what of my once and former garden? The woody shrubs, if they were good shrubs, will have become massive without consulting anyone. The tenderer ones will have died. Roots that need to be divided will have choked out. Breeders will have spread, may even have claimed the entire hillside. The Asian naturalizing woodland oddities that I planted on my hillside terraces will have all have spread downhill by the force of gravity and water — the rare arums, the toad lilies, and many other curiosities, along with reintroduced natives that might have grown on the same spot before, Solomon’s seal, bloodroot, goatsbeard, the black cohosh of the Native Americans, known to the English as fairy candles. None of those will appear domestic now, unless someone with more time than sense has successfully controlled and ordered my old flowerbeds.

Am I curious about what has become of my old garden? Not really. The “me” who built and tended it is as dead as Tuthmosis, a former self on the ladder of selves. The self who is speaking now is a later self, remembering former plants which were given their independence when I moved on. Some will have succeeded past the bounds of propriety and others will have vanished like the pterodactyl and it is no business of mine what vegetal or insectoid dramas are fought out in the old garden these days. The slowly evolving garden on my two acres here in the country is more than enough to fill my gardening dreams.

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There’s No Wrong Way to Begin a Garden

3/13/2014

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Yesterday afternoon, while watching a tide of tree limbs, flying gravel, dry leaves and a chair blow across our yard in a sudden gale, I realized that all this airborne debris included our blue heron wind spinner lawn ornament, the pride of the front yard. So I put on my shoes and went out into the blast and retrieved it. To the west a wall of cold blue cloud was bearing down on us at tornado-suggestive speed and the temperature, after a handful of extremely spring-like days, was once again falling faster than the House of Hapsburg and Bitcoins. This morning I discovered that the blue glass gazing globe in one of our front beds was a casualty of the wind.

Despite our exciting garden plans for 6 or 8 weeks from now, our whole area looks like the Slough of Despond, or anyway a slough. The ground has been thawed and refrozen repeatedly in cycles of temperatures dropping as low as zero. Some shrubs that should now be showing off their late winter or very early spring finery are ice-burned and pathetic, including some new hellebores that ought to have been able to take it but instead look scalded. We will just have to see what lived and what died in this year’s remarkable winter.

Normally we have our first daffodil between mid January and mid February. Today, March 13, the first daffodils, thin and spindly, appeared in the round frontmost bed in our yard.

This week some early crocuses have also risked taking the air.

I fear this may mean that spring, when it comes, will last about three days, and everything will bloom simultaneously and then fry immediately in 85 degree heat. The long cool incubation that best suits spring flowers may not be with us this year. But that remains to be seen.

I have not been gardening that long. Our first garden year was 1988, the second spring after we bought our first house, a mid-sixties ranch house on Cottonwood Road in town. The first know instance of gardening was at Tell Abu Hureyra in what is now northern Syria around 11,514 years ago. I am trying to avoid the customary round numbers here. The crop was rye. By comparison with that, I have hardly been gardening at all.

I don’t count my entire childhood history of relentless cultivation in this calculation, because we were forced to do it. My father liked vegetables, so at very early ages my brother and I were herded into the yard with hoes and rakes and put to work chopping, weeding, thinning and aerating things. We also served as pest control. We could collect the insect pests in a jar and use them for bug fights or we could mash them between two pieces of wood, whichever amused us the most. Such intensive hand-cranked cultivation results in excellent produce. In fact it is the only way to get any results at all. Domesticated plants react to neglect by dropping dead on the spot. Also, there is no known agricultural poison as discriminating as a kid with a good working notion of “good bug versus bad bug.” One of the things we learned is that bad bugs are not bad in the Calvinist sense. They are just the wrong bug in the wrong place, the same way a weed can be defined as a flower that nobody wants. I would call our childhood activity gardening now, but at the time we regarded it as a punishment and spent our gardening time asking what we had done wrong and why this was a fair sentence for doing it. Obviously we had not yet heard of Original Sin or read Genesis or anything like that and would have been incredulous if we had.

So, our first garden year was 1988 and was caused by a random plant catalog, the famous Dutch Gardens catalog, which at the time was better printed (and more interesting) than most best-sellers. As an aside, the Dutch Gardens catalog of 2014 still has most of the same old plants in it, showing the hidden evolutionary conservatism of gardens. All garden catalogs seem to boast new and stunning plants to be amazed by, and then sell mainly the same old ones. But I digress.

What I am trying to say is that after Karen and I debated the propriety of trying some of these novel plant wonders, we ordered about $60 worth of assorted roots, bulbs and tubers. When they arrived, I bought a shiny
new shovel from the hardware store and guiltily slunk around the corner of the house, lest anyone spot me performing a manual act, and excavated the angle between the chimney and the front yard. It was a fluke, a Neolithic-class happenstance, that this was a south-facing spot against a brick wall. All gardeners will now say, “Ah, yes…”

The type of flower bed I dug is the sort traditionally called a Dog’s Grave. I threw the dirt from it down the hill, stacked the peculiar objects that had come in the mail more or less right-side-up at the bottom of the bed, and then filled it back up by pouring a large bag of potting soil over it. I never expected any of it to come up. That probably helps explain why I crammed enough plants to fill a 20-foot border into a 3 x 5 hole. I assumed at the time that they were doomed anyway.

In an amazingly short time everything came up, and since our city neighborhood had no deer, all of it survived to bloom. The little bed was too full to have weeds. It was a floral jungle so thick that nothing could have been staked up had it needed to be. It was a solid green plug of plant matter, a vegetal eruption. In a true stroke of luck, we’d somehow ordered both short and tall plants, with some very large plants that climbed up and got out of the way of the shorter ones.

I don’t remember everything that was in that bed but it included Casablanca, the giant white oriental lily that smells like the well-known Evyan perfume White Shoulders, and one of the most monstrous of all dahlias, the Kelvin Floodlight. When the bright yellow blooms of the Kelvin Floodlight reached their full 12-in diameter I was utterly hooked. My diffidence of April was gone forever. For the last twenty-five years and counting, ten of them at Cottonwood and the rest at our home in the country, I’ve happily wallowed in mud and dirt just on the off chance of flowers.

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Remembering an Old Garden

There’s No Wrong Way to Begin a Garden

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