As every gardener knows, the etymological root of the word paradise means “enclosed garden.” Enclosed or not, a garden can give you a contact high that’s as close to paradise as we can get. Ed differs. “Blissful and bothersome,” he says. No matter how many anemones and cosmos sway in the breeze, how many wafts of ginger lilies and daphne and mock orange drift around the porch, how scrumptious the basket of tomatoes, fennel, peppers, and radishes—there is always a mitigating force. As you survey the beds, you can’t stop noticing: Things could be better. Weeds, fallen branches, yellowing remains of bluebells and hyacinths after blooming is over. And why, why did anyone ever plant ten walnut trees at the entrance, where guests can be conked on the head by falling nuts? Walnut tree roots send out a poison into the soil, preventing anything you want to grow from having a chance. Why the perpetual glitch in the fountain (motor burned out again), the black spot on the Rosa Mundi, and the peach tree up and dying for no reason?
We have thirty acres here at Chatwood. Six—six—of those acres are cultivated gardens, including the glorious brick-walled rose garden inspired by one in Williamsburg, Virginia.
In the late 1950s, the owner and local legendary gardener Helen Blake’s flowering rooms burgeoned, delineated by hedges and wide perennial borders. Her passion for roses flourished. She rustled whole bushes from abandoned farms and plantations, even taking slips from cemeteries before she became smitten with heritage French roses. By now, many have died, others have lost their tags, and often I’m not sure if a rose in question is the one marked as Prince Albert or Sir Thomas Lipton on her rose maps. Many twiggy remnants are roses unknown to modern catalogues and growers. Quickly, I realized that the research to pin down the names of the remaining roses could take half my life.
Moving here wasn’t like buying a house with a few foundation plants, woody azaleas scattered about, and a front bed of annuals to be renewed in a day each spring. Chatwood, still a phenomenal garden, was a world-class garden seventy years ago. I’ve gone headfirst into several restorations, but this hits me over and over: I’ve inherited a phantom. This paradiso, eroded over the years, left me with plenty of garden maps to guide a stupendous restoration to glory. Sweeping over me next: I can’t do it. So what will I do?
At its apogee, Helen tended more than 350 roses with few repeating varieties. Someone she obviously would look down on later planted the ubiquitous Peace in several spots. What a cliché, she clucks. I can see her, directing her head gardener and several minions to dig here, transplant there. Imperious, confident. Then I look down at my own ragged, dirty fingernails. Sixty-odd years after her reign, I consult her rose maps and struggle to replace ones that die. Antique roses usually bloom once and briefly, sending out fragrances I’ve smelled only in testing bottles at perfume counters. Her dead Ispahan I’ve replaced twice. I’m longing to see it thrive. See me at odd moments, scratching in the dirt for old tags, trying to read rusty ones remaining on twigs. When the bloom is on in late May, with rose books in hand—I am overwhelmed and enchanted. The names! I am stepping through the pages of Proust, through the Tuileries rose garden, around Josephine Bonaparte’s Malmaison outside Paris, inhaling Colette’s descriptions of her mother’s Burgundian garden.
Read aloud her rose litany: Louise Odier, Cardinal de Richelieu, Fantin-Latour, Comte de Chambord, Aviateur Blériot, M. Tillier, Marie Pavié, Souvenir de La Malmaison, Cécile Brinmer, Mignonette, Louis Philippe, Mme. Pianzer, Clotilde Soupert (can’t you just see Clotilde Soupert?), Amarette, Général Jacqueminot, Coquette Per Blanches (?—can’t quite read her crabbed writing), Reines des Violettes, Duchesse de Montebello, Comtesse de Murinais, Charles de Mills, Duc de Guiche, Cramoisi des Alps, Henri Martin, Duc de FitzJames, Baronne Prévost, Mme. Zoetmans (isn’t she peering at us through her lorgnette?), Alba Suaveolens, Cécile Brunmer, Souvenir d’Elise Vardon, Commandant Beaurepaire, Mme. Plantier, Albertine de la Grifferaie (I love Albertine), Mme. Les Gras de St. Germain, Gloire de France, Paul Perras, Sombreuil (a favorite), Hippolyte. Listing them feels heady. How I love the arduous rose garden.
The ghost of Helen Blake smirks. She’s not so interested in the names. Fiddle-faddle. She’s interested in why leaves roll up and drop off, why hundreds of iridescent beetles descend. Pick them off by hand and drop them in soapy water to die. What is that invasion of nutsedge? (One friend gave up gardening because of nutsedge.) It must be dug out way underground, where the evil proliferating nuts reside. She contemplates the oncoming challenge of spring. How to charm her roses into riotous bloom? Rotted manure. Epsom salts. Greensand. Alfalfa meal. Cottonseed meal. Fish emulsion. So many mocktails these roses imbibe. There’s the rub—a real gardener marches into the garden as into battle. Instead, I feel like a neglectful mother who’s allowed her child to run into the street. But then arrives the brief month of glory. This hallelujah season calls for a standing ovation. What’s hard, Helen Blake: How to ignore the rest of the year when your rose garden looks quite bleak. I’m underplanting with dianthus and creeping thyme. Still, bare roses aren’t lovely and you can just shut your mouth.
As much as you own an old house and garden, it owns you. There’s a continuum in progress. You’ve stepped in and now you’re entranced and sweetly obligated to sow seeds in the vintage greenhouse, to plant the lettuces in ten-day intervals, to eat squash that keeps on coming long after you’ve had enough. At the same time, I want to shake it up. I simplify—reducing the size of several vast perennial beds with little remaining in them, staking vines, eliminating scraggly beds altogether, planting ground cover because the cost of weeding could send someone to college. We’re organic. It costs more when you don’t soak the ground with Roundup and Sevin. Sorry, the homemade remedies just don’t cut it on this scale. I would like to remove a row of awful and ancient cedars, all half dead inside, but the estimate was more than the price of a quite nice new car. I don’t like mulch. It looks like corporate landscaping. The reddish kind looks like dog food.
Maybe even Helen would have cut back by now.
I’ve turned a two-room outbuilding full of dead crickets and fossilized fertilizer into an art studio and a writing retreat, living out a childhood desire for a playhouse. I had a scraggly Burford holly hedge ripped out, opening the view to long yellow flower beds. Ed and jack-of-all-trades Mr. Farley tied chains to the holly trunks, which looked like elephant legs, hooked them to a truck, and they came flying out of the ground. I almost expected screaming.
We added an oval swimming pool right in front of the weathered 1770 barn, which I hope to convert to a party room. I built a structure I call the Chapel of Hog Wire in the meadow and also a wire billboard, both for hanging art for an annual show, most recently celebrating the work of the brilliant landscape artist John Beerman. While wandering around the garden, a couple of hundred people sip wine, munch on sage-orange shortbread and tea sandwiches of pimiento cheese or watercress. The chapel is covered with climbing gourds and morning glories in full summer, a secret spot to read. My two cats think it’s their house to climb. Everyone raves over the garden. I have brought it back to glory, I have kept the spirit, I have saved a piece of the patrimony. But the stream is getting blocked by weeds. The dahlias came up in garish red, not the pink I planted. The graceful crabapple tree appears to be succumbing to rot.
The truth dawns: I am giving over my life to Chatwood.
In the vegetable garden, surrounded by a picket fence to deter deer, we grow strawberries, cucumbers, clumps of zinnias, Rattlesnake watermelons, peppers, cardoon, herbs, squash—an overwhelming bounty to share. Okra, with its creamy hibiscus-like blooms, deserves a place in a flower bed. I have to feel sunny and carefree opening the gate with an empty basket on my arm, then leaving laden with gorgeous tomatoes, handfuls of herbs, and a bunch of zucchini flowers. One night when we were away, a doe leapt the 4.5-foot fence and inconveniently gave birth in the zinnia bed. She wouldn’t leave her new one. Frantic, she destroyed everything. When the gardener came to mow and heard the thrashing, the doe was found and released with the tiny fawn. We’re trying again. The soil is turned and raked, the greenhouse full of sprouted seeds. I’ve heard that leaving on a radio tuned to right-wing political talk shows scares away all creatures.
You can tell—I’m a dilettante gardener. “But wait,” my husband insists, “you’re a writer. You can’t devote your life to bringing back a vast garden.” But I love the hot peppers, the Dr. Van Fleet climbing over the garage, and elephant ears along the stream! Not prone to guilt, still, I can envision this little kingdom gone wild, coyotes encroaching, ivy twining around my ankle. I sense the rushes of that dark force my neglect might unleash. Therefore, I’m out early, face smeared with SPF 85 sunblock. Work in this heat, you melt like wax.
I often walk down to the edge of the woods to Springhouse Creek, with its remains of a springhouse. My two cats prance on the remaining stones and lap from the cold water that bubbles up. Ah, the original source for the house, still flowing pure and clean. The first daffodils—Chatwood has hundreds—come up around the half-fallen foundation in late January, and the first copperhead (trouble in paradise) rears its cunning head from a hole soon thereafter. I like to imagine Mrs. Faucette, wife of the Quaker who built Chatwood in 1806, bringing her ham, butter, and cheese to the shelves that once existed over the icy water that trickles up from underground. The stream flows from here into the Eno River. Will we ever clear the weeds and wade in the cold water all the way to the river? I can imagine the pleasure so intently that I think it has happened.
With our landscaping crew, we have hacked jungle brush and weed trees along the Eno, which inexplicably had been ignored as part of the garden. We hired men with major equipment to cut and dig and saw for two weeks. Suddenly the meadow extended to the water, a sweep of view across buttercup fields to the sparkling river my grandson says is the color of Coca-Cola. Ed bought an extension tool that clips high branches, and a new weed whacker. Months of work ensued. I knew we were in the garden’s thrall when romantic Ed gave me a chain saw for Valentine’s Day. We installed a culvert over another stream and now have access to a mile-long riverside walk. Our few neighbors walk on our land and we on theirs. The woods are full of laurel. The small pink blossoms remind me of a dotted-swiss sundress I wore when I was eight. An ineffable joy to walk along the Eno, to startle turtles who flop off logs, to see trees reflected on the glittering surface, and to find wild ginger and shy ferns peeking around rocks.
From the folder of yellowed garden maps, I learned Chatwood’s lost garden names—Horseshoe Garden, which I call Birdhouse Garden; Lake Bed, which is known now as Long Meadow; Secret Garden, now a circular stone terrace called Moon Terrace; Azalea Hill, now no azalea in sight, but what a good idea; Sundial Meadow (sundial MIA); and Maple Gate, known to me as Lower Gate. Always discoveries. We have added Brief Creek and Walnut Oval and Springhouse Creek and Wedding Parterre because we always hope someone will get married on the long terrace that steps down to the meadow. We live among many happy places where we imagine events that probably never will happen.
From Helen, and the owners after her, I inherited a fortune. I know to expect a pink knot of hyacinths to erupt by late February, an onslaught of daffodils and narcissus into March, pink columbine, bleeding heart; the wide swath of Virginia bluebells to pop out in April; and for May, the roses, clematis, and long border of fluffy Sarah Bernhardt peonies. (Beautiful as they are, I don’t like the irises. Their sword-like leaves are ugly for much longer than the brief bloom.) Clumps of daylilies—they need separating—ginger lilies, calla lilies, and the true lilies Stargazer and Casa Blanca carry through midsummer, then phlox, echinacea, butterfly bushes, black-eyed Susans, and Japanese anemones save the day in high summer, when our southern gardens lapse into heat exhaustion.
Thank you all who came before me, enduring chiggers, ticks, poison ivy, sunburn, pulled muscles, stings. From my porch on a spring morning, I look out at the green world. Hello, I call out, just to hear the echo from beyond the trees. Hello, the air returns my voice. Or is it the land’s voice? “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote. A flash ago, winter blotted out color, leaving the garden palette monochromatic gray, dun, and black, with only boxwoods and cedars to spark the scene. Now I see jungle green through a scree of light rain, a rich terrarium with kaleidoscopic flowers running through their seasons of beauty, as we are whirling within the same cycles ourselves.