It was a day in late October and I had two thousand dollars’ worth of heirloom bulbs to place in the ground (the daffodils ‘Empress of Ireland,’ ‘Beersheeba,’ ‘Beryl,’ Telmonius plenus, ‘Queen of the North’; the tulips ‘Mrs. John T. Scheepers,’ ‘Queen of Night,’Tulipa clusiana, T turkestanica; Iris bucharica), when almost one foot of snow fell on the ground. I do not like winter or anything that represents it (snow, the bare branches of trees, the earth seeming to hold its breath), and so I disliked the ground being covered with this soft substance (sticky and at the same time not so), with a color so definite (white) as if it wished to dispel any doubt that might arise in regard to this particular quality (its color, white). But snow will occupy all the spaces you know, the space above the ground, the space below the ground, and if you try to turn inward, as long as it is in front
of you, it will occupy that space, too. For me, to look at a landscape covered with this substance is to look at despair, and I cannot find anything in the history of human beings to make me feel that my view is merely personal (I grew up on an island in a climate that is tropical and therefore am prejudiced). All I see when I look at the history of human beings is that people who find themselves living with this substance, snow, and the stilled landscape that comes with it, go South or long for the warmth that comes from living in the Southern Hemisphere. I feel that I can state this with some certainty only after helping my son make a map of the travels of Eric the Red and Lucky Leif Eriksson. This is the evidence I have for my feelings, but my own history contradicts this: I come from south (far south, I come from the West Indies) of where I now live, and I love the event called spring and accept that it comes after winter and that it cannot come without winter.
The snow so early did not go away; the snow stayed and the air grew colder and so winter started in mid-autumn. I began to complain and make a big fuss about this, but when I took a look at a pathetic journal of climate that I keep and make entries in from time to time, I saw that each year I say the same thing; winter always starts at about the same time (mid-autumn) and I always feel that this is unusual, that it comes too soon. The ground became harder and harder and harder still; the Cyclamen hederifolium (planted in the shade of an old hemlock) looked diminished, old; how could I have imagined that such a thing as cyclamens could ever really grow properly in my climate; except that I know they will come back along with the Arum italicum, which looks sort of similar, the leaves dappled with white and generous in shape in the way of leaves that belong in the tropics.
The surprise, the shock, of winter has become to me like a kiss from someone I love: I expect it, I want it, and yet, Ah! For it holds the expectation of pleasure to come: spring, yes, but most immediately the arrival of catalogues with their descriptions and illustrations of the familiar (achillea, campanula) desperately attempting to and actually succeeding in sounding like something new, something you must order right away even as it lies outside in your garden, dormant. You can imagine its roots tight and stilled beneath the ground, if you just look out your window; it is building up the resources to emerge with a vigor (in the seemingly fabled spring) so frightening you secretly consult your memory on the one-through-four steps of dividing plant material.
I walked around my garden with such thoughts on my mind. Some of them I think are recurring, some of them new, but the new eventually recur if I garden long enough, for the garden repeats itself all the time and will advance only so long as human history and all that it entails moves along also. The earth was folded shut and I was at first shocked, but then remembered it from before; the sun was weak, not stinking with heat, not threatening a fire of extinction, erasure, but I remembered that, too, from before. By now I have been gardening for years, and memory, ephemeral, subject to things I hope not to understand, is for me an anchor. Walking around the garden, then, I am full of thoughts of doom, I am full of thoughts of life beyond my own imagining. I come inside.
On this particular day the mail was mostly from my creditors (garden related), first gently pleading that I pay them and then in the next paragraph proffering a threat of some kind. But since there was no clear Dickensian reference (debtors’ prison), I wasn’t at all disturbed,
and when I saw that along with the bills there were some catalogues, all caution and sense of financial responsibility went away. The best catalogues of any kind, whether they are offering fruits, vegetables, flowers, shrubs, trees, will not have any pictures; the best nurserymen in this country will not sully their catalogues with lavish pictures but will only now and then print some little illustration of a leaf, a bird perched on a limb of something, a pail (empty or full, it won’t matter), a watering can; the best nurserymen will sometimes not give you any information on growing zones or instructions regarding cultivation; the best nurserymen just assume that if you are interested in what they have to offer (all of it so unusual, it is sometimes not to be found yet in any plant encyclopedia) they will be chatty enough about it; they will be full of anecdotes in regard to the season just past, but they will not show you a picture and you certainly will not have a little passport-size photograph of them grinning up at you.
And so it was with a certain confidence and happiness that I grabbed my catalogue from Ronniger’s, a seed and potato company in Moyie Springs, Idaho. This used to be my favorite catalogue in the world; it made people with whom I am sure I would never agree on anything of importance seem wonderful. But the current catalogue makes me hesitate. For one thing, it is almost twice as long as it used to be (forty pages then, seventy-two pages now), and the new pages are taken up with things I would never buy from Ronniger’s anyhow: ornamental alliums, asparagus, and blueberries. It even now has a color advertisement for some soon-to-be-useless garden implement (I know this, I have the very same one in my garage, it is broken). The worst part is a picture of Mr. Ronniger crouching down next to some potatoes he has just reaped: I can see his teeth, so he must be smiling, and the picture has a caption that says “Harvest is a time of great joy.” If I am disappointed in Mr. Ronniger’s new catalogue, will I now be disappointed in the potatoes, too? For not all the potato seeds will be grown by him; the ones grown by him will be labeled “Organically Grown,” the ones grown by someone else will be labeled “Certified Seed.”
A nice ballast to shore myself up from the emotional devastation (well, from a gardening point of view) endured during the careful reading of the potato catalogue was reading the entire six volumes of the Mapp and Lucia saga written by E. F. Benson. There is nothing I like more than reading about malice and gossip and life in a small village (I only like to read about it, though, I should not like to live in it myself). And so fortified, I returned to my favorite catalogues, the ones without pictures and captions and instructions for cultivation. In the Heronswood catalogue the plantsman Daniel J. Hinkley writes nicely about a recent seed-collecting trip he made to Japan; he writes that he
saw five different species of Acer in the wild and apparently they were new to him, and also that a single specimen of Schisandra nigra loaded with fruit caused him to stop as if dead when he saw it. This catalogue and the Arrowhead Alpines catalogue is all an American gardener with intense interest would ever need. The nurseryman at Arrowhead Alpines is Bob Stewart, and he has a wife named Brigitta and a son named Ender; he has a friend who is a professor at a nearby university and that friend had an unusual clump of Petasites, certainly it was unlike any I had seen before, and he got the professor to sell some to me. One year Bob began his letter to his customers by telling us he had finally gotten rid of his first wife and the financial demands she made on him by offering her a large settlement; she accepted, but he did not say how much it was; I really did want to know.
The grimness of winter for this gardener can be eased only by such things. On my night table now is a large stack of books and all of them concern the Atlantic slave trade and how the world in which I live sprang from it. The days will have to grow longer, warmer, and softer before I can pick one of them up.