Life in the Garden

by Penelope Lively

  The flat at the top of the house is occupied by its landlady, an old lady called Mrs Bartholomew. And when, at the end of the story, Tom meets her, after his last excursion with Hatty, when she has become strangely older, a young woman, everything falls into place. ‘… nothing stands still, except in our memory,’ Mrs Bartholomew tells Tom; the memory garden that has stayed always the same in her dreams, and in Tom’s. Both concepts are beautiful – the dreamed garden, which cannot become a yard with dustbins so long as it lives on in her memory, and the little girl who also lives on because a person – an old woman – is not just now, but also then, all the incarnations of herself. For the boy Tom, this is a moment of maturity, a glimpse of continuity and of growing up, and a reason why Tom’s Midnight Garden is one of the greatest children’s books of all time. But, above all, it is a narrative of great elegance, simply told, and leaving you with insights into the nature of time, and memory. It nicely complements W. H. Auden’s comment in an essay on Alice in Wonderland: ‘There are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children.’

  The garden as therapy – The Secret Garden. And gardening as an activity can be therapeutic also, or rather, gardening advice. This proposal is neatly wound into The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields’s finest novel, both as a story element and an opportunity to display one of the novel’s several narrative devices whereby the life of Daisy Goodwill, born in Manitoba in 1905, is told: ‘Dear Mrs Green Thumb, Your piece on hollyhocks was terrif. I liked the part about “their frilled dirndl skirts” and their “shy fuzzy stems”.’ After the death of her husband, Daisy has taken on his horticultural column in the Ottawa Recorder to startling effect. Housewife and mother, it is the first time that Daisy has either earned some money herself, or displayed talent and received praise; she finds some much-needed self-esteem. She is devastated when, in due course, she is ousted by a regular journalist on the paper, but before this happens her readers have been rewardingly appreciative:

  ‘… I laughed till I cried about your struggle with your leggy poinsettia.’

  ‘… just wanted to let you know your column on Chicago gardens pushed my husband’s magic button.’

  ‘At last, someone’s solved my black leg problem. Any advice on thrips?’

  ‘… Loved “Getting tough with phlox” … bought an extra copy for my sister-in-law in Calgary who’ll get a real kick out of it.’

  ‘Wow, you really told it like it is in “Plant Food – Yes or No”. My wife and I have been bickering over this particular issue for years.’

  The Stone Diaries is a kaleidoscopic novel, brilliantly and intricately told by way of straight narrative, alternating points of view, letters, newspaper reports. The account of Daisy’s rather bleak married life is obliquely told, but there is a sudden vivid rush of words when it comes to the description of her garden and the later significance for Daisy of becoming the respected ‘Mrs Green Thumb’ is the more apparent: ‘And her lilacs! Some people, you know, will go out and buy any old lilac and just poke it in the ground, but Mrs Flett has given thought to overall plant size and blossom color, mixing the white “Madame Lemoine” lilac with soft pink Persian lilac and slatey blue “President Lincoln”. These different varieties are “grouped”, not plopped. At the side of the house a border of blue Sweet William has been given a sprinkling of bright yellow coreopsis, and this combination, without exaggeration, is a true artist’s touch. Clumps of bleeding heart are placed – placed, this has not just happened – near the pale blueness of campanula; perfection! The apple trees in the back yard are sprayed each season against railroad worm so that all summer long their leaves throw kaleidoscopic patterns on the fine pale lawn. Here the late sun fidgets among the poppies. And the dahlias!’

  Reading that, let alone the readers’ letters, I don’t need to know if Carol Shields was a gardener – I know she was. Only an informed gardener could have written that. In fact, it is something I should know; Carol was a friend, but I don’t remember that we ever had a gardening conversation on our too rare meetings – the Atlantic usually between us. And, reading that passage again, I find myself wondering if she is describing some garden of her own. The blue Sweet William puzzles me – here, it is usually pink, red, white. And what on earth is railroad worm? (Ah – I think what is meant is the blue phlox – wild Sweet William, Phlox divaricata, native to North America, and the railroad worm is the larva of a beetle, called the apple maggot this side of the Atlantic.)

  The fictional garden is one aspect of the written garden. There is also the garden writing that is free of fictional purpose, concerned only with discussion, advice, celebration – the writing of those who garden. And the range and variety is extraordinary, from the briskly informative to the florid and pretentious. If we take a look at a few of them, it might be significant to start by going back over a century to someone who was writing in fact at the same time as William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll, but could not be more different.

  Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden was published in 1898 and was a huge success at the time – twenty-one editions by 1899. It was her first book, and she went on to write many novels, and indeed Elizabeth and Her German Garden was termed a novel, though it is no such thing. It is an account of her life as the chatelaine of a Prussian estate at Nassenheide in Pomerania, and especially of her creation there of a garden. She had been born in Sydney, but brought up in England, and had met and married a Prussian count fifteen years older than herself when twenty-three. After a few years in Berlin, he took her to live at the family estate, from which he was frequently absent on business, leaving her with an entourage of servants and estate workers. She seems to have been quite comfortable with his absences, found her surroundings idyllic, and set about creating a garden out of a wilderness – the place had been neglected for years.

  I find Elizabeth and Her German Garden a tricky read. It is soaked in whimsical humour, mostly written with that arch tone that was perhaps appealing in 1898 but not to the twenty-first-century ear. Her husband is archly called the Man of Wrath, and her three children the April baby, the May baby and the June baby. There are whimsical vignettes of visiting eccentrics. But when she writes about the garden, her plans, her successes and her failures, it is another matter – a whiff of affectation here and there, but mainly it is her enthusiasm and enjoyment that come across. On first arrival she was rapturous about what she found: ‘There are so many bird-cherries round me, great trees with branches sweeping the grass, and they are so wreathed just now with white blossoms and tenderest green that the garden looks like a wedding. I never saw such masses of them; they seem to fill the place. Even across a little stream that bounds the garden on the east, and right in the middle of the cornfield beyond, there is an immense one, a picture of grace and glory against the cold blue of the spring sky.’

  The bird cherry she refers to is Prunus padus, native to northern Europe and northern Asia, also called the hackberry, or Mayday tree. The flowers grow in racemes, and I have never seen one; I had thought at first she meant our own Prunus avium, the native cherry that got A. E. Housman going: ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now/Is hung with bloom along the bough.’ Hers sound lovely too.

  Elizabeth revels also in the existing wild growths: ‘… under and among the groups of leafless oaks and beeches were blue hepaticas, white anemones, violets and celandines in sheets. The celandines in particular delighted me with their clean, happy brightness, so beautifully trim and newly varnished, as though they too had had the painters at work on them … And then … came the lilacs – masses and masses of them … one great continuous bank of them … away down as far as one could see, shining glorious against a background of firs.’

  But a garden is what she wants, and on a considerable scale, given the acreage at her disposal. She plants sweet peas, hollyhocks, Madonna lilies and, above all, she sets about ordering and planting roses. Roses
are to be her speciality, and she names them all, meticulously: ‘Marie van Houtte’, ‘Viscountess Folkestone’, ‘Mme Laurette Messimy’, ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’, ‘Devoniensis’, ‘Persian Yellow’, ‘Duke of Teck’ … and so on until she has listed nineteen, a splendid litany of rose names. Remarkably, every single one is still available, I find; they have hung on, continuously cultivated for over a hundred years, demonstrating the tenacity of a good rose. Though some are clearly rarities now; you would have to pursue the right supplier. Back in Elizabeth’s day, she would have been scouring the cursory printed nurserymen’s catalogues that I remember my grandmother receiving, sombre text listing plant name and price with never an image in sight, a world away from the lavish photography and extravagant descriptions that we are used to today. Plant catalogues now compete with the garden centre in enticement technique. They reach for superlatives: fantastic, stunning, gorgeous, spectacular, fabulous, luscious, eye-catching. The images are always of plant perfection; eyeing them, you forget about the normal garden defects – the dead-heads, the mildew, the black spot, the greenfly.

  Elizabeth was a complete novice, when it came to gardening. She makes plenty of mistakes, struggles with dry, light soil that is particularly hostile to roses, has her failures: ‘The long border, where the rockets were, is looking dreadful. The rockets have done flowering, and, after the manner of rockets in other walks of life, have degenerated into sticks … the giant poppies I have planted out in them in April have either died off or remained quite small, and so have the columbines.’ But what is endearing, and impressive, about her, is that she had an eye, a vision, she knew what she wanted, and that was quite out of kilter with the gardening fashion of the day. She wanted irregularity, groupings, drifts of spring plantings, foxgloves and mulleins shining in her wild shrubbery walks. She is frustrated at every turn by her gardener, who wants everything in straight rows: ‘… he went about with a long piece of string making parallel lines down the borders of beautiful exactitude and arranging the poor plants like soldiers at a review.’ And it is at this point that one learns the main source of her frustration: ‘If I could only dig and plant myself!’ It would have been quite out of the question, it seems, for a Prussian lady of the manor to set to with spade and fork herself. Once, she does slink off furtively with spade and rake to sow some morning glory, retreating in haste to her chair ‘to save my reputation … it is a blessed sort of work, and if Eve had had a spade in Paradise and known what to do with it, we should not have had all that bad business of the apple.’

  How odd. There was Gertrude Jekyll, at the same time, digging away happily in England without inviting social outrage, but apparently in Prussia they did things differently. Eventually, it all got too much for Elizabeth, and she moved to England, with the oppressive Prussian husband dying in 1910. She went on to become an established writer, have an affair with H. G. Wells, marry Earl Russell (brother of Bertrand) and entertain a host of friends at the home she set up in Switzerland. She mixed with the literati of the day – Katherine Mansfield was a cousin, and both E. M. Forster and Hugh Walpole served as tutors to her children at Nassenheide. Forster later claimed that he hadn’t been able to find the garden, that it was more of a park, but one feels he can’t have looked very hard. Those hundreds of roses? She sounds rather attractive – tiny, only five foot, vivacious and gregarious. She died in America in 1941 and apparently her gravestone bore the epitaph, chosen by herself: parva sed apta – small but to the point. One has to forgive the coy style of the non-gardening parts of Elizabeth and Her German Garden as the expected feminine note of the day, made up for by the genuine fervour of her gardening voice, and her avant-garde ideas. She wanted a white garden, anticipating Vita Sackville-West by fifty years, and planned a yellow border: ‘There are to be eschscholtzias, dahlias, sunflowers, zinnias, scabiosa, portulaca, yellow violas, yellow stocks, yellow sweet peas, yellow lupins … I want it to be blinding in its brightness after the dark cool path through the wood.’ It sounds mad, a wild hotchpotch planting, but I like the innovative enthusiasm.

  I started my grown-up reading life in the age of the Sitwells – Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell; the late 1940s and early 1950s. Their works were the required reading matter of the day; every intellectually aspiring household had Osbert’s four-volume autobiography on the book table, a volume of Edith’s poetry, something of Sacheverell’s vast output (art, architecture, music). I dipped in, dutifully, and realized that you discover your reading taste from what you don’t care for quite as much as from what you enjoy. I couldn’t be doing with this sort of thing: grandiloquent overwriting for the most part, the use of ten words where one would do, a general miasma of pretension. I didn’t know that in fact the Sitwells were often under merciless attack at the time, figures of fun in some quarters, and indeed by the 1960s they had certainly fallen from favour and have slipped further and further from view ever since.

  Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell were the children of Sir George Sitwell, of Renishaw Hall, in Derbyshire. Earlier Sitwells had made a fortune from landowning and iron-making, achieved a baronetcy in 1908, and built themselves the gothic pile, Renishaw. And this is where the garden writing comes in. Sir George Sitwell wrote a short book called On the Making of Gardens, in 1909, which is mainly about the Italian Renaissance, with some reflections on theories of garden landscaping. Its interest, for me, is that it concludes with a fine example of what can only be called patrician garden writing – unique, perhaps.

  ‘It is not given to every man, when his life’s work is over, to grow old in a garden he has made, to lose in the ocean roll of the seasons little eddies of pain and sickness and weariness, to watch year after year green surging tides of spring and summer break at his feet in a foam of woodland flowers, and the garden like a faithful retainer growing grey in its master’s service. But for him who may live to see it, there shall be a wilder beauty than any he has planned. Nature, like a shy wood-nymph, shall steal softly back on summer nights to the silent domain, shading with tenderest pencillings of brown and grey the ripened stone, scattering wood-violets in the grassy alleys, and wreathing in vine and ivy the trellised arbour, painting with cloudy crusts of crumbly gold the long balustrades, inlaying the cornices with lines of emerald moss, planting little ferns within the fountain basin and tiny patches of green velvet upon the Sea-God’s shoulder.’

  Osbert Sitwell wrote an introduction to a later edition of On the Making of Gardens which is respectful, though with slight misgivings about his father’s prose style: ‘… couched in phrases often of stilted beauty … fountains throughout are inclined to “plash” … a genuine period-piece’. Well, yes, indeed. But Elizabeth and Her German Garden can also be said to be a period piece, and her writing could hardly be more violently different; apart from that winsome tendency, she appears by comparison agreeably unassuming and straightforward. Sir George Sitwell had also created a garden, the Italianate garden at Renishaw, but, judging from his writing, one suspects that he did no actual gardening. That was what the faithful retainers were for. Elizabeth longed to get her hands dirty; he was too patrician to do so. Which makes him, for me, not a real garden writer but a garden commentator. Though interesting, as such, because that style is an indication of what focusing on a garden can do to a person. Well, to a certain kind of person.

  So Sitwell deserves a mention for extremity of style only, not as a gardener writer. And Elizabeth von Arnim sneaks in just as honorary gardener: she wanted to get down there and dig, but was excluded on account of social status. The writing of the real gardener is another matter – the voices of those who really know what they are doing, the gardening connoisseurs, the gardening gurus.

  Anna Pavord was the gardening pundit to whom I paid most attention from the time when she was first contributing regular garden articles to the Independent. Their attraction was that they were succinctly knowledgeable but in no way patronizing or dictatorial; she simply helped you, with her expertise and her illuminating suggestion
s about how to set out a border, or tackle some recalcitrant piece of terrain. I have her to hand still, by way of her The Curious Gardener, a calendar of the year in the garden, again a nice combination of practicality and imaginative commentary. She wanders off into accounts of gardens she has admired, of her plant-hunting travels, a forensic inspection of pests and what to do about them, a swipe at aspects of the Chelsea Flower Show: ‘… the humourless pretension of the flower-arranging tent. Here, tortured creations draped in chiffon bear as much relation to the garden as a plastic ketchup bottle.’ She is essential reading on the clematis or the hydrangea: you see at once what you are doing wrong by way of planting or pruning. And then there are her two major scholarly works. I shall be referring to The Tulip in a later section; The Naming of Names is a companion volume in terms of its marriage of erudition with an eminently readable pursuit of botanical history. Anna Pavord is the perfect instance of a gardener writer, one for whom gardens and gardening have been the prompt for substantial and elegant writing.