Where to begin? The rhododendron ‘Jane Grant’ arrived; on a Tuesday, while on the way to Rocky Dale Farm, a very special nursery here in Vermont, I learned that it is always closed on that particular day—Tuesday; I had ordered three dicentra ‘Snowdrift’ from two different places and they were meant for the same place, but I did not realize this until the day they arrived, which was on the same day at the same time. What to do?
The rhododendron ‘Jane Grant’ is among the most beautiful of plants I have ever received in the mail, and that is hardly the way to judge a plant on first sight, even though that way works very well with people, but immediately, as I unwrapped her from her brown wrapping, I almost wept. She was beautiful, all delicate and tidy; glossy,
medium-green leaves with a lush indumentum (R. yakushimanum is a parent), and perched on top of the leaves, a generous fist of blossoms, whitish, limy green now, eventually opening, becoming a succession of pinks (as I write this, the transformation has not yet begun), all of them reminding me of something pleasurable: a girl’s dress, the inside of a mouth, a moment very, very early in the morning when light from the sun itself is in doubt. I had resisted this shrub for so long. And why? Jane Grant, the woman it is named for, used to be married to the first editor of The New Yorker. At this very moment I can’t remember why I resisted a plant only because it is named after the wife of the first editor of The New Yorker. And this only underlines for me the flabby basis on which so many of my opinions and decisions rest, so flabby I don’t even remember them. I ordered the ‘Jane Grant’ one day in January when I was recovering from pneumonia and trying to cheer myself up by looking at pictures of flowers for sale, not pictures of flowers already growing in someone else’s garden. I saw it beautifully pictured in the White Flower Farm catalogue and ordered it (along with many other things, none of them breaking any other prohibitions, as far as I could tell), and on the day that I returned from a nursery in Quechee, Vermont (a compensation for the Rocky Dale nursery disappointment), I met my ‘Jane Grant’ and many other huge boxes filled with plants from all the nurseries I had ordered from on that day in January. There is no doubt that everyone can have an interesting garden simply by ordering through the Wayside and White Flower Farm catalogues, but to have a garden made up of unusual native (American) plants and plants from other parts of the world, particularly Japan, Korea, and China, you have to go to some smaller, less-well-known nurseries, such as Heronswood (in Washington),
Arrowhead Alpines (in Michigan), Plants Delight Nursery (in North Carolina). If you find ephedra worth growing, you will not be able to purchase one from Wayside or White Flower. The Plants Delight Nursery lists four different kinds. I bought mine from Arrowhead Alpines.
On that Tuesday when all the plants I had ordered from seeing their pictures arrived, I was not at home to receive them and immediately remove them from their cardboard prison, and provide for them a refreshment of water and a sheltered place. No. I was on my way to Rocky Dale Farm, a legendary nursery among gardeners here in Vermont. It is far away from where I live, and so I was going with a friend, who not only is unafraid to drive herself long distances (I am) but has a truck. On our way there, she had the good sense to call and see if Rocky Dale was open; they were not. Then she had the good sense to think of our going instead to Talbot’s, another nursery, just outside Quechee, Vermont. Talbot’s is a well-kept secret. Mr. Talbot is a botanist, and in the winter he gives lectures on growing plants. I had never met the Talbots before, and on the spot I made up my mind that they were so appealing—if only I lived next door. After spending many hours choosing the plants I wanted to buy (flowering quince ‘Cameo,’ a fern-leaf lilac, two fern-leaf peonies, some Petasites gigantea, some ornamental rhubarb, two kinds of yellow monkshood, three different grasses, some woodland phlox, some tiarella, a katsura tree, some pussy willow with black catkins, among other things), I decided that they, the Talbots, were not unlike characters I meet in a good book and find appealing, comfortable, cozy, no matter what their faults, all their faults of course falling within reason, which is to say, not unlike my own. On our way home, my friend was annoyed at me. I had bought
too many things, she thought. She didn’t say so. I could see it on her face. But only in very rare circumstances must plants be bought in ones. The minimum is three, preferably five, and then up from that. To me, in a garden almost everything by itself is wrong. If it is very beautiful, more of it will do. If space limits it to one, then you must just say so. The feeling against planting only one must be widespread. When you must plant only one of anything, you are told to regard it as a specimen; but a specimen is so unfamiliar, so unwarm, so ungardenlike. One of anything, children, plants, is so tight-fisted I could cry.
One day Mr. Harrington (Ken, not his brother Phil) came to my house and removed from various parts of the yard the rubbishy honeysuckle shrub, a large old pine tree that grew just outside the window of my son’s room (this was not a wanton act on my part, an act dictated solely by my obsession with the landscape; the large branches of this tree would rub against the windowpane and frighten my son); an old lilac shrub was dug out from one place and put somewhere else; he remade the driveway. It took him many days to do all this, and as he made the many places bare, I plotted the many things I could put in them. Along the road where the honeysuckle used to be I had decided to put in a hedge of buckthorn, but then I turned against this when I saw what was said about buckthorn in that tyrannical volume The Manual of Woody Landscape Plants by Michael Dirr. Is there a gardener who knows about this book who can resist the opinions expressed in it? My friends and I can hardly plant a shrub or tree of any kind without saying to each other, “What does Dirr say?” In the case of my buckthorn, what Dirr had to say resulted in my canceling an order of twenty buckthorn plants from Roger and Penny at the
Equinox Valley Nursery. And even before I settled on the buckthorn, I had wanted to plant a hedge of arrowwood viburnum (V. dilatatum), but the Dirr is very scornful. Looking up from the Dirr, I was so comforted to see Mr. Harrington sitting in his bulldozer, driving his big truck or just whacking away at something, his wife and son taking his directions with great care. He is such a nice man. He loves trees, no matter what they are, as long as they have a good form, which the honeysuckle does not. He reminds me that there are two kinds of Vermonters: native Vermonters, people who look very much like each other but not in a disturbing way, not in a way that makes you feel so bad if you do not look like them; and then the rest of us, who have recently arrived in Vermont, and we all look like people in a witness protection program, that is to say, if we were seen while in Vermont, by people who know us not in Vermont, we would appear to be almost looking like ourselves. To live in Vermont without being born here means that one beautiful day in spring you were driving through, as I did on my way to the Talbots’, and saw so many beautiful houses set in the middle of so many beautiful views that you bought one of them. And then waiting to be discovered is: JANUARY! FEBRUARY! MAAAAAAARCH!
On those days when Mr. Harrington was helping me rearrange the small patches of my land, I walked around with a pencil and paper and did something I always thought too pretentious to even consider: I made drawings of my garden, or rather, I connected a series of lines to each other, and inside the lines I wrote down the names of shrubs and herbaceous plants I wanted to plant. I have now passed the point of planting only things I love without any prior regard as to how they will all look together. But still, my garden lacks something: it needs more shape, it needs more interesting things in its more shape. I started with around the house and in the back of the house and alongside the house; now I wish to move away from the house, go away from the house down to the bog, but still be connected to the house, I must never really leave the house. So, too, as I started with clematis ‘Nelly Moser,’ I now want Clematis marmoraria. I have fallen in love with species. They are harder to like, being always only themselves, and when taken out of their own context, untidy nature, and placed in the orderliness of a garden, where they are mostly meant to prop up the jellylike personality of the owner of the house, they in turn appear frail, not as floriferous as they should be, or much too vigorous, another way of saying a weed, another way of saying “annoying.” But I now want that very species, or plants not too far removed from that very thing. All this leads me to Bob and Brigitta Stewart and their Arrowhead Alpines nursery in Fowlerville, Michigan. It was while visiting them one day in late April that I purchased some Peltoboykinia (for me, this meant a step away from the rodgersia), some Primula farinosa, some corydalis, some Campanula betulaefolia, two mertensia, lots of Primula auricula, ephedra, a Paeonia peregrina, a Paeonia lutea, three Gentiana lutea. To walk around the Arrowhead Alpines nursery, with Bob and Brigitta, in and out of their greenhouses, is to go down the road of plants in a way from which you can never really return. He picks up something I have never heard of and mentions its connection to a man named Josef Halder, a Czech botanist who had excellent access to the parts of Asia that were formerly under Soviet rule. Josef Halder is the ephedra plant discoverer. Bob mentions Eric Smith and his work with hellebores. I happen to be devoted to Eric Smith, but only because of what I know about his work with hostas. Eric Smith hostas are mainly the blue ones, and I try to have as many of his hostas as I can afford. They are not cheap. Bob then told me of a nursery I must visit; the nursery is in Scotland and is run by a man named Jim Archibald, who knew Eric Smith. It was with Jim Archibald that Eric Smith worked on hellebores. While walking through his greenhouse with Bob, being introduced to a vast treasury of plants for the garden that until then were unknown to me (Mutisia spinosa, for instance; it may not be altogether hardy for me, but I know how to manage that), I met a man named Jim, and he was bent over a tray trying to see if finally some of the seeds he had received from a plant-hunting expedition in which he had bought shares were germinating. They were not.
March came to an end in mid-May. None of my fritillarias bloomed, but I loved the bluish-green of the leaves of the Persicarias
and the water-diluted green of the leaves of F imperialis. The Primula veris, planted last year in June and grown from seeds I gave to Jack Manix, bloomed in a patch at the edge of a very old hemlock. Some daffodils I had bought for $1.50 at Whitman’s Feed Store (North Bennington, Vermont) bloomed. I had not paid much attention when buying them, for it was way past the time when any bulb should have been put in the ground and I only bought them as an afterthought, to fill in a spot (I was just beginning to understand the idea of underplanting). These daffodils turned out to be ‘Mount Hood,’ the most beautiful daffodil I have ever seen, or rather have ever liked. They start out yellow and then change—not fade, but change—to a spectacular ivory, the shade of dinnerware on a shelf, tempting a child to see just how it would look shattered into many pieces. I do not like daffodils for a reason that is not at all aesthetic, a reason much more serious than that. The rodgersia returned, stubby, crooked fingers piercing through the ground. The pulmonarias bloomed so spectacularly I was sure they belonged to someone else. Pulmonaria ‘Janet Fisk’ and ‘Mrs. Moon’ have seeded; shall I now wait to see if one of the seedlings is a sport of some sort? But I am not at all interested in such a thing.
However. On the day I returned from the Talbots’, I met the plants I had ordered from the White Flower Farm and Wayside nurseries. Those orders, along with the many plants I had just bought from the Talbots, along with some other plants Jack Manix had grown for me, were lined up on the floor of the garage, spilling out onto quite a bit of the driveway. The plants were in small pots, large pots, trays of six packs. It was not a pretty sight. When you look at a garden this is not what comes to mind. The children complained, and underneath
their worry was the milk-money problem: had their mother spent all the money on plants, would they be hungry? They see the garden as the thing that stands between them and true happiness: my absolute attention.
Looking at all these plants spilling out of the garage at my feet, I thought of some people I know of who are connected with plants, and this was not in comparison, for it doesn’t bear it, I just thought of them: George Clifford, the possessor of an enormous greenhouse in Amsterdam who had employed Linnaeus, thus giving him the opportunity to invent the binomial system; of Reginald Farrer, of Kingdon-Ward, of Chinese Wilson, of David Douglas, of many other people, a long list of people who were interested in plants, not the garden, for the two meet only in secret and in people as ordinary as me. And when thinking of this array of people, I remembered again that many of them did not die in their own beds: Douglas fell down a bear pit in Hawaii, Wilson died in a traffic accident in Boston after surviving seeing Lilium regale in its natural place, a riverbed in China; Farrer died of diphtheria in Burma. I shall die in a nursery.
