I was putting the garden to bed for the winter when, looking over the empty spaces that had not so long ago been full of flowers and vegetables, I was overcome with the memory of satisfaction and despair, two feelings not unfamiliar to any gardener. Satisfaction was seeing the tips of the asparagus poke through the earth, coming all the way up, wonderfully whole, real, and without blemish, just the way they should be really, from the trenches into which I had placed their roots. Even after many years of gardening, I never believe a live plant will emerge from the seed I have put in the ground; I am always surprised, as if it had never happened to me before, as if every time were the first time. And a moment of despair was when I realized that none of my squash and pumpkin seeds were germinating, so no plants would appear, because some
beings, full of malice, had carefully scratched the seeds out of their hills and eaten them. I plotted the demise of the offending beings, and finally did catch one of them, a raccoon, in that ridiculous pantywaist contraption, the Havahart trap. But when I was about to drown him in a barrel of water, the three whining pacifists I have somehow managed to find myself living with (my husband and our two children) made such a fuss that I ended up setting him free in wilderness far away from anyone’s garden. (I do believe, though, that some natural instinct, not fully understood by any scientist, will lead him back to mine.)
My ‘Reine des Violettes’ and ‘Madame Isaac Pereire’ roses, planted just last April, were glorious in the summer; the perfume of the ‘Violettes’ in particular was extremely pleasing, really faultless; I kept burying my nose in its petals as if they were someone’s neck. And the ‘Madame Isaac’ was remontant, it bloomed on and on. The dimensions of my foray into rose growing were unknown to me until the beginning of April, when they started arriving; by early May, there was a total of thirty-three bushes. I had not ordered them all at once; the excess came about because last winter was so long and cold and I had so much time to stare at catalogues that I lost track of what I had already ordered and ended up with sometimes two or three schemes for the same spot. I had ordered my roses from Jackson & Perkins, Wayside Gardens, and Park Seed (Park has the cheapest roses, and they seem just as good as the others, but the selection is more limited; my wonderful ‘Reine de V.’ came from them, it was five dollars less than in the Wayside catalogue), and from a nursery in Maine called the Roseraie at Bayfields, run by a very pleasant man named Lloyd Brace. (I know that he’s nice only from talking to him on the telephone.) When the rosebushes arrived, I had not yet prepared the
ground properly for them, because it was still freezing and snowing. So they were badly mistreated before planting, and looked half dead by the time they were planted, except for the ones from Lloyd Brace, which came with fresh sprouts of green leaves on them and looked exceptionally promising when they were finally in the ground. All the roses did well, anyway, making me think—contrary to my expectations—that abuse must be a part of growing roses.
This business with the too many roses began two summers ago, when I received a letter from Jackson & Perkins inviting me to become one of the people in the United States to choose the best of the new roses they were introducing that year. In a brochure that came with the invitation, some people testified to the pleasure they had had while participating in this venture, and they were so effusive that at first I thought they must have got the roses free; they had not. For a reason not at all clear to me, I am drawn to the activities of people I do not want to know or meet and would never befriend, and so, of course, the minute I saw this brochure I sent my money away so that I, too, could become a member of the Rose Test Panel. The competitors arrived at the same time as all the other species, but they didn’t have proper names; they were labeled ‘Pink Blend,’ ‘Pink,’ ‘White,’ and ‘Yellow.’ I planted them, and at first I observed them closely, for I expected to receive a bothersome diary and, when that didn’t happen, a phone call and, when that didn’t happen, some form of communication from Jackson & Perkins soliciting my observations about these roses. I forgot about the Test Panel; other problems became overwhelming: the canes of the ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ (which I got from Wayside) grew tall and then fell over onto the lawn, and it would not bloom; I had read Peter Beale, who said of it: “This rose at its best
is the most beautiful of all Bourbons, but at its worst it can be horrid. It hates wet weather and in such conditions seldom opens properly without help.” I had been staring for a long time at the multitude of flopped-over canes when it dawned on me that what I was looking at was not a ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ at all but something else altogether, something that had perhaps been misnamed. Not so very long after that, I received another letter from Jackson & Perkins inviting me to join next year’s Rose Test Panel. Actually, through a lack of communication between Jackson & Perkins and me, I had never voted on the four roses I had grown, and this left me with little enthusiasm for judging the Jackson & Perkins roses of the future.
The rose with which I had the most success was the ‘Yellow,’ though it isn’t one I would tell people they must have. A rose I would recommend is ‘Ballerina’; all summer I watched it send out sprays of dappled-pink blossoms on long apple-green canes. I had planted it next to some clethra, and for a while they were in bloom together, so I actually got a small glimpse of a something I had planned.
Just as I was mulching and covering up the roses for winter, I came upon Christopher Lloyd saying in the increasingly beautiful-to-look-at Gardens Illustrated: “I got fed up with all the trouble roses bring in their train. They get a lot of diseases and you can’t replace a weak bush without changing the soil. They’re quite disagreeable and make a very spotty effect even when they’re flowering—a whole series of blobs. The climbing ones are quite shapely but the bush roses are pretty ugly.” It’s so appealing, the capriciousness of a gardener! I see that I shall be overwhelmed by the number of roses I will have ordered by next spring, so that twenty years hence I will firmly denounce the whole idea of growing roses.
I returned from a visit to the old suitcase (England) in May and found my hedge of common rhubarb in an incredible state of bloom, the tall stems covered with panicles of white; I stared at it in awe, as if I had never seen anything so beautiful, but I had. It then faded, of course, but not quite away; it turned brown—a deep, crisp, alive shade, a tropical not a temperate brown—almost as if in defiance, for everything else was in a state of fresh, young green. I cut it down to the ground, and it grew back, so that by the tail end of summer, I was able to eat some rhubarb again, but this seemed all wrong, all out of context: when the days are getting longer is the right time to eat rhubarb.
In early June, perhaps giddy from observing the rhubarb and planting various things, I went to the store to buy milk, and on my way out bought three packets of nasturtium seeds. I had wanted to plant
something along a walkway that leads to the door on the south side of our house—something that would spill over the slabs of marble in a happy, haphazard way—and the moment I saw the seed packets I knew the nasturtiums would do. They turned out to be one of the great pleasures of my growing season. I planted them very close together and I did not thin them but instead pruned and trained them to grow only in one direction: out onto the walk. They must have loved where they were, for they thrived. At night, the smell from them—sweet, like something fermenting that when consumed would make you crazy—was delicious. I considered my walkway a great triumph and was on the verge of bragging about it, but then, looking through Wayne Winterrowd’s most helpful book of annuals (Annuals for Connoiseurs), I saw a photograph of nasturtiums spilling out onto a walkway in Monet’s garden. At first I felt wonderful that I had had the same idea as a great gardener, and then, unable to help myself, I felt envy, because his nasturtiums had turned out much better than mine. His looked like a painting—the way all natural beauty looks. Mine were just a planting of nasturtiums.
A prostrate-growing evening primrose (Oenothera missouriensis) that I found at the Equinox Valley Nursery in Manchester, Vermont, was spectacular. I had never grown this particular primrose before and so had never seen the cycle of its amazing bloom: it has thick red stems from which sprout fat green pods (buds), sometimes with large red spots on them, and each pod breaks open at dusk to reveal a huge bubble of perfectly simple yellow, which by the middle of the next day has become a limp, slimy thing, like a squished caterpillar. (I made my son, Harold, hold one, and when he did he said, “Oh yuck!”) Also at Equinox, I found a pink evening primrose (Oenothera ‘Rosea’). It is
about ten inches high, with small narrow leaves that turn beautifully red in fall; it spreads rapidly and is already all over the bed, but this will be just fine, because it is at the foot of the hollyhocks and musk mallow and sidalceas. That corner of the garden—hollyhocks, musk mallow, and sidalceas, with the roses ‘Cécile Brünner’ (both climbing and shrub) at one end and R. ‘Ballerina’ at the other—was meant to be a mass of varying shades of pink, but the sidalceas turned out to be a horrid shade of lilac, not at all the pink that I had seen in the catalogue. I deserved this: I got them from a puffed-up plantsman’s outfit in Connecticut, where the people are very rude and high-handed on the phone. Of course, they would not take the sidalceas back. They were also quite skeptical when I said that a Canada lily they had sent was another kind of lily altogether. They replaced it in the fall with what they said were bulbs, but I have never seen bulbs like that, and if these odd-looking things fail to turn into plants, I can’t imagine calling the company back to tell them so. This is a big contrast to my rapport with the people at Wayside, who are always eager to help, and make amends for every fault that’s found; they even send letters of apology. (It’s possible that this is an example of the way climate influences modes of behavior; does warm air inspire servitude? Wayside is in North Carolina.)
Another disappointment: one day a shipment of three-and-a-half-foot twigs arrived, apparently the hundreds of dollars’ worth of fruit trees that I had ordered from a fruit-tree grower in upstate New York. They seemed such a far cry from the overladen-with-fruit trees I had seen in the catalogue that I almost burst into tears. I planted them on what was, for May, a severely cold and windy day; and a huge emptiness
opened up before me: I thought, Between this planting and the reaping (I hope) to come, I will fill the time up, but with what? I did not know the answer, and this inspired such a state of anxiety that I had to lie down.
It was on another day altogether that I ended up in a similar state of anxiety for a very different reason. I was taking an indirect route going to the grocery store and I came upon a field of joe-pye weed in bloom. I had recently started bringing mullein into my garden, and when I felt I had enough of those, I started raiding my own field for joe pyes and bonesets. I love these flowers, and when I saw the field of joe pyes, it made me feel so happy and giddy, because it was so unexpected (I had no idea any were growing there). Then, when I got to the store, I heard the woman who waited on customers say to the man ahead of me, “Hi, honey. God, you’re beautiful today,” and this struck me as untrue, because I had seen the man quite clearly. After he left I said to her, “What made you say that to that man? He was one of the ugliest men I have ever seen,” and she replied, “That was my husband.” Retracing my route on the way home, I was so blind with humiliation and anxiety and shame that I did not even see the joe pyes.
I was eating a plate of common Blue Lake green beans in August, and they were extremely delicious; I had never grown them before, and I realized that I almost never grow ordinary vegetables. I have become so confident of having a constant supply of food that often when I decide to grow things I can eat they have to transcend the ordinary: they must have a different color from the usual; they must have a different shape; they must come from far away; they must be the favorite food of the people in the countryside of France or Italy, or in
the mountains of Peru. It was this perversity that led me to grow French Marmande tomatoes, as well as some other tomatoes, which looked like large gooseberries (called ‘Green Zebra,’ and they were the best tomatoes I have ever tasted), and various odd potatoes—one called ‘Russian Banana,’ other kinds that looked like fingers, or were blue-skinned, or were pink when mashed. I also grew some cucumbers that were juicy and sweet and are ordinarily grown in Turkey or Syria (or somewhere near those places), and some purple beans that turned a disappointing green when cooked.
In early September I picked and cut open a small, soft, yellow-fleshed watermelon, and I was suddenly reminded of the pictures of small girls I used to see in a magazine for girls when I was a small girl myself: they were always at a birthday party, and the colors of their hair and of the clothes they wore and of the light in the room were all some variation of this shade, the golden shade of the watermelon that I had grown. I would wish then to be a girl like that, with hair like that, in a room like that—and the despair I felt then that such a thing would never be true is replaced now with the satisfaction that such a thing would never be true. Those were the most delicious melons I have ever grown.
The leaves turned yellow and red and brown, and then fell; the days grew short; the
heat from the sun grew thin, then just wasn’t there anymore at all. I planted six different kinds of fritillaria, and some flag iris, and some peonies—ordinary ones, not trees, that looked spectacular in the catalogue I ordered them from. Then one day the long chill arrived, the chill that no heat can penetrate. Winter.