Our Life in Gardens

by Joe Eck

  PEA SEASON

  NO ONE CAN SAY that a gardening life is rich in leisured holidays, but a gardener’s rewards are festivals, big and small, though we make little distinction there, for they are all wonderful. There are other activities in which effort and labor are so certainly followed by achievement and celebration, and anyone who takes an active hand in shaping life must know equal causes for joy. We know only our life, which is largely one of gardening. So bulbs planted with raw fingers in October flower in April, their abundance in rewarding proportion to the effort of five months before. A richness of roses comes fast on the heels of the painful pruning and staking, feeding and spraying that roses both require and so abundantly reward. And for all our bruised knees and chapped fingers and sunburnt noses, we feel lucky. For whereas even children have only their birthday and Christmas, Hallowe’en and Easter, and the End of School mostly to anticipate, we can look forward to a host of special events: the season of snowdrops, and then of daffodils, then of magnolias and stewartias, and after that of lilacs and roses, poppies, asters, colchicum, autumn crocus, and snow.

  Our years are rich, but though we are generally aware of our wealth, it is the vegetable garden that most makes us clip our coupons and chuckle at our dividends. We start with Egyptian onions, our earliest crop, which may be harvested and sautéed as scallions in early April when the snow is barely gone. Fine spring lettuces and radishes overlap them, and then green garlic and asparagus, and then strawberries and raspberries, blueberries and currants, and then we are at sea with high summer, the great bark of which is corn and tomatoes, all one wants in that season to eat.

  A few crops and the festivals that attend their maturity are simply no trouble at all. Squash is like that. You put the seed in the ground, and a few short weeks later, you harvest the young fruits. Tomatoes require more effort, for they must be trained into cordons on bamboo stakes, and suckered and tied in, and the pests that get them in the end—wilts and mosaics and fungus—must be fought constantly with organic sprays, copper sulfate for choice. Cucumber vines must be twiddled up on strings, lest the vines crab along the ground, making the harvest a process of wading through a surf of sticky green leaves. Most vegetable crops are labor-intensive, really, but it is by the sweat of one’s brow that one eats, and that is a good thing always to remember.

  No crop is more labor-intensive than peas, and perhaps none is more treasured here. Effort may well equal appreciation in many human activities, and we would argue as much. What those who do not garden never seem to understand, however, is that the effort exists in one place (and brings its own pleasures) and the appreciation of its reward is in quite another. Peas are a lot of work, for the ground must be prepared early, heavily enriched with good, well-rotted poultry-yard compost, and made mellow with powdered lime. The work doesn’t stop there, for once the peas are sown in mid-April, cages must be constructed above the drills to support the vines. Peas are climbing plants that attach themselves by tendrils to whatever will boost them up into the light. In the wild, any old bush or twig will do, for their interest is entirely in reproducing, and they often form hopeless tangles that matter little to their essential purpose, though it matters greatly to anyone bent on harvesting their edible seeds.

  For the support of peas we have two methods, depending on their anticipated height. Tall-growing varieties, such as ‘Alderman’—also wonderfully named ‘Tall Telephone’—may reach as much as seven feet, taller in fact than the eight-foot bamboo poles we get from A. M. Leonard, a foot of which must be inserted into the ground to make the long, two-sided structures on which the vines are trained. A row of poles is set four feet from one another, and a second row is set exactly opposite the first, at approximately three feet apart, row from row. The poles are then crossed at the top to form an X, and lashed to a ridgepole down the center. A second set of poles is tied along the length of this structure at near ground level, and to both sides we attach lengths of black plastic bird netting. Generally, we plant tall peas in long rows of about twenty feet in length, so a good half of a day’s work is involved simply in building the structures, which will then be disassembled after the pea crop is finished and the last over-ripe pods have been gathered for Old Pea Soup. It is a lot of fun, and the great nineteenth-century gardener William Robinson did it for his sweet peas, which yielded nothing for the table, but only beautiful flowers.

  Even more entertaining is the construction of supports for lower-growing peas, often called “bush peas,” though we have found there is no such thing, since all peas scramble and their wayward habits irritate both gardener and cook, often one and the same. The lower-growing sorts include some of the very best and most flavorful peas one can grow, the famous petits pois of France. For them we use a different staking method, one that carries a glimpse of antique gardening the second it is put up.

  Many willows grow throughout our garden. Most of them are pollarded in spring, their last year’s growth cut into four-or five-foot lengths and carefully bundled up with twine from hay bales fed to the cows all winter long and hung on a forest branch. The willows are really grown for their own beauty, for the vivid egg-yolk yellow of Salix alba var. vitellina, the orange of ‘Chermesina’, the scarlet of ‘Winter Fire’, or the dusty, silver leaves of S. a. var. sericea. But the prunings are carefully saved as supports for the choicest peas we grow, not our main crop, certainly, for petits pois are quite frankly petite, each one hardly the size of a peppercorn. Still, they are worth this trouble, which begins in early April and does not end until they are shelled in July.

  Harvested willow twigs are inserted on either side of a rather wide row, with a hand-width trench down its middle, into which the tiny pea seeds have been generously sown about twice their thickness deep, as close almost, as the old gardeners used to say, “as peas in a pod.” (Or at least, almost that close, for you can overdo the advice even of the Old Ones.) The twiggy willow stems are then gathered together into little huts or domes spaced about two feet apart and four feet tall, their tops bundled and tied with the same baling twine the twigs came up to the garden in, and the tops clipped off neatly all at the same height. The result is an effect that would have been quite familiar to Marie Antoinette, who cosseted her peas and cooked them herself in a silver saucepan with her own butter.

  Beside the trouble of constructing supports—which, as we have tried to indicate, is a pleasure in itself for us—the cultivation of peas has two problems. Just after they have sprouted, peas have a curious way of thrusting themselves out of the ground. There is a wonderful sonnet by Robert Frost that alludes to this fact, called “Putting in the Seed”:

  You come to fetch me from my work tonight

  When supper’s on the table, and we’ll see

  If I can leave off burying the white

  Soft petals fallen from the apple tree.

  (Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite,

  Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea;)

  And go along with you ere you lose sight

  Of what you came for and become like me,

  Slave to a springtime passion for the earth.

  How love burns through the Putting in the Seed

  On through the watching for that early birth

  When just as the soil tarnishes with weed,

  The sturdy seedling with arched body comes

  Shouldering its way and shedding the earth’s crumbs.

  Pea seed must therefore be very firmly planted, and perhaps nothing is better than a foot newly naked to the warmth of spring and the feel of the living earth. But a gentler touch is required when the “sturdy seedling with arched body comes,” for then a sprinkling of earth from the side of the trench should be gently placed over its head until it can catch root and grow. The other great problem is crows, mischievous heavy-thinking birds that know when a pea shoot is at its most succu-lent, most ready to be snatched from the ground and gobbled up. But our staking methods foil them, since both methods look as if they coul
d snare a bird, even a very big one.

  Peas are beautiful even as tiny shoots, and their beauty increases steadily as they develop into little vines, clinging by tendrils to their supports. Soon mothlike flowers appear, snow white and never very numerous, each producing its tiny pod, which develops into a plumpness the gardener recognizes as ready. Actually, the first ones are eaten straight from the vine, without the grace of even a splash of water, hot or otherwise, but soon there is a flood of peas, throughout July and even into August.

  Everyone works for peas. They must be picked just at youthful maturity, when the pods are plump but not bursting at the seams, nicely filled out but still fresh with flavor. If the pods are yellowed or speckled or translucent, the peas inside will be dense with starch and stolid, fit only for soup.

  But when they are at their prime, the last joyful work of peas can begin, the shelling of them late in the day, usually at the kitchen table or even before a fire if the evening is cool, as it is in July, usually, in Vermont. As green as anything on earth, the fresh peas are shelled into bowls and the pods tossed into baskets on the floor, a prize for the pigs, who fortunately do not discriminate between pea and pod.

  It is interesting that all the great cookbooks we know have very few recipes for peas, and many lament the fact that there are never enough peas to do much with. That is, as it happens, not our problem, though we still cannot improve on the simplest of all recipes for peas, which is to plunge them into briskly boiling water for two or three minutes, drain them, and toss them with an appropriate amount of fresh butter. You could skip the butter. For that matter, you could skip the boiling water.

  THE PERGOLA WALK

  SOMETIMES THINGS WE DO in the garden work out so well that we wonder why it took us so long to get to them. The pergola walk is the best of many examples. It was put up about eight years ago, and is therefore the most recent major addition to the garden. But because its craggy locust logs have weathered quickly, and also because it is half smothered in vines, it seems as old as the very oldest parts of the garden. Older, maybe, because pergolas almost always carry the resonance of antiquity, for they are direct descendants of the pergula that was an essential part of ancient Roman gardens. Garden features that have been around for a long time are not always worth emulating, but at the least, they should receive careful consideration.

  It was in Italy that we ourselves fell in love with pergolas, on a vacation on the Amalfi Coast one winter to escape the snows and frigid winds of home. We don’t usually favor picture-book vacations, far preferring the confusion and the artistic richness of major cities. But Ravello is very close to the ancient ruins of Pompeii and not too far from Naples, where the great Borghese marbles are housed. So we had two quiet, sunny afternoons to walk the ancient streets of Pompeii almost alone, and peer into houses, taverns, and even latrines that would have been teeming with humanity two thousand years ago. We drove through Naples, an experience that makes driving in New York or even Athens seem like a ramble in the country, to see the great marble statues that Queen Christina of Sweden restored when they lived with her in the Borghese Palace in Rome. Standing below them—for they are huge—they seemed magnificent in just about every way.

  But we also visited the Villa Cimbrone, a Renaissance gentleman’s residence perhaps best known because Greta Garbo and Leopold Stokowski fled there briefly in a futile attempt to avoid the world’s eyes. There’s a small bronze plaque on the gate recording that fact. Though we saw not a soul about, we believe the house is still rented, but the grounds are open to the public for a small fee, and they are extraordinarily well kept. In early February, no flowers were apparent. Italian gardens aren’t generally given to flowers anyway, and that makes them disappointing to people who think that floral color is everything there is to see in a garden. But in an old Italian garden, the walls, terraces, balustrades, paths, and most especially its segmentation into separate experiences, are always worth careful study. At Villa Cimbrone—as in most Italian gardens—there were also trellises, arbors, pergolas, and even freestanding screens on which shrubby or climbing plants had been trained. We left there convinced that we had done far too little with vines, and that once we got home to Vermont, we would fix that, though we were not quite sure how.

  People travel for all kinds of reasons, and wherever they go they find stimulation for what most absorbs them. Ideas about what to do in the garden, like other ideas about making things more beautiful—interior decoration, for example, or your wardrobe, if you care about that—come from many directions and sometimes also from simple need. Even before we made this visit to Italy, we knew that Gertrude Jekyll, perhaps the most influential garden-maker of the last hundred and fifty years, almost never made a garden without including a pergola in it. Marshall Olbrich had also told us early on that a beautiful garden was made as much from what lay above as below, from spaces and volumes in the air. We have found that out for ourselves. Even in the vegetable garden, for example, the construction of a bamboo pea trellis or a frame to support tomatoes or cucumbers always transforms the horizontality of mere rows into something far more interesting.

  So a pergola—or at least what one might call the basic theory of a pergola—was already in our mind, and that trip to Italy confirmed it. But the final decision to build one came quite simply from the fact that we were unhappy when we moved through part of our garden. Above the stream the garden is split into two parts, separated by a wide grass path. That path ends in a rustic wooden gate, and for a long time, the only access to the guest house, daffodil meadow, vegetable garden, and poultry house—all important places we go to every day—was simply a dirt path through the woods. A connection seemed lacking, and a pergola seemed the solution. The day the structure was finished, it had an inevitability that made it seem it had been there forever. That is always the surest way to know you have done a good thing in the garden.

  Our pergola is made of locust, which, as old Vermonters say, “lasts exactly one year less than a stone in the ground.” It is improbable that we will ever test that theory, at least until we join those stones and locust posts ourselves. But it does seem certain that they will not need to be replaced during our actual lifetime. The pergola consists of eleven bays made of upright posts connected one to the other by stringers, with smaller posts placed horizontally across those to make a sort of open roof. Vines have been planted on each post—sometimes two to a post—and trained across the top. There are four honeysuckles, four climbing roses, and three wisterias, two blues and a white. They are selections of the native Wisteria macrostachya (once kentuckiense), which may lack the glamour of its oriental cousins, W. sinensis and W. floribunda, but which always blooms reliably in Vermont and is quite pretty in its way. There are also two mock oranges, which we learned can be turned into something like vines if they are tied to posts. On all these sturdy plants we have trained clematis for additional bloom, and also others, like the quite improbable climbing aconite, Aconitum episcopale, with hooded blue flowers late in the year, usually in mid-October. All these would be enough to make a garden, but as rich open woodland lies on either side, obviously we have added other plants, making a broad garden that melts into the surrounding woods.

  And that has been the greatest pleasure of the pergola walk, since we could concentrate there on growing the rarest woodland plants we could find. Dan Hinkley has helped im-measurably in that effort, for three years after any of his amazing treks to the Himalayas or eastern China or the high mountains of Chile, some plant he collected there from seed will be growing on our pergola walk. At present, its most remarkable plants are two specimens of Syneilesis, S. palmata and S. aconitifolia, both members of the vast daisy clan, the first with broad, eight-inch circles of leaf cut into points at their margins, and the second with fernier, more finely cut leaves that look like those of some geraniums. There are two large clumps of Podophyllum pleianthum, its leathery, star-shaped pads of leaf each about a foot across, looking like no other plant that we grow
here except water lilies. Glaucidium palmatum, the rare wood poppy, thrives both in the ethereal lavender form and in the equally beautiful white. Ferns are plentiful, none of them particularly rare, though the ostrich fern, Matteuccia struthiopteris, grows to an alarming seven feet tall, and native maidenhair ferns are becoming almost weeds. Certainly, though, the stars of the pergola are orchids, of which Cypripedium kentuckiense has proven the most vigorous, two separate clumps of it providing perhaps thirty blossoms each. We have not yet tried the most beautiful of the hardy lady’s slipper, C. reginae, which occurs natively in the woods around here and much farther north, even to Zone 2. Stock of it is scarce, and one simply does not dig from the wild, wherever it has settled down to grow. But we will find it someday as a nursery-propagated plant, and we are sure that it will thrive on our pergola walk.

  The segmentation of a garden into separate experiences is an essential part of its beauty. Usually, these separate parts are metaphorically called “rooms,” and great care must be taken to be sure that each has its own identity and offers its own particular delight. But equally important is the way those rooms are connected by hallways, stairways, or corridors that link one part to another. They are the vital filament on which the beads are strung. There is great pleasure in simply getting from here to there. The connecting functions of a garden are also usually linear spaces. You walk down, up, or through them, surrounded by the garden rather than simply standing in front of it. That is why access is such an important concern of a garden designer.