Guidance from horticultural (and literary) greats
When I was cutting my teeth as a garden writer — this was in the 1980s — I thought I should visit as many famous gardens as I could and immerse myself in the work of esteemed horticultural writers.
The latter quest led me to unexpected places, including the landscape design world of Edith
The Age of Wharton. You may have Innocence
on your bookshelf; I
Italian Villas & Their
have Gardens.
Wharton's concerns extended to how best to replicate the Renaissance villa in your own home. She was no doubt thinking of the abodes of her own Brahmin set, but the principles burdening the Renaissance architect also pertain to us little people: The garden "must be adapted to the architectural lines of the house it adjoined; it must be adapted to the requirements of the inmates of the house ... and lastly it must be adapted to the landscape around it."
Sound advice until you learn that her idea of a garden included sunny bowling greens, majestic parterres and stylish orchards. The search for great writing about more down-toearth aspects of gardening led me to three writers with dirt under their nails: Christopher Lloyd, Henry Mitchell and Allen Lacy.
They had different backgrounds, experiences and tastes, but these differences were just a reminder that while all gardeners and gardens are unique, the quest for a profound connection to the natural world is the same. Dismissing the idea of gardening as a hobby, Lacy said that "being wholeheartedly involved with gardens is involvement with life itself in the deepest sense."
Lloyd was the brainy horticultural wiz and master of one of England's most picturesque and interesting gardens, set in the grounds of a medieval manor house named Great Dixter. He died in 2006.
Mitchell was for more than two decades the creator of the beloved Earthman column in The Washington Post. He died in 1994. Lacy was a philosophy professor with a garden column in the Wall Street Journal and, later, the New York Times. He wrote a newsletter for a while but eventually retreated from the publishing scene to his garden and a small arboretum he founded in Linwood, N.J. He died Dec. 27.
His death prompted me to dip into their written work again, which presents gifts on many levels. I get a kick out of how the gardeners' plant palette and tastes have changed since their observations, now decades old.
I am still impressed by the breadth of their horticultural knowledge, particularly Lloyd's. And as I think back to when I first read
Wellbooks such as Lloyd's Tempered Garden
or Mitchell's Essential Earthman Home or Lacy's Ground, I measure my own journey along this path.
Foliage Plants
In (1973), Lloyd leads the charge against that
Victorian holdover of massing tender annuals in public spaces. "Tropical bedding as practiced in London, in spas and at seaside resorts is probably the most repulsive manifestation of the parks and gardens mentality," he wrote. This practice is still evident in the downtown parks of Washington and probably at faded English seaside resorts as well. Perhaps it has been banished from Boris Johnson's trendy Londinium.
But some things have changed, even since the 1990s. The princess tree, Paulownia tomentosa, is a fast-growing, coarse-leafed tree with showy exotic blooms that belie its hardiness. Lacy called it "the most beautiful flowering tree in my garden." It has the sort of Southern Gothic qualities that would have appealed to Mitchell as well, though I don't think he wrote about it. Today, it's considered the biggest weed on the planet.
Lacy never forgot his roots in Depression-era Texas, and in his prose he projects a person who is a realist and averse to fulsomeness, the princess tree notwithstanding. He wrote that waiting for spring made him cranky, although he could be playful in his writings. There was the time he visited the venerable English seed merchants Thompson & Morgan and came across a cucumber the size of a grape that, when ready, exploded to disburse its seeds. "I touched a plant. Half a dozen ripe fruits flew in every direction. I touched another plant. I forced myself to stop. Such amusement probably wasn't seemly in a grown man."
If you want an introduction to their
In a Green Shade, work, I'd suggest Lacy's Well-Tempered Garden Lloyd's and One Man's Garden. Mitchell's
Anyone who visited Mitchell's garden in Washington in the day would not have found a garden in the sense that Wharton would have known, but rather a plant menagerie, each specimen closely observed and providing manna for the soul, not to mention Earthman's column.
To my mind, the richest prose belonged to Mitchell, who was droll, wise, lyrical and bighearted even when he pointed out the daftness of others.
This is one of my favorite passages, for all those reasons: "For most gardeners, spring is when things at last start to grow again and snowdrops bloom and buds swell. The witch hazels are out; the new leaves of clematis are half an inch long. For others, spring means no shirt and coffee in the summerhouse. They will never acknowledge spring until April 14. But for us, the die-hard gardeners, spring is already here, even though we may have snow, an ice storm or two, and ground frost for another six weeks."
And this: "Nature is endlessly ingenious and, of course, unspeakably vicious and barbaric. Any complaints should be sent not to me but to the designer of the universe."
And, finally, this: "Peace comes to the gardener when at last he has all his flowers in reasonable and sane balance - the day after the undertaker comes."