There was a moment while I was standing inside a tent at the Chelsea Flower Show—a vast, four-day-long display on the grounds of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, put on by the Royal Horticultural Society every summer—when I experienced a feeling that I imagine the great plant appropriators (David Douglas, Archibald Menzies, Asa Gray, Thomas Nuttall, John Torrey, Joseph Banks, Ernest Wilson) must have experienced upon first seeing a flower of special appeal: I wanted immediately to put the thing I was seeing in my handbag and take it home. I was looking at a Verbascum ‘Helen Johnson’—a mullein I had never seen before. It was a sport found growing at the Royal Botanic Gardens, at Kew; Helen Johnson is the name of the gardener who found the mullein. Its leaves were just like those of the ordinary wild mullein near my house, which
I have been cultivating, but its flower was a brownish-apricot, almost translucent, with a yellow-and-violet twirl of stamen in the center. Perhaps its appeal for me lay in my not having seen it anywhere before, but I really felt I had to have it. It cannot be propagated by seed, because its seeds are sterile; it can be propagated only through cuttings. I learned this from Adrian Bloom, of Blooms of Bressingham; his was the second stand at which I found Verbascum ‘Helen Johnson.’ While I was speaking to him about this plant, I saw him begin to put some distance—not exactly physical—between us. Familiar as he must be with the fanaticism of people who are involved with plants, my enthusiasm was too much for him. For days after I first saw the ‘Helen Johnson’ I tramped around the great gardens of England plotting ways to smuggle it back to this country. One day, when I was reading the newspaper, I came across an article about the woes of honey farmers in England. Entire hives have had to be destroyed because they have become infested with bee mite, a parasite that attacks baby bees while they are still in the cell and causes them to be born deformed. It is believed that the bee mite came to England when some beekeepers took their hives to France so the bees could gather lavender pollen there—that while the bees were gathering lavender pollen they picked up the mites, and when they returned to England the mites came with them. I have never, as far as I know, tasted lavender honey, but I wonder if, once it is tasted, it must be tasted again and again, no matter the cost.
Almost as if ashamed of the revulsion and hostility they have for foreign people, the English make up for it by loving and embracing foreign plants wholesale. I am sure there are more plants than people in England originating from the Himalayas. It was at a flower convention,
which is what the Chelsea Flower Show is, that I saw this clearly. There was the blue poppy (Meconopsis betonicifolia), a flower I had never seen except in a picture; it was everywhere. I thought it might be native to England, but it is not; it comes from the Himalayas and was brought to England by Frank Kingdon-Ward, the plant hunter (that is how he refers to what he was doing; a title of one of his books is Plant Hunter’s Paradise). I do not know how he died, but I don’t believe it was in his own bed.
I was wandering through this place, the Chelsea Flower Show—inside the Great Marquee, where the flowers were on display—a whirl of things forced into perfect bloom, more perfect than anything nature would allow. If I had not known that the Chelsea Flower Show dates back to 1913, I would have thought that this event had never happened before, that this was the first time it had ever been put on. Being there was like being at a child’s birthday party. I was in a daze, because I had just gotten off an airplane (it was the middle of the morning, I had already had breakfast, but my body wanted it to be the middle of the night); I was in a daze because I was among so many exquisite flowers and because I was in the midst of people who were so pleasant and kind it was hard to believe they were related to the people who were so rude and insulting to me as I passed through customs. If you ever want to keep up a grudge against someone, don’t see that person alongside beautiful flowers. I loved all the people at the Chelsea Flower Show, standing among rhododendrons in impossible shades of mauve, pink, and peach. They came streaming in through an entrance called the Bull-Ring Gate, off the Chelsea Embankment (the same one I had come through), from all directions, as far as I could see, and they looked, not like twentieth-century citizens of a country
that used to run the world but like residents of a village—a village far from the city, far even from a town. They displayed the orderliness of the unsophisticated: they lined up; they were polite; they were not nervous; they didn’t seem to be expecting (as I was) a terrorist disaster.
The stand of sweet peas was spectacular: none of that ‘Mammoth Mixed’ or ‘Old Spice,’ the sparsely flowering varieties common to American gardening (at least the American gardens I know), but large, generous flowers of the clearest, purest, single colors: pure pink, pure white, pure mauve, pure red, with names that seem to have sprung from a mind exhausted with the effort of naming things (‘Band-Aid,’ ‘Royal Wedding’). Just after the sweet peas I came to the place where Peter Beale’s roses were being displayed, and a group of people, all twittering and pleasantly agitated, were standing about in the midst of roses that looked even better than the ones in the Wayside Gardens catalogue. Apparently, a duchess had visited; she had unveiled a new rose to the public, and then she had left. When I got there, people were still basking in an “I saw the Duchess” atmosphere. At that moment I realized I had been missing my children, who had stayed home in Vermont with their father. My children like to dress up in some old clothes that used to be mine, clothes that are from the Victorian era, and they pretend that a duchess is coming to tea; she comes, they have tea with her, they quarrel with her, she chops off their heads. This game ends in huge peals of laughter. But my children will grow up and they will stop playing duchess and go on to live, happily or unhappily, the messy lives of ordinary human beings. The best display I saw all day was that of the Crown Estate, a selection of things grown in Windsor Great Park, which belongs to the Queen. The blue poppy was there (a flower nearly impossible to grow here, because of our hot, dry summer); so were some Hosta sieboldiana. And there was something there, too, that I had never in my life seen before, something called Gunnera mani-cata, which had leaves so large it seemed as if they could cover ten children’s bottoms; the leaves were serrated and deeply cut, like castor-bean leaves. The flowers were about two feet tall, shaped like a pine cone, and emerged from under the leaves, an undelicate and green protuberance. This plant is from Brazil—a very nice man, young, a gardener for the Crown Estate, told me so. I missed the unveiling of the astilbe ‘Catherine Deneuve’ (Blooms of Bressingham), which is a pink astilbe that looked like many other pink astilbes, but I saw the stoutest, tallest lupines I have ever seen. They were banked up against a wall—a sea of fat, erect whorls covered with red, yellow, orange pea-shaped blooms. And at the Hazeldene Nurseries there was a wonderful display of violas and pansies. Particularly lovely was a cream-colored viola with tiny gray lines running through it, called ‘Viola Cream Lady.’ As I was walking out of the Great Marquee, I recognized Rosie Atkins, the editor of a beautiful new magazine called Gardens Illustrated (I recognized her because there is a photograph of her on the editor’s page), and, I suppose, hungry for someone to talk to, I said hello to her and told her how much I liked her magazine (and that is true, I do like it), but I did not tell her that we here in America do not have as good a magazine about gardening as hers, that the closest we come to a good gardening magazine is one called Fine Gardening—but who won’t approach with caution and suspicion anything with the word “fine” earnestly attached to it?
Outside the tent were gardening tools and furniture—and the show gardens. In a garden called Wildflower and Seaside Garden (it won the Fiskars Sword of Excellence for the best garden at Chelsea that year), burdock was featured prominently, and then and there I began to look forward to the day when I might see a kind of burdock growing in a garden in England and be so filled with longing for it that I would consider, again, breaking the law. And in another show garden I saw the rose ‘Rambling Rector’ in full bloom, and it made me wish that Peter Beale lived in America, because he sells real roses, including this rambler—the kind that would actually survive in the climate I occupy (which, to me, is a real climate). Also, his book about roses is very good, so full of help. It was by now a beautiful afternoon, and I would have plowed on, but I saw something that made me feel like going to my hotel for a rest. To commemorate the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Gertrude Jekyll’s birth, the magazine Country Living sponsored a garden filled with flowers she liked, and growing more or less in a scheme that the people at the magazine believed she would have approved of. And that was fine, except that they had hired an actress to portray Jekyll, and this woman—wearing Edwardian clothing—made Jekyll look feeble and stingy, as if she had just been removed from a time capsule: damp, full of mildew, not at all like the great artist she was, the great eccentric who always managed, somehow, to deflect close scrutiny. A few days later, in Godalming, Surrey,
when I visited Munstead Wood, the house she had Edwin Lutyens build for her, and I was standing in her bedroom, I realized anew how false was that brittle portrayal of her. Everything about the house, with its big rooms, its wide hallway, the specially chosen light wood used for stairs and beams, the wonderful views of woodland and rhododendrons and azaleas and walks and flower beds to be seen from the window, had the texture of sensuality and passion and generosity.
The following morning, before returning to Chelsea, I was reading the newspaper, and after turning away from the extremely unsympathetic opinions of a man with a name (Peregrine Worsthorne) that sounded like an old-fashioned purgative given to children and made from a herb now cultivated only in a physic garden, I came upon an article about a woman who holds the national collection of pelargoniums. She was upset because most people (and until very recently I was one of them) do not know that pelargoniums and geraniums are not the same thing or—to put it coarsely—that geraniums are the ones you can leave outside, while pelargoniums are the ones that must be brought inside, the ones with scented leaves, the ones in window boxes, the ones that turn black when the first frost hits them. She said that before the war (she did not say which war, the British have been involved in many wars, but it is a small country so everyone must know which one “the war” is) people didn’t call a pelargonium a geranium, but when the gardeners went away to war the distinction was lost. This, of course, dominated my experience for the rest of the day. If when the gardeners went away, the world of plant differentiation fell apart, what else might have fallen apart? And what did she really mean to say, this woman? If only the world—especially the gardeners—had stayed put? And then I missed my children less, because they always
think it’s my fault when things don’t work out. But there is a big difference between a mother and a gardener.
That day at the flower show, I saw another beautiful grouping of Verbascum ‘Helen Johnson’ at the stand run by Hopleys Plants, and I later read in their catalogue that the nursery had been the first to introduce the flower, in 1991. Barbara Barker, who runs Hopleys with her husband, is a very kind person. She encouraged my enthusiasm, and it was her soothing voice I heard when I read in the catalogue: “We should like to thank all those people who have kindly given us plant material over the years. Do you perhaps have a plant you think we should grow—we would be pleased to swop.” This was another lovely day spent among gardeners—gardeners, I kept thinking, who had replaced those who had willy-nilly gone off to war yet who didn’t know how to make a new arrangement with the world when the old arrangement no longer worked. Because, also that morning, I had read in yet another newspaper an article by the editor, congratulating himself for having loudly raised the question whether or not the monarchy should be abolished, and to myself I’d thought, People in his position used to help run the world, used to make the heads of millions of people like me spin just by turning a page; now he is reduced to asserting how brave he is for asking a ridiculous question. That evening when a friend called to wish me a happy birthday (I had turned forty-four), I was telling him all this, and he said that once when he was flying over England, he looked down on it and said to himself, God, this looks like the world’s oldest suitcase. He did not say what feature in the landscape, architectural or natural, had led him to think that.
No American should go to England without reading Thomas Jefferson. It has become almost impossible for me to think of the two
things I like most, history and gardening/botany, without thinking of him, and when I was in England I wanted to visit a garden he had visited. Painshill Park was one of the places he and John Adams went to see on a gardening tour they took together in 1786, while they were negotiating a trade treaty. I learned this from a woman named Eleanor McPeck, who is a garden historian and teaches landscape design at Radcliffe. She had said that, of all the gardens Jefferson saw in England, he liked Painshill Park, in Cobham, Surrey, best. (One of the nice things about hearing her talk about Thomas Jefferson is the way she will say, “Jefferson did this” and “Jefferson was”—this use of his name not implying a phony intimacy but acknowledging that she and he are two citizens on the same public footing.) I am sure it’s true that Jefferson loved Painshill, but it is hard to tell this from his own writing. A transcription from his journal reads:
Painshill—Three hundred and twenty-three acres, garden and park all in one. Well described by Whately. Grotto said to cost £7,000. Whately says one of the bridges is of stone, but both are now of wood, the lower sixty feet high: There is too much evergreen. The dwelling house built by Hopkins, ill-situated: he has not been there in five years: He lived there four years while building the present house. It is not finished: its architecture is incorrect. A Doric Temple, beautiful.
What Thomas Jefferson saw then was the English landscape at its most beautiful, its most manipulated, its most contrived, its most convincing; how vexed and disappointed we become with nature for
not actually looking this way. There was a vineyard at Painshill which produced grapes from which wine was made; there was a man-made lake, a Gothic ruin, a mausoleum, a Turkish tent, a grotto, a Temple of Bacchus. Before a courtier named Charles Hamilton imposed order on this landscape, in 1738, it was just brush. After Hamilton, Painshill passed from owner to owner, hand to hand, until the Second World War, when it fell into disrepair and nature reclaimed it. Until twelve years ago, when a trust was created to preserve the site, it had returned to being just brush. It is part of the life of a garden, that because creating a garden is such an act of will, and because (if it is a success) it becomes the place of great beauty which the particular gardener had in mind, the gardener’s death (or withdrawal of any kind) is the death of the garden. In a way, a garden is the most useless of creations, the most slippery of creations: it is not like a painting or a piece of sculpture—it won’t accrue value as time goes on. Time is its enemy; time passing is merely the countdown for the parting between garden and gardener.
On the day I saw it, Painshill was in the process of being restored. This is a good thing, in its way, but there was also a layer of sadness to it. When I was talking to the people involved in its restoration, they spoke about it in a way that implied it was a part of the national heritage, and I thought that something crucial had been lost over time: the sense of the place not as some sort of national park but as a piece of land a man arranged out of who knows what psychological impulses. I made an observation not original to me, not unlike the one my friend made when he called England an old suitcase: I was in a country whose inhabitants (they call themselves subjects, not citizens) do not know how to live in the present and cannot imagine living in
the future, they can live only in the past, because it, the past, has a clear outcome, a winning outcome. A subdued nature is part of this worldview in which everything looks beautiful.
That same afternoon, I saw Munstead Wood. The woman who now lives there (she introduced herself as Lady Clark; I childishly managed to spend the entire time I was there not calling her anything) has installed a swimming pool at the end of Jekyll’s old nut walk. She has been criticized for doing this—but why should she have to live in the Gertrude Jekyll House Museum?
There actually is such a thing, a Museum of Garden History, in London. It is in an old church in Lambeth, and in the churchyard there the Tradescants (of Tradescantia, or spiderwort), John the Elder and John the Younger, are buried. The Elder was the first real gardener to become a personality in England, and the Younger had been to Virginia for the purpose of bringing plants back to England with him. It was their tomb that I wanted to see, not for any particular reason—just curiosity—but their tomb led me to some other things that are of interest to me. The Tradescants, father and son, are buried together, and the tomb next to theirs holds Captain William Bligh, his wife, his twin sons, and a grandson. There was a small knot garden of dwarf box in the middle of the churchyard, and it is the only knot garden I have ever seen that did not make me feel despair. Inside, in the bookshop, I found a biography of the Tradescants in which the author (Prudence Leith Ross) quotes Francis Bacon as saying: “Nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn,” and I could only think to myself that this was someone who never had to cut the grass himself. The exhibition in the museum was about Gertrude Jekyll, again having to do with how long ago she was born. It had everything
you would expect: her tools, letters, photographs of her family, and so on—but only two things really interested me. One was Gertrude Jekyll’s gardening boots. Anyone who has bought those stupid, uncomfortable clogs or the rubber boots that are advertised in garden catalogues should see these: strong, sensible, and comfortable-seeming leather boots, which were studded on the bottom with iron to make them last. They looked like a well-loved home. The other thing was a copy of her brother Walter’s book of songs, which he wrote in tribute to the people of Jamaica. He did not like black people, so naturally, he had to go and live among them. For some people, a fixed state of irritation is oxygen. I understand this all too well.
When I got home myself, I found my pansies committing suicide; they were in desperate need of deadheading. I watched with equal parts of joy and sadness the longest day of the year come and go.