The Garden, You, and I by Mabel Osgood Wright

This book may not be for everyone -- what book is? -- it may be most useful, and give the greatest pleasure, to today's gardener purely as a technical manual. This despite its being first published in 1906, at which time it was curiously credited only to authoress "Barbara." (It is available for free at our favorite place, Project Gutenberg).

I reason that it's still useful because I reason gardening can't have changed too much in a hundred years, and because the book amounts to such a positively encyclopedic treasure trove of actual, useful names of plants, along with precise instructions in the use of really professional methods. Consider the seed bed, for example. A seed bed is a raised bed of earth where you sow seeds on purpose so as to transplant the results somewhere else, while maintaining the plot, double-duty like, as a useful cutting garden for indoor flowers. Or, consider the hairpin. In The Garden, You, and I you'll learn to garden with hairpins. The near-professionals here take such care over their transplants that they patiently untangle every last rootlet of each one, and pin the rootlets to the earth, to be sure they will enjoy as good a start in new ground as possible.

Since I am a hideously amateur gardener, I marveled politely while reading these things, while reading too the gorgeous names of a thousand roses and a hundred ferns -- Gem of the Prairies, Felicite Perpetual, Baltimore Belle, Safrano, Perle des Jardins, Rock Rolypody. But I confess I took more interest in the book's background stories, in all the little details about life in America only a hundred years ago. The three women at the heart of The Garden, You, and I are three semi-fictitious friends who maintain a correspondence over the course of a year, during which the two better gardeners help the acolyte with her experiments and questions. They are very thorough friends -- one, Lavinia Cortright, is in a way set aside to tend and represent the seaside garden, with its sandy and salt-flecked flora all different from what her inland companions know.

All three are what used to be called "commuters' wives," women living close enough to the city for their husbands to take the train in to an office job every day, but far enough away from it to still raise chickens and transplant whole young trees from "the knoll" to their own property whenever they like. In 1906, horse and buggy were just making room for the automobile and the "macadamed" road; young middle-class couples still employed servants, the "man" often being a recent German or Irish immigrant pining for the old country. Young parents saw their toddlers through the dangerous "second summer" with real anxiety, for childhood diseases killed and there were no vaccines and no antibiotics. A little treat like a working man's being able to take a shower after a long, grimy day was a huge luxury and a gift procured for him by the combined efforts of wife and domestic staff. They rigged up some sort of outdoor shower stall and shower head all run by gravity, and they hauled up by hand the twelve buckets of water needed to make it go.

Mabel Osgood Wright must have sensed that she could not very well keep every reader's interest alive by talking about gardening only. So in addition to these little details we also have the one or two subplots that also caught my eye, plots which, to her credit, resolve (or don't resolve) in surprising ways. We don't see too much of Lavinia's seaside garden as it happens. Instead, we spend most of our time out in suburban woods and farm fields, following -- when we are not assiduously tilling the soil -- a halting romance between the visiting city public school teacher, Miss Maria Maxwell, and the mysterious local Man from Everywhere. Once, way out in the country, we meet the tragic, gentle neighbor Mrs. Markham, who went insane after her husband and son were killed in a carriage accident years before. She lives happily now in a secluded house set in a glorious scent-filled garden, attended by one understanding servant woman. Mrs. Markham dresses all in white, and tends her flowers while assuring visitors that the Doctor and their son have just gone out -- they will be so sorry to have missed you. At the very end of the book, following the technical instruction, the thousand roses and the gentle subplots, we understand that the primary author of these letters has just had a very interesting event happen to her, and that everyone is doing well. We remember that night spent in the open, after the horse and buggy got lost in the dark .... 

If you are a hideously amateur gardener like me, read the book for these daguerreotypes of Americana. If they don't strike you much,  read it for the lovely writing. Wildly obscure though the book may now be, the lovely writing reflects the lovely efforts these women made to put lovely things, every single day, into their otherwise unrecorded American lives. I may say, the surprisingly good photographs are an extra treat.

Before night enough Jacqueminot buds showed rich colour to justify my filling the bowl on the greeting table, fringing it with sprays of the yellow brier buds and wands of copper beech now in its velvety perfection of youth. This morning, the moment that I crossed my bedroom threshold, the Jacqueminot odour wafted up. Is there anything more like the incense of praise to the flower lover? Not less individual than the voice of friends, or the song of familiar birds, is the perfume of flowers to those who live with them, and among roses none impress this characteristic more poignantly than the crimson Jacqueminot and the silver-pink La France, equally delicious and absolutely different.

Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim (Marie Annette Beauchamp)

The introduction to this book is almost as interesting as the book itself, for it explains, briefly and lucidly, the life and works of our authoress, and why she happened to have two names. The lady was born in Australia Marie Annette Beauchamp, and was a cousin of the more famous, New Zealand born writer Katharine Mansfield (nee Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp). Reared in England, where she "was always called Elizabeth," she married, or "was persuaded to marry" a German count, and so became a rather young countess Elizabeth von Arnim. For the publication of her first book, Elizabeth and her German Garden, the former Miss Beauchamp acquired in 1898 a third name: for in the gentle but surely expiring tradition of lady writers even then, she was at first Anonymous.

The book was a huge success, so that for subsequent editions her name, or at any rate her German name, was permitted to grace the cover. The Garden was followed in later years by more books, a few of which we might know better. She wrote Mr. Skeffington, made into that great movie of the same name in the early 1940s with Bette Davis and Claude Rains; she wrote Enchanted April, made into a movie in the early 1990s starring actors not quite so well known.

All this we have from one R. McGowan, writing in San Jose on April 11, 1998. Apparently he or she is the one responsible for getting Elizabeth and her German Garden scanned into the files of Project Gutenberg as long ago as that. Indeed he closes with, "In the centennial year of this book's first publication, I hope that its availability through Project Gutenberg will stir some renewed interest in Elizabeth and her delightful work. She is, I would venture, my favorite author ...."

I don't think I'll count Elizabeth as my favorite author quite yet. Her rough diary of a year at her country estate is certainly a unique view into a strange and vanished world -- faint praise; any good book should be that -- but there is also something unpleasantly dreamlike in these cool, guarded, yet outlandish portrayals of family, guests, servants, routine, holidays, chores, and weird excursions. There is warmth in the garden, but only there. And even there, the reader who is also a gardener will not be able to follow her too far in her hobby, even in sympathy, unfortunately. Though she began as an absolute amateur, still she was the wife of a count, and had the means -- the pin money -- to order things like a hundred rose bushes at a time, and to speak of stream and woods. Like so many garden writers, where she says "garden," she means property. There is a big difference, even if one tries to rejoice for her.

The rough diary, set down from the beginning of May to the end of the next April, is one half given over to the garden, and one half to a chronicle of indoor domesticities, chief among them a long midwinter visit from Irais and Minora. These are two women whom Elizabeth would far rather not have left on her hands, especially Minora, who is merely a young relation of a friend, taken in as a favor because she is alone in Germany and requires chaperoning. The girl also has literary pretensions. She is gathering material for a book on Germany. Elizabeth and Irais find her ignorant, credulous, and yet absurdly timid when it comes to any chance for an authentic German adventure.

Such as, for instance, a sleigh ride to the Baltic coast in the depths of winter. Minora starts out happily enough with her two companions, but after six hours of the cold and a cold picnic and then the swiftly gathering darkness, and pop-eyed, faux innocent assurances from Elizabeth that the elderly coachman doesn't fall asleep and overturn the carriage too often, she turns desperate and drops broad hints that they ought to stop at a neighbor's house for the night and continue home in the morning. Upon that she is treated to a long, sumptuously composed speech from Irais about how vulgar and pushing such a visit would be, and how even if they all were such rubes as to dare it, she herself would promptly be seated in the most uncomfortable chair in the house, in the spot preordained for unexpected visitors who are also virgins of no rank. Granted Minora's idea was a little awkward, still the reader wonders if indeed German etiquette at this time was so atrocious, or if Irais was indulging in deviltry, or if Elizabeth was making the entire scene up for the sheer joy of invention.

Regardless, it makes one sympathize with Minora, even though perhaps she was sometimes an annoying chit. And, to be fair to Elizabeth, long country house visits must have worn on the hostess' nerves in any society or era where they were once commonly made. Elizabeth wanted to get back to her garden and her family privacy. Still, in setting the stage for this long and not very funny story, Elizabeth had told us that she also likes to take her truly wearisome summer guests to these same Baltic beaches. The great joke there is that the seacoast in summer swarms with mosquitoes, which spoil the expectations of visitors who had thrilled to the suggestion of refreshing ocean breezes. After that, they tend to pack their bags and go home. So, I think, would I. I think also I do not make Elizabeth one of my favorite writers, not just yet.

A couple of scenes, if they are not much warmer than any others, nevertheless ring with a likable and unmistakable truth. In one, the young wife, mother and gardener tells us what it was like, not only to have servants to do your work, but to be forbidden to do your own work -- even if it was work you loved:

I did one warm Sunday in last year's April during the servants' dinner hour, doubly secure from the gardener by the day and the dinner, slink out with a spade and a rake and feverishly dig a little piece of ground and break it up and sow surreptitious ipomaea [morning glory], and run back very hot and guilty into the house, and get into a chair and behind a book and look languid just in time to save my reputation.

This was the mistress of the estate, and she could not garden. In another scene, that same young mistress proves her mettle when it is time to sack one of those servants. One day a door to a parlor swings open and the governess, Miss Jones, is accidentally overheard criticizing her employers in a private talk with our Minora. She pronounces, in a general way, that most parents "are not wise," that most pious husbands including the present master were probably rakes as bachelors, and that it's a sore trial for the governess to have to be polite and "even humble" to such pompous fools. Elizabeth walks in to the parlor, icily invites Minora to tea, and tells the governess she "wants the children for a little while." The next day, Miss Jones is gone, flung out into the great world with no good references, we may be sure. No mention of consulting the husband, "the Man of Wrath," in all this. No need to, it seems.

R. McGowan's introduction tells us that in time, Elizabeth had to leave this idyllic home -- we never quite know where it is, except that it is fifteen miles from the Baltic -- and go on to a probably much more urban second half of life. (Back in England? We don't know.) After the Man of Wrath died, she circulated among people fine enough to introduce her to friends like H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, whose brother she married. Somehow, one doesn't see men like that mucking about in the compost days from any town, and knowing the names of a hundred roses, too.

The second marriage ended in divorce. With the outbreak of World War II, she fled to America, where she died in 1941.

Now of course the Garden is not all unpleasantly dreamlike, and mosquitoes and sacked servants. There is humor in it, and it would be unfair to leave you with no idea of it.

"I really think, Elizabeth," said Irais to me later, when the click of Minora's typewriter was heard hesitating from the next room, "that you and I are writing her book for her. She takes down everything we say. Why does she copy all that about the baby? I wonder why mothers' knees are supposed to be touching? I never learned anything at them, did you? But then in my case they were only stepmother's, and nobody ever sings their praises."

"My mother was always at parties," I said; "and the nurse made me say my prayers in French."

And there is the garden and the flowers, "which I have loved so much." (Even on the last page we hear a hint of a goodbye.)

"I love tulips better than any other spring flower; they are the embodiment of alert cheerfulness and tidy grace, and next to a hyacinth look like a wholesome, freshly tubbed young girl beside a stout lady whose every movement weighs down the air with patchouli."

I'm curious to know what Elizabeth's last novel, Mr. Skeffington, is like. Of course I have seen the movie, but I'd like to know if Skeffington shows some kind of arcing journey of the woman and the writer. I think it must, unless Hollywood transformed it sight unseen. From idyllic and adored German garden, the titled young mother, thirty, becomes a seventy-year-old telling the tale of a Jewish banker who barely escapes with his life from a Germany that now occupies another universe.

About Orchids: a Chat by Frederick Boyle

"If every human being should do what he can to promote the general happiness, it would be downright wicked to leave one's fellow-men under the influence of hallucinations that debar them from the most charming of quiet pleasures."

The quiet pleasure, that is, of growing orchids. The "hallucination" to be cured is that they are difficult to grow. I could have sworn, somewhere in the very early pages of this book, that the author assured his readers he would give them simple basic instructions in how to do this. But in clicking back through it -- on my Kindle, which is becoming usual with me -- I find no such promises. Instead, I find Mr. Boyle gently telling us "I do not give detailed instructions for culture." He instantly adds, "No one could be more firmly convinced that a treatise on that subject is needed, for no one assuredly has learned, by more varied and disastrous experience, to see the omissions of the text-books."

In other words, circa 1893 he has learned to grow orchids on his own, and he wants to share the delight of the hobby but wants also (we must presume) to let his reader and future orchid fancier achieve those delights in exactly the style he did. And after all he may be right. No expert writing any treatise can replicate the conditions of your home, greenhouse, or garden, nor foresee or command the amount of effort and time you are willing to put into your little hobby. Mr. Boyle wants you to happily run that middle ground between chore and failure, wherein after eight or ten years of trial and error and as much success as you want, you play host to a true orchid expert, and watch him gawp at your treasures and then bask when he turns to you in wonder and exclaims, " 'Sir -- we do not call this an amateur's collection. We do not call this an amateur's collection.' "

The most Mr. Boyle will say about orchid growing is that the plants are far easier to keep alive than people think, but that they do need a tremendous amount of humidity. If you can lay sand on the floor of your orchid house and make sure it is saturated, that would be best. He also specifies how to pollinate them for hybridization purposes, and recounts with pride how a young girl had success at it after he taught her. For the rest of his book -- which is a collection of his articles, published over many years in a variety of prestigious English garden-and-country-life magazines -- he delves into more than a century's history of orchid hunting and orchid mania among the rich, and he sketchily classifies the various species of "cool," "warm," and "hot" orchids, and all their colors, Latin names, temperature requirements, flowering habits, and sizes. We are glad to learn that collectors in the wild used to chop down jungle trees to harvest the orchids growing forty feet up in their branches, and then pack the flowers in shipments of as many as twenty thousand for the voyage to England; in the early years, two specimens might survive, or none. Yet throughout, he still never specifically says 'do this at home, and then the next day do that.' Rest assured, he breathes, actual orchid culture will prove no mystery, and anyway "the reader will take my hint" as need be. A hint like, "not everyone indeed is anxious to grow plants which need a minimum night heat of 60 F in winter, 70 F in summer ...." These would be the "hot" varieties. We remember that we are reading about the ultimate rain forest houseplant in an English climate before central heating.

So, lacking precise instructions, all of About Orchids' weight of sheer botanical information does become a bit wearisome, possibly even to the interested gardener. Lacking the revelations and memories of Frederick Boyle's own experience, you may find yourself skipping pages on odontoglossum and phalaenopsis. What does intrigue, though, is the impression that orchid growing must have been more popular in Boyle's day than ours. More than once he tosses off casual pronouncements such as "Everybody knows Dendrobium nobile so well that it is not to be discussed in prose..." -- although we do remember he was writing for an audience that read gardening magazines. Anyway possibly the hobby was relatively cheaper then than now, too. He writes of orchids being common enough to cost the average person pence or shillings, rather than of such rarity as to draw -- as they once did, even in his lifetime -- pursefuls of guineas from a Rothschild. It may also be that a hundred years ago, orchids' popularity still benefited from their novelty, and from what people knew about their exotic origins and the dangers men had faced, for decades, to bring them to auctions in foggy, grimy London. Here is the tail end of a passage recounting just a little of the 19th century's passionate hunt for any and all orchidaceae:

"Then Osmers traced the whole coast-line of the Brazils from north to south, employing five years in the work. Finally, Digance undertook the search, and died this year. To these men we owe grand discoveries beyond counting. To name but the grandest, Arnold found Cattleya Percevaliana ...."

Today, we have forgotten the heroics of the plant-hunters. Orchids do appear for sale in big home furnishings stores and garden centers, but to my budget they seem fairly expensive again, between $20 and $25 for one specimen. Perhaps things have come full circle, and orchid mania is once more for the better-to-do. Anyway when plant shopping I have also passed orchids by, hitherto, because most of the time the same big, flamboyant species seems to be available. It's all ruffles and white or sugary pink in color, and I regret to say I don't find it much more beautiful than many another flower. I am also put off by the plant's need to have its blooming spike attached to a supportive stake with many, little, actual women's hair clips. (There is a reason for this: tree-growing orchids of necessity stand sideways in their pots, with the flower, which would normally hang down gracefully from a branch, fighting its way up and against gravity and its own habit. Hence the drooping, the stake, and the clips.) I'm accustomed to my garden of native midwestern perennials, my goldenrod and coneflowers, which, though granted they can be rather sorry-looking in the heat or after a storm, nonetheless like Lazarus rise again and walk each spring without my doing a thing about it. To an indoor flower in need of such cosseting, I say righteously, no matter how fabulous it is let it be left alone to droop and sprawl in its natural habitat. Venezuela, or "the Brazils" I take it.

So then, why orchids, ever? Why the mania of a hundred or more years ago, why the expense today, why do orchids still vaguely conjure up ideas of mystery, of fantastic beauty and of some sort of intellectual seduction akin to sex, drugs, rubies and sapphires, religion and espionage all rolled into one?

Frederick Boyle doesn't descend much into pedestrian scientific facts that really are remarkable. You must consult modern books and websites for that. The plant family is among the oldest and most widespread in nature, boasting something like 25,000 species and 100,000 man-developed hybrids. Their looks and reproduction needs can be about equally gloriously bizarre -- Charles Darwin was able to predict the existence of a previously unknown tropical insect, simply by looking at an orchid and understanding what it would take to pollinate it -- but it is not for these inner satisfactions that Boyle encourages the "quiet pleasure." For him, orchid growing is the last interest which can really rouse the blood of a civilized man. In the fight against boredom it eclipses even art.

A picture, a statue, a piece of china, any work of art, is eternally the same, however charming. The most one can do is to set it in different positions, in different lights. ... The littera scripta manet -- the stroke of the brush is everlasting. Painters lay the canvas aside, and presently come to it, as they say, with a new eye; but a purchaser once seized with this desperate malady has no such refuge. After putting aside his treasure for years, at the first glance all his satiety returns. ... For such men orchids are a blessed relief. Fancy has not conceived such loveliness, complete all round, as theirs -- form, colour, grace, distribution, detail, and broad effect.

The ease of their cultivation then adds to their seduction. So much so that our author and orchid writer paradoxically complains of fielding queries from well meaning, excited people on "how to do it"! "My articles," he says, "brought upon me a flood of questions almost as embarrassing as flattering to a busy journalist."

The burden of them was curiously like. Three ladies or gentlemen in four wrote thus: "I love orchids. I had not the least suspicion that they may be cultivated so easily and so cheaply. I am going to begin. Will you please inform me" -- here diversity set in with a vengeance! From temperature to flower-pots ....

To which the reader, either today or in 1893, feels bound to reply, Well dammit man, what did you expect? So they are easy and sublime; so talk.

Granted, he did, quite a lot, albeit none of his talking can take the place of, say, an actual Ghost Orchid, Dendrophylax lindenii, blooming and filling a nighttime room with its "intoxicating scent." With which brilliant observation, I am sure he would agree.

I don't know if Mr. Boyle occupies some special place in the orchid lovers' hall of fame, if perhaps he is some sort of late Victorian Moses for the industry. He seems to have no easily clickable cyber-biography. Google his name, and you encounter him only where I did, at Project Gutenberg. He is the author of their The Woodlands Orchids also, published in 1901, when he was sixty. Gutenberg gives no date of death for him. Perhaps, mysterious and prophet like, he is still alive, and puttering about in one of his wondrous amateur "houses."

A Gardener's Year by Katharine Twomey

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest Indiana

A Gardener’s Year is one of those books that libraries tend to discard because it has not been checked out in twenty-four years. And it is one of those books that tends not to be checked out because, perhaps, the library patron browsing the gardening shelf takes it down to look at it and sees a collection of short, almost abrupt essays, not written by an expert, published by an obscure, long-gone press, and asks himself – "Why do I need to know what this lady did with her garden in Hot Springs, South Dakota, in 1973?"

We don’t need to know what she did, of course, but the book is a little triumph of charm. Katharine Twomey seems to have written at a time when an ordinary person – do we dare say, a busy housewife – could "contribute scores of articles on horticulture to newspapers throughout the Plains States" detailing little more than her own amateur experiences in, and ruminations about, her garden now, and her memories of gardens past.

These essays did not cost her much effort, which is not to say that they are not good. They are lovely, unhurried, highly personal; she assumes that she can hold people’s interest in simple stories of grasshopper invasions, of the hunt for flowers that will not bring on her husband’s hayfever, and of the depredations to the perennial bed caused by the family dog. Taste in reading matter is highly personal, and it may be that through all this she cannot hold many people’s interest, which is why my copy of A Gardener’s Year was last stamped DUE in May of 1984. I like these kinds of gentle, idiosyncratic essays. The writer is not trying to impress, she hasn’t a slew of professional citations to back up her work. She is simply one human being recording her ideas for the possible pleasure of another.

And all this is not to imply that the book is all sweetness and light and has no backbone whatever. The collection’s great strength is that it details the adventures of the distinctly amateur gardener. As Twomey points out early on, the respected garden writers of yesteryear were often well-to-do people, living in bosky climates, with a staff of servants to do their work. Miss Gertrude Jekyll, comfortable herself, designed gardens for the estates of wealthy Englishmen. She could plan "vistas" and experiment with her famed color schemes to her heart’s content. Katharine Twomey was much more like the rest of us. She lived in an ordinary house and coped with the ordinary problems of gardening around the garage beneath a vista of telephone wires. She also coped with the expense. "You see a lovely iris in a catalogue and you order one – yes, one," she writes.

Winter is the best time for reading gardening books, as Twomey points out, and her own book might prove more encouraging, come spring, than all the up-to-date and expert advice you can find.