Occasional Prose (40 page)

In any case it is obvious to the naked eye, at least in my part of the country, that flower gardens are disappearing, along with family fruit trees and vegetable gardens. Even roadside stands, which were a cross between home growing and market growing, are getting scarce, so that you are lucky this year to see a couple of cucumbers with a hand-printed sign “
CUKES
” beside a rural mailbox. And to find a passionate, straw-hatted lady gardener at work in her rows is as arresting a sight as a scarecrow dressed in the straw-hatted lady’s old clothes. Mrs. Perényi is aware of all this. She knows full well that it is not “worth it” to attempt to grow the quinces, pears, apricots, gentians, Himalayan poppies that she does keep trying and is conscious, too, that even the more co-operative subjects such as peonies and phlox (“Pansies are a
thankful
flower,” a young countrywoman said to me once) are a folly she indulges herself in for no better reason than that a garden without them “would be sad.”

There are pages where she treats her garden ruefully as a sort of addiction, and this view of it may help solve a puzzle: the thriving state of the seed, bulb, and gardening-tools industry in the teeth of what looks to me like the general disappearance of gardens. As Mrs. Perényi points out, most of the old firms like Burpee’s—selling by catalogue to home growers as well as to nurserymen—have been taken over by conglomerates, which strongly suggests that there is still pay dirt there. Even granting that the breeders today, like publishers, concentrate on the mass market—the best-selling petunias, zinnias, marigolds—to the neglect of old favorites like sweet peas, bachelor’s buttons, love-in-a-mist, this is a bit peculiar. I can only think that people buy more seeds, tubers, corms, bulbs, rhizomes, than they ever plant, more tools and gadgets than they ever use, that there is a gardening itch, like an addiction, that comes on strongest in the fall and winter, when the catalogues hit the mailboxes, and that the craving, in the end, proves to be purely mental (platonic, you might say), getting no farther than the filling out of an order slip and writing of a check. Still, though I can verify the suspicion to some extent from my own practices, from the packages of ancient seeds (wild strawberry, for instance, angelica!) gathering dust in the toolshed, it cannot be the whole story. Perhaps there are secret gardens, like the Mary gardens, or
giardini segreti
, mentioned by Mrs. Perényi, that right this minute lie hidden from a prying eye down loggers’ trails in the woods, in mobile-home parks, town dumps, and cemetery plots.

Making things grow, at least in Connecticut, where the author lives, and in Maine, where I spend half the year, is a continuing struggle in which it often appears that Nature, far from being on your side, is actively against you, attacking with bugs, molds, rot, cankers, neighboring dogs, raccoons, skunks, porcupines, drought, torrential rains, “black” frosts, snow heaves, winter-kill. And I cannot think that the satisfaction derived is in the results, however beautiful or tasty. Even my exquisite Mme Hardy rose with its green center like a curled-up worm and faint blush of pink on the first creamy petals (unobtainable at any florist) or the messes of tender lima pole beans harvested and cooked by Mrs. Perényi (try and find them at the Shop ’n’ Save) will never quite compensate the grower for the anxious pain and fret of cultivation. If they
are
the reward, then greed (of eye or tongue) would be the chief motive for gardening: you dig and scratch so as to be able to sit back and savor the end product. I do not believe that that is how it works. That is not why the Risen Christ appeared to the Magdalen in the likeness of a gardener. Certainly there is a joy in fruition, and some pride, too, but it is more in the strange process of growth brought to completion than in the testimonials to the
value
of the process represented by the yield.

That value, as I have been suggesting, can always be called into question by somebody who doesn’t “know about” old roses or care for lima beans and thinks the time consumed would be better spent in a boat or on a tennis court. Only a fellow gardener can judge your rose or lima bean in the light of an ideal product, which both you and he see in the mind’s eye. And only another gardener can appreciate the components of luck and accident in the mysterious process of growth, that is, sense the history of inscrutably simple and complex causes leading up to the eventual fruit or flower nodding on the stalk, as though to nudge you into recognition of a numinous presence—related to L.,
nuere
, to nod.

The fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable. Like a rock struck by the spading fork in ground long worked over and hence presumably free of boulders, mystery rears up to meet us from a restless subsoil constantly turning in its bed. Mrs. Perényi seems to find this particularly true of the behavior of vines; she does not know
why
a clematis refuses to follow the course laid down for it and instead crawls along a telephone cable or why a
Hydrangea petiolaris
, disobeying all Nature’s rules, heads sidewise into the thick shade of a hemlock hedge rather than upward to the sun. But vines, admittedly, are serpentine.

The mystery suddenly met, “surprised,” almost, in the garden (as in “Coming Through the Rye” or the Apparition to the Magdalen) is omnipresent, though lurking. It is tied to the life process, an idea we can accept, but, more disturbingly, to what is commonly called the “supernatural.” Appropriately, the subject is tackled in the entry called “
SEEDS
,” when the author is talking of “Adonis gardens”—spring baskets or pots planted with quick-sprouting wheat, fennel, and lettuce by women of antiquity to welcome the risen god. Then, all at once, she gruffly interjects: “I am an agnostic. I don’t believe a word of any organized religion and go to church only to look at the architecture, listen to music I could hear nowhere else. ... And yet, that isn’t quite right either. When it comes down to it, I am as superstitious as any savage about the origins of life and as disposed to propitiate the powers that govern nature. True gardeners will know what I mean. You can’t work among plants for long and remain altogether an unbeliever: it is too obvious that
something is going on
.” The italics (hers) come down like the full stops of an organ.

This must be the core and pith of the book. As so often when one is dealing with Nature, explanation would seem out of place. We do not wish to hear
what
is going on, in the author’s opinion, any more than we want her to send a sample of her soil to her county agent for analysis.
Better leave it alone
, in both cases. Maybe what she is saying is only common sense, and common sense, for all we know, may be natural wisdom transmitted genetically. Tolstoy seems to have believed something of the kind and so did Socrates.

I confess that I do not follow all Mrs. Perényi’s principles in my garden practice. I lack the strength of character
not
to spray fruit trees that are manifestly being eaten by enemies and if I find it easy to resist chemical fertilizers, it is because supplies of wood ash, manure, and seaweed are locally available. We have a thing called the Rotocrop (which I found in an ad in the
Observer
and which she would surely scoff at) that makes compost out of kitchen garbage—best to leave out large animal bones—as well as leaves and grass cuttings. But if we could not get manure, I doubt whether I would be heroic enough to go it on compost alone; anyway there would not be enough.

We have also used Weed-and-Feed on the lawn, and when we gave it up, it was not because our lawn was wrecked by it as hers was by some similar product—in fact ours was greatly improved—but because the wind blew the stuff all over the lilacs. So she was right about that, even if for her own, to me not quite tenable reasons. I am a much softer gardener than the author, which means I am a bad gardener. I would not have the heart to emulate Miss Jekyll in a “vigorous thinning” of the nut-trees in January or hack out some of the Scotch fir “that are beginning to crowd each other.” To be a good gardener, you must be ruthless and decisive, and I am neither. I am a temporizer.

But you do not have to be a good gardener to fall in love with
Green Thoughts
. Its willingness to talk of failures is an encouragement to lesser lights. Probably the author’s frankness promotes a spirit of confession in the reader, which permits him to face up to his defects. As an inveterate realist, Mrs. Perényi is full of good counsel; the soundest remedy is often simply to throw the erring plant away. She is reassuring about garden “subjects,” such as leeks, commonly regarded as difficult. Of modern hybrid lilies, said to be “fussy”: “All they require is a hole dug for them in sun, or semi-shade. ... I plant them a little deeper than is usually suggested, putting into the hole a tablespoon of bone meal or dried cow manure topped with a pad of sand for good drainage. Then I forget them—which is why a label with their names must be attached to a stick placed in their vicinity.”

The book reads as though it had been immense fun to write. It also reads with the intrepid assurance of a classic, which it will be, I think, for a very long time, possibly in years to come as “escape literature” when there are no gardens left to relate to it. In anticipation of a string of future editions, I have two small hesitant questions to raise. The first has to do with the “Mary garden” of medieval and Renaissance painting; Mrs. Perényi calls it the “
hortus inclusus
.” My own recollection is of a “
hortus conclusus
.”

The second concerns the dessert called Apple Charlotte, from which other desserts including Charlotte Russe derived. Mrs. Perényi tells us that four varieties of apple were named for Queen Charlotte, consort of George III of England “—hence, it is said, Apple Charlotte.” For my part, I have always understood that the dish—like the Charlotte mold it is made in—was named for Goethe’s Lotte. To quote the first stanza of Thackeray’s parody, “The Sorrows of the Young Werther”:

Werther had a love for Charlotte

Such as words could never utter.

Would you know how first he met her?

She was cutting bread and butter.

And here is the last stanza, following on Werther’s suicide:

Charlotte, having seen his body

Borne before her on a shutter,

Like a well-conducted person,

Went on cutting bread and butter.

Sliced bread and butter are the “basics” of the dish, which originally contained apples but today may use other fruit. The Charlotte Russe uses sliced cake rather than bread, but the principle is the same. Yet even if Mrs. Perényi is wrong (as the persistence of the bread-and-butter theme suggests) in her notion of the provenance of the dessert, I am grateful for a nice bit of information contained in the same sentence: not just apples, the
Strelitzia
(bird-of-paradise flower) was named for Queen Charlotte, an ardent botanist who was born Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

November 5, 1981

*
A review of
Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden
, by Eleanor Perényi.

The Very Unforgettable Miss Brayton

I
N THE LAST QUARTER
of her life, Alice Brayton’s garden in Portsmouth, on the island of Rhode Island, became a social magnet for visitors to Newport, “society’s summer capital,” a fifteen-minute drive away. I was first brought to see it in 1949, when I had moved to a farmhouse on Union Street, Portsmouth, and already, on that first afternoon, I had the sense of being taken to a delightful little circus with its own P. T. Barnum in the form of a small white-haired spinster (“I’m not an old maid, I’m a spinster”), the owner, the impresario, and a principal exhibit of the show.

Officially the property was famous for its topiary work, the “Green Animals” she had decided to name it for at about the time I met her. Before that, it had no name, not pretending to be an estate; the address was simply “Cory’s Lane, Portsmouth”—an address it shared with the Priory, a boys’ school run by “black” Benedictines across the country road. The land sloped down to Narragansett Bay, which made for very mild winters allowing her to grow figs, virtually unheard of elsewhere in that part of the world, and bamboo for staking. The topiary collection stood on an elevation like a grassy platform behind the large white frame house, and several of the privet animals—the giraffe, the camel, the ostrich, the elephant, the horse and the rider—besides being raised on clipped green pedestals, were unusually tall in their own right, so that the impression on one coming from Cory’s Lane was of a sheared family of Mesozoic creatures—dinosaurs, pterodactyls.

That impression remained even though the greater number of the animals belonged to the classic repertory—a swan, a pair of peacocks, a unicorn, a bear, a boar, a cock, a she-wolf (copied from the Roman bronze of Romulus and Remus’s foster-parent); there were also baskets with handles, tall tubular forms resembling tops, and (the greatest hit) a policeman at the entry with a night stick and a metal star on his bristly green chest.

The general assumption was that the animals were a collaboration between Alice Brayton’s fancy and the clippers of a family of Portuguese gardeners who worked and lived on the place. But sometimes she would disown her own part in the creation. “Folk art,” she said dryly when in that humor. “It all came out of Joe’s head.” At other times she insisted that the topiary was as old as herself; in that version she was just the curator, maintaining it “as it was”—this despite the fact that there were accessions to the collection, including, if I’m not mistaken, the policeman, who could hardly have been “in restoration” when I first saw the garden.

It was the same with the inside of the house: she could never decide whether she preferred to have us think that wallpapers, draperies, and so on were “original,” i.e., more than 150 years old (the age of the house varied too, according to her mood), or testimony to her prowess as a decorator. Was it better to have had “ancestors” or to be a genius in one’s own right—self-made? I don’t think Miss Brayton was ever able to settle her mind on that point, which nevertheless was the pivot of her existence. The truth was she had created something indisputably her own—her gingery self, her evolving animals, her continually revised mythology of wallpapers, draperies, carpets, bell-pulls—and never knew whether to be proud of that or ashamed.