Then I moved on to the plantsman Shepherd Ogden and the catalogue he puts out with his wife, The Cook’s Garden. It is from him that I always get my lettuce and other salad greens, and a beet called ‘Formanova,’ which he describes this way (the descriptions are written by him; he is an author): “An old favorite of ours, and for good reason. Very tender and sweet, with a unique carrot shape that makes it easy to peel and slice. Can be planted closer than other main crops for high yields.” But this beet isn’t shaped like a carrot at all, it is shaped like a penis, and I always refer to it that way; I call it the penis-shaped beet. This used to be my favorite catalogue to read before I discovered Ronniger’s, and it remains high on the list of the catalogues I go over and over just for the descriptions. I know Shep very well; he had been the previous tenant of the first house I occupied in Vermont, and when I read his catalogue it is quite like talking to him. When I first met him, he mystified me: he is a very tall man who moves much too swiftly for his height and he speaks as swiftly as he moves. Then one day he told me that until he was eighteen years old he was five feet two inches tall and then within a year he grew twelve inches; but all through his teenage years he thought of himself as a short person, and he never got over that. Knowing him in that way, I read his catalogue and feel that he is speaking directly to me.
I am having a minor (I think) infatuation with the Shepherd’s Garden Seeds catalogue (no relation to Shep Ogden’s catalogue), so I ended up ordering more from them than I meant to. But the description of the ‘Kidma’ cucumber was hard to resist. “Developed for eating out of hand, they are perfect when picked at 5 to 8 inches long. These cucumbers are not marketed commercially because they are too delicate to stand shipping.” This is the luxury of a kitchen garden—growing things you cannot buy at the store. And from Shepherd’s Garden Seeds I also got ‘Chioggia Striped’ beets (described as an Italian variety), which I tried late last summer at a friend’s house; they revealed pink-in-white circles when sliced, and they were delicious plain, without a vinaigrette sauce or butter. And I ordered Blue Lake string beans, which I had never grown; they are the most ordinary of string beans to grow, so perversely, for just that reason I wanted to have them this year. On page 38 was a listing for a pink-fleshed potato called ‘Cherries Jubilee’; it was described as “luscious” and it is, especially if some of it can be stored over until January for a dinner of mashed potatoes. My confidence in the Shepherd Seed people increased when I saw that they, too, get their potatoes from Ronniger’s, but in the Ronniger’s catalogue, ‘Cherries Jubilee’ is listed in the Samples category, which means you can order only a sample of seeds, each sample weighing one half to one pound. Through Shepherd’s I ordered three pounds. But it was in the seeds for flowers that I lost myself: three packets each of ‘Old Spice’ and ‘Early Mammoth’ sweet peas. Where I will put them I don’t yet know, but they’ll all have to go in; there’s no such thing as too many sweet peas. I also ordered packets of rose campion, cottage pinks, a foxglove, stock, and double Canterbury bells.
I ordered all these flowers, along with some love-in-a-mist (from Smith & Hawken), daylilies, platycodon, malva, and many other flowers I find beautiful in themselves, completely disregarding Gertrude Jekyll’s admonitions about color schemes, complementary or contrasting. Lately, I have been completely immersed in her writing, and it was this extraordinary pleasure that the arrival of the spring catalogues interrupted. In her book Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden (which is hard to find in this country; I just happened to come across it in the Borders bookshop in Ann Arbor, Michigan) she says: “I am strongly of opinion that the possession of a quantity of plants, however good the plants may be themselves and however ample their number, does not make a garden; it only makes a collection.” And again: “Given the same space of ground and the same material, they may either be fashioned into a dream of beauty, a place of perfect rest and refreshment of mind and body—a series of soul-satisfying pictures—a treasure of well-set jewels; or they may be so misused that everything is jarring and displeasing. To learn how to perceive the difference and how to do right is to apprehend gardening as a fine art.” All that and much more of what she says about beauty and art in the garden is perfectly true—but what if all the flowers I love and want very much to grow are, when seen together, all wrong, all jarring and displeasing? When I lived in my old house—Mrs. McGovern’s house, the Yellow House—and had just started gardening and knew even less than I do now, I decided one day to place a large square bed in the middle of my small lawn. It seemed an odd thing to everybody—everybody told me so—but I just went ahead anyway and put things I liked in this square: white peonies, pink peonies, some yellow lupines, some Johnny-jump-ups, and some portulaca, and then on one edge, lavender and oregano. I found this quadrangle very beautiful and used to sit for long stretches in a chair and gaze at it; at the time I was much in love with lupines.
Devotion to what I love, or might love, has caused me to order six rugosa alba, a ‘Reine des Violettes,’ and a ‘Madame Isaac Pereire’—all roses—from Wayside Gardens. I wanted four ‘Paul’s Himalayan Musk’ from them also—this is a great pink rambler, which I had planned to run up some old apple trees—an idea not unique to me; I got it from Gertrude Jekyll—but they were all sold out. The rugosa ‘Alba’ I plan to put in an opening near the road; I don’t know how they will look, but they will be full of thorns, so the deer won’t eat them; they might even keep the deer out. The ‘Reine des Violettes,’ too, might be strange—it seemed bluish in the catalogue. I believe I am opposed to blue roses—but once I saw a picture of it I began to imagine it in the corner at the far end of my new stone wall, along with some Canterbury bells, blue and pink platycodon (White Flower Farm), and blue and white campanula. In that large order to White Flower Farm I made—this went against my promise to myself not to order too much from them because they are expensive and they seem so conceited in their advertisements, but their daylilies are the best I have ever grown—were six Canada lilies. They look best surrounded by masses of green grass and brown tree trunks, which is how I saw them when I first fell in love with them, in a field across from my first house in Vermont, the house that Shep Ogden used to occupy. They are tall, with thinnish scapes holding up cadmium-colored, cup-shaped flowers, their heads bent down as if in intense demonstration of humility. And where to put these? And then there are two wonderful things from the Jackson & Perkins catalogue: climbing ‘cécile Brünner’ and ‘Ballerina’ roses. The ‘Ballerina’ will go at one end of the hollyhocks and the ‘Cécile Brünner’ will be at the other end, running up the side of the house and above the back door and around some windows. I don’t know how this will look. It may not only violate established rules, but also not please me in the end at all.
In the Park Seed catalogue I saw some beautiful portulaca. When I think of this little spready plant with short, yet succulent leaves and rose-like flowers, I think of it by itself, isolated, disregarding how it might fit into the garden as a whole. My love for this little plant is no longer a mystery to me. Last summer, as I knelt over it, fretting about its health (fretting is the most common of all the moods that a gardener can have; a gardener frets even when things are going well), the origins of my feeling for it became clear to me. When I was little and lived in Antigua, my mother used to leave me in the care of a woman who, once we were alone, would take me to visit a friend of hers, a stevedore, whose name I cannot remember. They would talk for a while and then disappear together inside—to have sex, I realized some time later—leaving me all by myself outside. He lived in a small yellow house, and the shutters, which they would close when they were inside, were painted a vivid blue. In the front of the house was a little walkway, and on either side of it were two banks carpeted with this flower, portulaca, which we called bachelor’s button, and which behaves like a perennial there. These portulaca were crimson and deep purple, and I used to dance up and down around them, pretending that I was a little girl from somewhere else. Fro
m that garden I could see the sea, and sometimes a train loaded with sugarcane would pass by, for the house was near the railroad tracks. The woman and I would return to her home, and always she had a bagful of brown sugar, the raw kind, only a stage away from being molasses; she would sometimes give me a lump of it to eat. She and my mother had an enormous fight when my mother found out about our trips to the stevedore’s house, but they would have had an enormous fight anyway; people there always do.
Gertrude Jekyll’s nurse told her that dandelions were “Nasty Things,” and wouldn’t allow her to pick them and carry them home. I learned this in a biography of Miss Jekyll written by a woman named Sally Festing, which I read intermittently—in between the spring catalogues and Gertrude Jekyll’s own writing. I identify strongly with the pain writers experience when they are criticized, so I don’t want to say too loudly how unsatisfying I found this book. It’s possible that the nurse’s disapproval of dandelions was an event that led to the person Gertrude Jekyll became and her choice of vocation, but the author doesn’t say; this kind of speculation doesn’t seem to interest her. This book is very decent and discreet—just the qualities I want in a friend, but not in a book I am reading. Was Gertrude Jekyll ever in love with anyone? Did she ever have sex? That’s the kind of thing I like to know about other people. This biography doesn’t answer these questions. She had many close friendships with other women, the book does say that. And it says that she knew John Ruskin. But I wanted to know what Gertrude thought of the fact that an English court had annulled Ruskin’s marriage, which had never been consummated. Apparently, he had been horrified to discover, on his wedding night, that his wife had pubic hair, she was not smooth and hairless like the nude statues he so admired. (All this I read somewhere else, though.) Festing’s biography skips happily along and then, all of a sudden, surprises you with a new piece of information. I carried around in my head the fact that Edwin Lutyens and his wife, Emily, were very much in love, and then, all of a sudden I read that Emily had become involved in some way not clear at all to me with Krishnamurti, and that Edwin turned up at Gertrude’s house in the company of Lady Victoria Sackville and her daughter Vita. I guessed that Edwin and Lady Victoria Sackville were having an affair. Sometimes Lutyens called Gertrude Bumps, and sometimes Woozle. She was a very ugly woman and very conscious of it. What better way to divert attention from herself than to make pronouncements about correctness and beauty in the garden. What a perfect example of making a virtue of your own neuroses!
When I finished writing this, the thermometer outside my door read 18 below zero. I now know that spring will never come. I shall spend the rest of my life reading seed and plant catalogues, and books about gardens and the people involved with them.
PART II
AN ORDER TO A FRUIT NURSERY THROUGH THE MAIL
Please mail to:
Jamaica Kincaid
(DF 127 B) Northern Spy (1)
(DF 114 B) Red Rome (1)
(DF 123 B) Red Stayman Winesap (1) 3 trees @ $15.25 each = $45.75
(DF 604 B) Colette (1)
(DF 610 B) Red Anjou (1)
(DF 602 B) Bartlett (1) 3 trees @ $15.25 each = $45.75
(SF 803 A) Napoleon (1)
(SF 804 A) Schmidt’s Bigarreau (1) 2 trees @ $14.75 each = $29.50
(DF 405 A) Santa Rosa (1)
(DF 406 A) Shiro (1) @ $14.75 each = $29.50
(DF 305 A) Hale Haven (1)
(DF 310 A) Red Globe (1) @ $14.75 each = $29.50
(BF 302) Ivanhoe (2) @ $6.15 each = $12.30
(BF 308A) Patriot S.H. @ $6.15 each = $12.30
A total of $204.60
Shipping: $20.40 (Approximately. Please adjust.)
Please charge to my American Express #
Date: 01/94 My telephone number is
I hope this is all clear. If not, do not hesitate to ring me, I would so appreciate it.
This was such a disaster. Only the pear trees are thriving now, and only in the last two years have they flowered.
It isn’t easy to grow hard fruits in the garden in my climate and no one told me so; not the catalogue, which succeeded in convincing me that their nursery was situated in a climate even more severe than my own; not my fellow gardeners, who were always serving me a delicious apple pie from their exceptionally productive little orchard—but they had inherited the little orchard from the farmer whose house they had bought. I inherited two apple trees from Dr. Woodworth (a Granny Smith and something else, a red one), but the apples always turn out distorted and crippled-looking, as if someone had assaulted them on purpose when they were tiny; and on top of that, when I cook them, I have to add a lot of sugar just to get a taste sensation of any kind.
It is six years since I sent this order, and after vowing never to order fruit trees through the post again, I am looking at this very same nursery’s catalogue and I am making up an order. Oh, please, someone, Help Me!
THE OLD SUITCASE
There was a moment while I was standing inside a tent at the Chelsea Flower Show—a vast, four-day-long display on the grounds of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, put on by the Royal Horticultural Society every summer—when I experienced a feeling that I imagine the great plant appropriators (David Douglas, Archibald Menzies, Asa Gray, Thomas Nuttall, John Torrey, Joseph Banks, Ernest Wilson) must have experienced upon first seeing a flower of special appeal: I wanted immediately to put the thing I was seeing in my handbag and take it home. I was looking at a Verbascum ‘Helen Johnson’—a mullein I had never seen before. It was a sport found growing at the Royal Botanic Gardens, at Kew; Helen Johnson is the name of the gardener who found the mullein. Its leaves were just like those of the ordinary wild mullein near my house, which I have been cultivating, but its flower was a brownish-apricot, almost translucent, with a yellow-and-violet twirl of stamen in the center. Perhaps its appeal for me lay in my not having seen it anywhere before, but I really felt I had to have it. It cannot be propagated by seed, because its seeds are sterile; it can be propagated only through cuttings. I learned this from Adrian Bloom, of Blooms of Bressingham; his was the second stand at which I found Verbascum ‘Helen Johnson.’ While I was speaking to him about this plant, I saw him begin to put some distance—not exactly physical—between us. Familiar as he must be with the fanaticism of people who are involved with plants, my enthusiasm was too much for him. For days after I first saw the ‘Helen Johnson’ I tramped around the great gardens of England plotting ways to smuggle it back to this country. One day, when I was reading the newspaper, I came across an article about the woes of honey farmers in England. Entire hives have had to be destroyed because they have become infested with bee mite, a parasite that attacks baby bees while they are still in the cell and causes them to be born deformed. It is believed that the bee mite came to England when some beekeepers took their hives to France so the bees could gather lavender pollen there—that while the bees were gathering lavender pollen they picked up the mites, and when they returned to England the mites came with them. I have never, as far as I know, tasted lavender honey, but I wonder if, once it is tasted, it must be tasted again and again, no matter the cost.
Almost as if ashamed of the revulsion and hostility they have for foreign people, the English make up for it by loving and embracing foreign plants wholesale. I am sure there are more plants than people in England originating from the Himalayas. It was at a flower convention, which is what the Chelsea Flower Show is, that I saw this clearly. There was the blue poppy (Meconopsis betonicifolia), a flower I had never seen except in a picture; it was everywhere. I thought it might be native to England, but it is not; it comes from the Himalayas and was brought to England by Frank Kingdon-Ward, the plant hunter (that is how he refers to what he was doing; a title of one of his books is Plant Hunter’s Paradise). I do not know how he died, but I don’t believe it was in his own bed.
I was wandering through this place, the Chelsea Flower Show—inside the Great Marquee, where the flowers were on display—a whirl
of things forced into perfect bloom, more perfect than anything nature would allow. If I had not known that the Chelsea Flower Show dates back to 1913, I would have thought that this event had never happened before, that this was the first time it had ever been put on. Being there was like being at a child’s birthday party. I was in a daze, because I had just gotten off an airplane (it was the middle of the morning, I had already had breakfast, but my body wanted it to be the middle of the night); I was in a daze because I was among so many exquisite flowers and because I was in the midst of people who were so pleasant and kind it was hard to believe they were related to the people who were so rude and insulting to me as I passed through customs. If you ever want to keep up a grudge against someone, don’t see that person alongside beautiful flowers. I loved all the people at the Chelsea Flower Show, standing among rhododendrons in impossible shades of mauve, pink, and peach. They came streaming in through an entrance called the Bull-Ring Gate, off the Chelsea Embankment (the same one I had come through), from all directions, as far as I could see, and they looked, not like twentieth-century citizens of a country that used to run the world but like residents of a village—a village far from the city, far even from a town. They displayed the orderliness of the unsophisticated: they lined up; they were polite; they were not nervous; they didn’t seem to be expecting (as I was) a terrorist disaster.
The stand of sweet peas was spectacular: none of that ‘Mammoth Mixed’ or ‘Old Spice,’ the sparsely flowering varieties common to American gardening (at least the American gardens I know), but large, generous flowers of the clearest, purest, single colors: pure pink, pure white, pure mauve, pure red, with names that seem to have sprung from a mind exhausted with the effort of naming things (‘Band-Aid,’ ‘Royal Wedding’). Just after the sweet peas I came to the place where Peter Beale’s roses were being displayed, and a group of people, all twittering and pleasantly agitated, were standing about in the midst of roses that looked even better than the ones in the Wayside Gardens catalogue. Apparently, a duchess had visited; she had unveiled a new rose to the public, and then she had left. When I got there, people were still basking in an “I saw the Duchess” atmosphere. At that moment I realized I had been missing my children, who had stayed home in Vermont with their father. My children like to dress up in some old clothes that used to be mine, clothes that are from the Victorian era, and they pretend that a duchess is coming to tea; she comes, they have tea with her, they quarrel with her, she chops off their heads. This game ends in huge peals of laughter. But my children will grow up and they will stop playing duchess and go on to live, happily or unhappily, the messy lives of ordinary human beings. The best display I saw all day was that of the Crown Estate, a selection of things grown in Windsor Great Park, which belongs to the Queen. The blue poppy was there (a flower nearly impossible to grow here, because of our hot, dry summer); so were some Hosta sieboldiana. And there was something there, too, that I had never in my life seen before, something called Gunnera mani-cata, which had leaves so large it seemed as if they could cover ten children’s bottoms; the leaves were serrated and deeply cut, like castor-bean leaves. The flowers were about two feet tall, shaped like a pine cone, and emerged from under the leaves, an undelicate and green protuberance. This plant is from Brazil—a very nice man, young, a gardener for the Crown Estate, told me so. I missed the unveiling of the astilbe ‘Catherine Deneuve’ (Blooms of Bressingham), which is a pink astilbe that looked like many other pink astilbes, but I saw the stoutest, tallest lupines I have ever seen. They were banked up against a wall—a sea of fat, erect whorls covered with red, yellow, orange pea-shaped blooms. And at the Hazeldene Nurseries there was a wonderful display of violas and pansies. Particularly lovely was a cream-colored viola with tiny gray lines running through it, called ‘Viola Cream Lady.’ As I was walking out of the Great Marquee, I recognized Rosie Atkins, the editor of a beautiful new magazine called Gardens Illustrated (I recognized her because there is a photograph of her on the editor’s page), and, I suppose, hungry for someone to talk to, I said hello to her and told her how much I liked her magazine (and that is true, I do like it), but I did not tell her that we here in America do not have as good a magazine about gardening as hers, that the closest we come to a good gardening magazine is one called Fine Gardening—but who won’t approach with caution and suspicion anything with the word “fine” earnestly attached to it?
My Garden (Book) Page 8
