On the day the temperature was 10 degrees below zero, the Ronniger’s Seed Potatoes catalogue arrived and that was the cheeriest thing, for I then spent the afternoon sitting in a bathtub of hot water, trying to satisfy a craving for overchilled ginger ale and oranges, and reading this little treasure. It is the most beautiful catalogue I receive each year; it is simple, like a Methodist hymn (I was brought up a Methodist and I am thinking of the first hymn that was in my child’s hymnal, “All Things Bright and Beautiful”), plain, straightforward, humble, and comforting—the exact opposite of the White Flower Farm catalogue, which is sumptuous, showy, and expensive-looking. Ronniger’s is printed on newsprint, and it has photographs that might have been taken with a not very good camera, or by someone who was not a particularly good photographer,
or possibly a combination of the two, but they are adorable, the photographs. They are of people doing something with potatoes, or of machinery used in the cultivation of potatoes, or of potatoes just by themselves, in a bowl or some other kind of household container. It is a catalogue only of potatoes and a few other things that might enhance the flavor of a potato (onions, garlic, salt) or might make a potato grow better (a cover crop of alfalfa or clover). There is a particularly appealing picture of a young boy gathering potatoes; he has a look of blissful concentration on his face, as if the world outside the cultivation of the potato were completely closed to him. But this is only conjecture on my part; this is only my reading something into a picture I am looking at while sitting in a tub of hot water and drinking cold ginger ale and eating oranges; it could very well be that this boy is deeply familiar not only with the cultivation of the potato but with its history, with the crucial part it played in his ancestors’ diet and, therefore, their development as a people.
The process of receiving and reading catalogues may not be as important to my garden as my weeding is, but that is the way I begin the gardening year. Actually, first I despair that there will never be a gardening season again, and then just when that conviction sets in, the seed and plant catalogues start to arrive. The very big, showy ones like the White Flower Farm and Wayside Gardens catalogues are psychological lifts: I never read them; I only look again and again at the pictures.
The best catalogues for reading are not altogether unlike wonderful books; they plunge me deep into the world of the garden, the growing of the things advertised (because what are these descriptions of seeds and plants but advertisements), and that feeling of being unable to tear myself away comes over me, and there is that amazing feeling of love, and my imagination takes over as I look out at the garden, which is blanket upon blanket of white, and see it filled with the things described in the catalogue I am reading.
It is in such a state that I read the Ronniger’s Seed Potatoes catalogue. Here is a description of that early-maturing potato called the ‘Dazoc’: “Talk about a delicious red potato … we found this one in our neighborhood on the Moyie River Road, grown since 1953 by Bud Behrman, who claims it came from North Dakota and has long since disappeared from commercial markets. Yet, he and his brother have zealously kept it going over the years. Round red deep eyes, excellent flavor, delicious baked and great hash browns, stores well. Bud and family eat them ‘til the next crop produces new potatoes.” This seemingly straightforward description of a kind of potato provided me with many hours of deliberation and fantasy: How many kinds of early-maturing potatoes can I grow this year? Should ‘Dazoc’ be among them? Surely a potato grown by someone named Bud Behrman and eaten regularly by him and his family must be a good potato. And the Behrmans—who are the Behrmans? I imagined the Behrman family as the nicest people ever. When I was young and living far away from my family, my life was almost completely empty of domestic routine, and so I made a fetish of the way ordinary people in families lived inside their homes. I read women’s magazines obsessively and would often cook entire meals (involving meats in tins and frozen vegetables)
from the recipes I found in them. One year I made an entire Thanksgiving dinner that was the same Thanksgiving dinner a family somewhere in the Midwest ate every year. This meal was featured in one of the magazines I read all the time, and the portrayal of these people and their food was so compelling to me that not only did I make the entire meal, but after Sandy Frazier and I ate it, I called up the Midwestern family and told them what I had done; they seemed perplexed and flattered. I then wrote a “Talk” story for The New Yorker about the whole episode, which I believe brought to an end that particular expression of alienation in my life. It was the memory of this that made me not order the ‘Dazoc’ potato but remain content with simply imagining the Behrmans and their potato dinners.
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. From 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.
