This is a geranium. Notice the slimy brown gelatinous blooms. Notice the green leaves. In a closed room with cigar smoke, geraniums smell like Germany between the wars.
Geraniums make people want to play Brahms on the cello, but only when the blooms are red. These blooms are slimy, brown and gelatinous to the touch. They evoke no old German parlors, no Brahms, no cello urge.
Why are these particular geranium blooms so disgusting? They have been watered too much. Too much water affects geraniums the way too much gin affects commuters. They lose their fragrance, turn unpleasant colors and dare you to throw them out.
The geraniums got too much water because they were put right here beside these dissolute-looking plants called impatiens. Impatiens, you see, are aquaholics. They start drinking at breakfast and keep right on lapping it up until the last guest is gone at night.
Notice how the greenish-white stalk of the impatiens suggests an unwholesome human membrane. It reaches everywhere and sucks up water. At night it can turn itself into a bat and fly around the country in search of ponds, rivers and rain barrels.
Was not the gardener who placed geraniums and impatiens here, side by side, a fool about gardening? Ah! Do not be so fast to judge gardeners, you urban cliff people, until you have gardened for yourselves. For now, be quiet and learn.
This ruin here, this botanical dilapidation, this wreck, this holocaust of thorns and crinkled brown leaves—this is a rose bed. It was a rose bed very much like this of which Heinrich Himmler, in his black Himmler suit with the state-trooper puttees, was thinking when he smiled ever so tinily and said: “We will make life for the whole world a bed of roses.”
Almost all beds of roses look like this between the tenth of June and the second of May in the following year. Rose bushes make us think of June mornings in Appalachian valleys in 1932, for these were the last places and last time that roses looked and smelled like roses. In July of 1932 the rose tycoons discovered how to make them with monosodium glutamate.
We can see from the existence of this brown, thorny eyesore that the gardener here is a sentimentalist. He refuses to believe that the Appalachian roses of June mornings will never come back. Listen carefully. Do you hear the roses whispering among themselves in their black Himmler suits with the canker rot where their state-trooper puttees should be?
They’re planning to stick thorns into the gardener’s thumb and right index finger when he comes later today to lavish more fertilizer on them.
Here is something less cruel. It is a giant marigold. It is two feet tall and has no leaves and no bloom. People plant them because they remind us of miniature television transmission towers. If we were Japanese we could probably make billions of yen exporting giant marigold stalks to underdeveloped countries starving for television transmissions.
No human labor is required to raise a giant marigold that is all stalk and no leaf or flower. All the work here has been done by bugs. These are probably the same bugs who created that sad brown clump there where the lawn borders the flower bed.
The sad brown clump is actually a beautiful five-foot strip of velvety purple petunias as they appear three weeks after leaving the flower merchant’s showroom. These petunias were used as supplemental feeding for the women and children bugs that were not strong enough to compete with the swinish men bugs eating the giant marigold.
Before moving on to the delphiniums, which are going to require good nerves and a strong stomach, perhaps we should go inside for some tea. Maybe even some gin. It must be 5 P.M. somewhere in the American sphere of influence. And even if it is not, the impatiens wouldn’t hesitate, would they?
Hesitate and you are lost, they say in the gardening game. Of course, they also say you are lost whether you hesitate or not.
That yellow flower you just snapped off with your heel there—that was a lily. For some reason a lily grows here every so often. It doesn’t make any sense, does it?