This is the third book we have written together, though separately we have written others, making a total of six. But to say “written separately” makes no sense, for when two lives have been bent for so many years on one central enterprise—in this case, gardening—there really is no such thing as separately. That is not to say that we do not divide up chores and tasks. Much like piano duetists, we both have our separate parts to play, though we are also concerned that the sound of our lives be one seamless and complete whole. We hope our garden is that, for we have known many gardening couples who divided up their garden to avoid the quarrels we never seem to have. We suppose that domestic harmony is bought in all sorts of ways, when it must be bought at all. Fortunately, that has not been an issue here.
We know that making a garden together is extraordinary to many people. We further know that two people writing a book about a garden seems even more impossible. Or at least very bizarre. Indeed, there are people (even very experienced writers) who claim that they can hear our different voices within the text, and can tell which of us wrote an individual essay, or even a single sentence. That is remarkable to us, for we certainly cannot, and in the earlier books—when we glance into them to see if we are perhaps repeating ourselves and are saying something one time too many—the question is apt to come to one or the other of us, “Did you write that, or did I?”
There is a deeper point here, however, than the silly surface question of figuring out who said what. Most people have difficulty with the idea that a couple can achieve anything in perfect harmony. So, for example, we are often told that Harold Nicolson was the architect of Sissinghurst, and Vita Sackville-West poked in all the pretty plants. We are hardly scholars of their relationship, but nothing in their correspondence or published writings supports that assertion. Indeed, many who knew them have assured us that the garden at Sissinghurst was never a bifurcated effort, even when it came into the capable hands of the two wonderful gardeners who followed Nicolson and Sackville-West, Pamela Schwerdt and Sybille Kreutzberger. Why can’t two people make a garden?
Actually, that is the trumpeting assertion of Margery Fish’s book We Made a Garden, and Mirabel Osler’s wonderful A Gentle Plea for Chaos lovingly records such a joint effort—and its necessary dissolution when her husband, Michael, died. All Beth Chatto’s books acknowledge the contributions made by her husband, Andrew, and she frequently expresses deep gratitude for the ways he saw and thought. We knew Linc and Timmy Foster well, and we also knew that perhaps some of their finest times together were spent in the joint creation of Millstream, their magnificent garden in Falls Village, Connecticut. They are both dead now, and the garden is gone, but Timmy left a wonderful memoir of its creation, Cuttings from a Rock Garden (with both their names on the title page), and Linc wrote an authoritative work on rock garden plants, Rock Gardening, with “Drawings by Laura Louise Foster.”
Michael Pollan has said that sooner or later a writer who has a garden will write about it. We’d go further, to say that sooner or later two people who make a garden will write about it. Or at least we have. The point is this: When a book is written about a garden two people have made together, that book is really not about—or not just about—the garden they made. It is also about a relationship, and so it comes to be an autobiography of that relationship. It is for that reason, principally, that we write, and for that reason that we also find it so odd when someone says, as is the case with surprising frequency, “Come on! Who does what?”
This book is a mixed bag, a gypsy trunk of this and that. Within it, we hope the reader will find sound information about the cultivation of plants and their value in the landscape, and some perceptions about garden design, which is our profession. There are also essays about the various parts of our garden, and there are essays about particular plants—roses and lilacs, snowdrops and cyclamen. And vegetables. There are also essays on the development of the garden over time and the question that weighs on us most at this time, its probable demise.
Still, for all its mixed nature, this book has a coherence, for as we have tried to explain, it is really about us. Rather than apologizing for that implicit egotism, we would have to say that we may well shamelessly write another. We do not seem to be done yet.