Leaf by leaf one thing led to another – Twin Cities


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Just like Christmas was yesterday, it’s too late for my annual gardener gift list.

Had it not been too late, I would have recommended books, not the ones with huge color photos, which make us appear inadequate, but the reverse.

Bonnie Blodgett

It was reading books with stories, not pictures, that made a gardener of me. Michael Pollan’s Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education was one of the first. He wrote about lawns just as convincingly as he wrote about exotic roses with names like “Mme. Alfred Carriere. “

I realized that I could combine my two passions, writing and gardening, just like him, and get people to garden in ways they had never thought of before.

I would lead by example. I would allow them to make mistakes.

Pollan himself was started as a garden author through a book called “Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden”. The author, Eleanor Perenyi, was an editor at magazines and waited until retirement to write the book that immediately made her famous.

In recognition of Perenyi’s collection of opinions based on decades of hands-on gardening in rural Connecticut, Pollan followed up his own bestseller, inspired by hers, with a number of other books he had edited for the Modern Library.

Dutifully, I bought and devoured them all, unimpressed by the fact that any other word was the name of a plant I had never heard of and which, living in the far north, would never grow, even in Latin.

That was how I was introduced to Henry Mitchell, the late Washington Post’s great gardening columnist, whose work was summarized in a book called One Man’s Garden. This was followed by Mitchell’s “The Essential Earthman”, named after the column itself, “Earthman”.

Described in his obituary as the “polite, quiet, chain-smoking son of the South” and “passionate about flowers,” Mitchell wrote in a self-deprecating style that embraced failure as part of the learning process and accounted for the lion’s share of the fun.

Henry had a melancholy side. Gardening was his refuge. It reassured him to know that not all living things are as cruel as humans can be.

I was not surprised to learn that as a young reporter on civil rights in his hometown of Memphis he endured death threats and wrote against the Vietnam War even before the start of the Vietnam War and risked resignation from the newspaper for praising the left-wing US Senator from Oregon, Wayne Morse.

I was also not surprised to learn that he struggled with alcohol for most of his life and eventually beat him, or that his favorite novel was Don Quixote.

I loved seeing that the Post had the passages that were most memorable to me, so much so that I still know them by heart.

“It is pleasant to waddle around in your own paradise, knowing that thousands of others have better gardens with better this world and those, and that they have grown better and have no weeds at all.

“To know that and to grin smugly like a terrier that has just fallen into the devil’s balls and think that there is no garden in England or France that I envy and none that I would trade for mine: that is the goal of gardening – not to make us complacent idiots, but to make us content and calm for a while, with enough energy (even after bitter wars with the bindweed) to thank God to feel reverently that it is such a thing Happiness can give. For a few days, of course. “

And I was delighted as if I was reading his comments on squirrels and dogs for the first time. I didn’t have a dog when I first met him. Now I do, a dog that lives to hunt squirrels. He had basset hounds.

“Squirrels eat a lot of onions – they’re in heaven if they find cyclamen and crocuses – but they keep the garden interesting for the family dog. In addition, the squirrels are more attractive than the cyclamen probably would have been anyway. “

He was a huge influence on me, his laid-back attitude more than his encyclopedic knowledge of plants, as well as another selection by Pollan for his series, Margery Fish.

Your book “We Made a Garden” was probably the best companion during my difficult marriage. She met her husband Walter at work. He was her boss. Both worked for the Daily Mail in London, and this may have been the master-slave character of their marital bond. He was the newspaper’s news editor, she a humble reporter offered the job for her valiant service in World War I, and worked with the newspaper’s founder, Lord Northcliff, known as the “King of the Naval Road.”

They married late in life, had no children other than their plants. But I suspect Walter was just another practitioner of the rampant misogyny that was in vogue in England at the time than an honest tyrant.

He had married a powerful woman and did what a man had to do.

I want to say that when I read We Made a Garden all those decades ago I was relatively happy to be married to a man who despised my garden and gardening in general as opposed to a man who forced me to do everything in the garden its way. It was bad enough being yelled at all the time around the house.

My garden was my refuge from everything, as it is for many sensitive people from the hard things in life. But Margery never seemed vulnerable or bullied to her husband’s demands. She was tough as hell for everything they say.

Rereading the book earlier this week, I was thrown back to my own early years when a passion for flowers inspired me to dig up my muddy back yard only to learn that flowers usually don’t do well in full shade. At least not the ones I wanted, which everyone wanted in the beginning, before she opens the secret door to shade-loving plants and leaves roses in the dust in favor of the astilbe.

I’m just having fun. Nobody does that. Meadow rue, Cimicifuga, Chelone or Epimedium maybe, but not Astilbe.

Fish doesn’t even mention astilbe in her sleek but efficient history of her gardening education.

But epimedium, when it finally appears in the final chapter of “We Made a Garden”, will be featured as one of their favorites because it is among the most humble.

At the beginning of the book she deals extensively and respectfully, even lovingly, with roses, then with clematis, delphinium, lilies and the other great divas, perhaps to leave the best for last.

Also, since the book is the story of a garden, the plants she discovered after Walter’s death are the last to appear in the book. And what to advise when a plant is as self-sufficient as an epimedium that doesn’t require staking, dividing, feeding, or even a lot of watering, let alone very little sun?

It takes pruning. She writes: “We grow this plant for its beautiful leaves and we tend to forget how beautiful the flowers can be. When they come out the foliage is tattered and shabby and it makes sense to remove it just so that the full beauty of the flowers and new leaves, pale green, pink, can take place. “

Epimedium is also known as the bar word or – this is my favorite of its common names as it is the most descriptive – fairy wings, a reference to the shape of its delicate flowers.

It is the foliage that makes the best, most enduring (in every way) impression, and the foliage itself is the part of a plant that most “flower” gardeners figure out at some point in their gardening career is most important.

Margery had this enlightenment without direction from Walter, although she “thinks she is protesting too much” (i.e. inexorably) expressing gratitude for all the advice that Walter hammered into her hopeless head, sometimes with an anvil of it.

During “We Made a Garden” she impales her (deceased) husband deliciously with weak praise. His insistence that she pinned the roses (and everything else) in place with sticks enough to hold a bull and ties of equal strength so that the flowers initially looked like the faces of doomed prisoners hanging on the gallows were lined up, as the discipline described was assigned to an incorrigible servant, who of course was incorrigible to the core.

Imagine the amusement when Walter, who had trained her well, succumbed and left Margery alone to do what she wanted. Free at last!

Gravel paths, which were rolled weekly to maintain their sharp edges, were replaced with paving stones, which enabled her to plant the plants she loved most, lovable intrepid ones, in the crevices.

“I grow tall mounds of Alyssum, more lemon-colored than golden, here and there a small lavender or silver plant like Helichrysum plicatum, and the green-leaved Dianthus multiflorus with its bright cherry-red flowers and the salmon-pink version, Emil Pare.”

Nepeta (catnip) has been added all over the place and, due to its endless usefulness, was probably their very favorite. Nepeta is the type of plant she loved most – subtle, gentle, and responsive to radical pruning to produce a second, third, and even fourth bloom.

At first, Walter’s gardening seemed more demanding, and hers typically feminine in its refusal to apply proper discipline.

In fact, it wasn’t until after Walter’s death that Margery rolled up her sleeves, did most of the work himself instead of delegating it to gardeners like Walter, and most of all, loved the hardest work of all.

Like the Nepeta doing this sheer shearing so as not to remove too much, her work was, if anything, more arduous than his.

It turns out that the plants that Walter insisted on growing as if they were the most demanding and at the same time eye-catching – the roses and his beloved dahlias, a genus his wife loathed for their bright blooms – in many ways the the easiest.

Margery’s favorites were NOT flashy at all, but the plants were best suited to appear in complementary groups where a single one doesn’t hog the limelight at the expense of the overall effect.

Nepeta was used in abundance to soften the rose gardens and cover their hard thorny stems. At the same time, the light blue flower color and velvety gray foliage of the catnip bring out the best in the bright and often competing and even contrasting colors of the roses.

So it has harmonized its plant partners, and most of the plants she added in places her husband would have requested the removal, like not just cracks in the sidewalk but the tops of walls and the bottoms of trenches and, well, everywhere .

The four grainy black-and-white photos of East Lambrook Manor, the name of the house and garden in Somerset, England, which is now open to the public, show a beautiful but tranquil stone building with a gable roof and small leaded glass windows surrounded on all sides by an exuberant Mixing plants of every size, shape, and texture imaginable, with the hardscaping in pristine condition and the plant structure carefully pruned to calm the mess.

“My Lord and Master,” as she often called her late husband, would have been both amazed and proud.

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