by Joe Eck
Perhaps you can find all these things. If you are lucky enough to live in San Diego and can get to Chino’s, the legendary farmstead that has been in the same Japanese family for three generations—through war and out of it—you certainly will. Or you could live near Walker Farm, in East Dummerston, Vermont, as we do (another family enterprise, in the case of Jack and Karen Manix, the present stewards, extending through six generations), to see what is fresh and choice, and in the process, pick up some cut flowers, a tray of rare annuals, or a loaf of really good bread. There are many other such places, we are sure, since more and more Americans are interested in fresh, organically grown vegetables and fruits, and have learned that a head of lettuce is not just a head of (iceberg) lettuce, and a carrot is not automatically all a carrot aspires to be.
Somewhere also, in every sizeable city, there are open-air markets or gourmet food shops that cater to a really discriminating taste in vegetables, generally referred to as “fresh produce.” (What other kind is there, though we certainly do know its opposite, “stale produce.”) In New York, for example, there must be such a place, for the appetite is certainly there, and the cash to spend is also, and opportunities for brisk sales generally appear like mushrooms when appetite and cash conjoin. But we are almost half New Yorkers at this point in our life, and we don’t know where it is. There is the famous Union Square Market, to be sure, which can, on a lovely summer or autumn weekend, be wonderfully lighthearted, with attractive young people circulating among the open-air stalls, accumulating their week’s vegetables and fruits in sensible, ecologically correct canvas bags that are tucked around Baby in its high-tech carriage.
Even, however, if we admit that really great organic farm stands do offer superb produce, picked fresh that day and in the most exquisite sizes and varieties, our argument for a home vegetable garden would still not be silenced. If you are in the mood for an outing, a trip anywhere can be nice, even, if you have cabin fever, to the local supermarket, where rounding the aisle into frozen foods might be distinctly depressing, not just because people apparently eat that sort of thing, but because the experience of being out and about is almost over. However, a trip to a really great farm stand is a lift to the heart, and one might begin smiling half a mile away. But an amble to your own vegetable garden is really quite a different thing. Better too, we’d argue, not just because it is the work of your own hands, but also because you can do it so often and still do it again. We often go to ours four or five times a day, for harvest, to work, for a handful of parsley, or just to go up and stare at the beauty that is there. We would not want to get into a car so often to travel to the best farm stand on earth.
Of course our main argument is a spiritual one, and neither has reference to practicality nor can be overturned by any practical considerations whatsoever. Vegetable gardening—assuming one does it right, and if not right, why at all?—is a lot of work. Also, the work both starts and ends in the least pleasant parts of the year, in early spring when rows must be turned, compost and lime bucketed in, and the first seeds sown of peas and spinach and lettuce, and in the chilly twilights of autumn, when frost threatens and all the crops that are sensitive to cold must be gathered in, tomatoes both ripe and green, eggplants, peppers, squash, and pumpkins. Covers must be thrown over celery, celeriac, and perhaps artichokes, if we have not already taken them all. Sometimes, with aching muscles not yet awake to spring, or with numbing fingers in the desperate early twilight of the first black-frost night, we are near to tears. So what? When were the deepest satisfactions available to humanity ever bought without labor and suffering?
There’s more to it than that, of course, and though committed vegetable gardeners might seem to the rest of humanity rather like mad folk, there are good, bright, sunny times, when the work of the garden—sowing, cultivating, weeding, harvesting—is all done under warm skies and seems as effortless as breathing. We know gardeners who approach their vegetable plots in just that spirit, always getting their crops in when the spring sunshine is warm (too late, in our opinion) and cheerfully abandoning their last tender crops to frost, the very thought of which makes them turn more comfortably into their warm pillows. They probably have the best of it, and in the eyes of nongardeners, their attitudes make sense. For such fair-weather gardeners, we have a sort of admiration, though it perhaps barely veils our contempt. To us, and put most simply, work is itself a joy. We do not know what we would do, otherwise.
In gardening, design is seldom a function of labor, but in vegetable gardening, it is. There is a lucidity about its design that makes a vegetable garden a very satisfying place to work and to be. Except for the odd patch of chervil, say, or dill, it is mostly a regular affair, of rows and squares and rectangles. We have seen vegetable gardens attempted with curving rows and swirls and other ingenious free-form patterns. We appreciate the whimsy of the people who made them and their fine, early spring Mad Hatter ingenuity. But those gardens simply never seem to work. Or be workable, for with almost any vegetable gardening chore you can name, there is something soothing about the rhythm of up one row and down the other. It is as indisputable a logic as the feet of cows, which always make paths over fields in a way that is at once most sensible and elegant.
So the paths in a vegetable garden—and there must be some, to get among the crops for cultivation, to fertilize and harvest and spray, and maybe simply to stroll about on a quiet summer evening—must be regular also, and in straight lines. Since we have a country garden attached to no grand house, we far prefer paths of common hay—spoiled and therefore cheap if we can find it—laid over very thick layers of newspaper, or the winter’s accumulation of catalogs containing things we cannot afford and would not want if we could. Still, we welcome every one for path making, come early spring. Then they are laid on the earth, and hay conceals them. Since all paper and inks are now soy-based, nontoxic, and rich with nourishment for earthworms and other beneficial soil creatures, we consider each catalog a gift. Even in triplicate.
When all our gardening efforts must be curtailed, the last to go will be the vegetable garden. For it alone, among all the many parts of our garden, reflects that high ideal which motivated both Washington and Jefferson as garden-makers, the marriage of Use and Beauty. And when, from age or other causes, we must give it up, we will still be growing lettuce in a window box.
VIOLETS
WE KNOW we have bought violets from time to time, for we remember bringing them home from some nursery or another. Certainly we have also been given violets, since violets are prolific, and anyone who grows them has them to give away. But violets predate our own brief tenancy on our land by eons. Thirty years is nothing to that history, but when we first saw this land that long ago on a mild late-April day, April 30 to be specific, Viola rotundifolia was spreading new flowers on every wooded bank above the stream. They were of modest beauty, hardly half an inch across, though of a rich, buttercup yellow that glowed against their few, rounded, laurel-green leaves. They have been faithful to the anniversary of our first acquaintance, blooming always by the last of April and seldom before, despite the global warming that has altered the calendars of so many of our favorite flowers. They prefer the drier woodland spots, often flourishing best around old maples that have thrust the soil upward with their soaring trunks. We have never chosen to transplant them, liking so much the places they choose to be, and the memory of our first encounter with them there.
Memory, however, accounts for many fewer violets than we seem to have in the garden, and where they all came from is often a puzzle. They are unassuming plants, usually choosing quiet, almost secret places to flourish. They make patches under the shade of deciduous shrubs, beneath the hedges, or even in the lawns. Any fertile spot that is far from weeding hands will suit them, and they seem particularly to favor the spiny thickets of antique and shrub roses, where they obviously feel safest. They have a curious way of reproducing, for the flowers one loves are usually (though not always) sterile. Underneath th
e sheltering leaves, and later in the year, the reproductive parts are produced, fat green pods that fertilize themselves. Botanists call this mechanism “cleistogamy,” from the ancient Greek cleisto, meaning “closed or secret,” and gamy, meaning “marriage.” Once a violet is introduced into the garden, perfect clones will reappear, even though the original plant was lost or forgotten many years ago. So from April to early summer, our garden is full of violets, noticed then and forgotten at almost any other time. Often it is a chance encounter with long-lost friends.
One great exception, however, is V. labradorica, which we notice as much—more perhaps—for its fine summer foliage as for its May bloom. Though widely distributed through Greenland and the colder parts of eastern North America, our own plants were certainly nursery-bought, though we cannot remember where or when. Like so many plants that persist in any garden over many years, V. labradorica seems to have found its own habitat here, flourishing in the narrow cracks of a small planted terrace beside the glassed-in winter garden. There, it produces four-inch-tall tuffets of heart-shaped leaves, studded in late spring with half-inch-wide flowers of rich violet purple and buds of the same color. The remarkable thing about V. labradorica, however, is that the leaves are also a deep, purple-flushed green with purple undersides, and though the flowers are magnificent against that backdrop, the handsome leaves remain all season and well into winter, justifying the prominent spot the plant occupies. You need only one plant in such a habitat in order to have dozens, cramming into the narrowest crevices and even into crannies of old mortared walls. They may also happily settle around fine old potted specimens of bay or box or gardenia, where they are equally pretty, and a dreadful pest, stealing their food and smothering their roots. From there, at least, they must be eradicated summarily.
If V. labradorica is prominent for most of the year, V. rosea catches us always by surprise. It is a shy little thing, blooming in late April among the thick litter of last autumn’s leaves caught around the bare shanks of the roses. The flowers are small, hardly the size of an English pea, and somehow shrunken or malformed, with a complexion of strong pink made washy by paler blotches. We’d hardly go looking for it, so we smell it in bloom before we see it. Every year we marvel that so small a thing can be so insistently fragrant, stronger on the air than our best old roses in their season. The original plant came to us from our near neighbor in the next state, the landscape designer Kris Fenderson. We’ve had it over twenty years, always close to but never where it was planted. Still, it always returns to remind us that though it has moved a few yards, it continues to be with us. We’d miss it sorely any year it did not beckon us to come closer.
But V. rosea is hardly the only violet that has an odd way of turning up. A curious case of this “now you see me, now you don’t” quality that so many violets seem to possess is reflected in our experience with V. ‘Sulfurea’. More than fifteen years ago, we had a compost pile in an area that seemed remote to us then but now is at the heart of the garden. The compost has long since been carted away, and the branches of the mature conifers and rhododendrons that now sweep across that space give us little reason to peer among them except to yank away the occasional seedling ash or maple. Three springs ago, in late April, we were desultorily doing that, using up a scrap of time before lunch, when one of us noticed a patch of dull green leaves about a foot wide, studded with small violets of a curious blend of cream, buff, and apricot, with improbably violet centers. They were very beautiful, those chance flowers, and we resolved to dig the plants up patiently, separate out the wisps of fescue and woodland aster entangled with them, and establish them under closer eye in a prominent part of the garden.
We meant to do that, but spring is full of similar good resolutions, and we didn’t. The following year, we meant to do it too, for the violets were still there, still shining, still holding their own against the weeds. Maybe we’ll do it next year. For we see that a quite beautiful selection of V. ‘Sulfurea’ is being offered by Canyon Creek Nursery under the cultivar name ‘Irish Elegance’. It does not seem more elegant than ours, which must have been thrown out, years ago, in a flat of failed seed. Such is the way of violets. They always win out in the end.
We are sure that V. sororia and all the selections of it we have planted in the garden over the last thirty years will win out the strongest. We transplanted the first ones into the garden from a five-acre meadow far in the back of our property, where they flourished in sheets before we had cows to graze them and we had the time and patience to pick bouquets of hundreds of blooms. Both in the picking and in transplanting, we took both the violet and the white, really a washy gray, giving it the popular name Confederate violet, from the sadly worn uniforms of the Confederate soldiers in the Civil War. We still have a nice mix of both occurring vigorously along the Rose Alley, where they were first established in 1978. We distinguish among the colors only when they are in bloom, however, or when a nice mix of their delicious young leaves and flowers is needed for a spring salad. Otherwise, they are ruthlessly weeded in spring, for summer annuals, for perennials, and, in spring, for more daffodils, with which those that are left amiably conspire. More are sure to reappear.
“Shy” is no word to apply to our native V. sororia, which carries the Latin word for “sisterly,” seemingly because it will grow into a gaggle of its kind, often smothering out any plant that cannot get the upper hand with it. Thwack it out as we must, come late spring, we cannot always leave some purple and some white to have each. But we do try to leave behind some choicer cultivars, especially ‘Freckles’. It is aptly named, for each half-inch-wide flower is so copiously dotted over with violet spots on a white ground that the whole seems a pale, grayish mauve from above. (It is the particular delight of children, who are closer to seeing things than we are, and therefore discern its spots.)
‘Freckles’ has been widely circulated and can be gotten from many nurseries, or as a friendly gift from fellow gardeners who grow it. We remember perfectly where we got it ourselves. We were young gardeners at the time and depended heavily for our latest treasures on Johnny Laughton, an elderly retired postman who ran an extraordinary “open-field” nursery in West Brattleboro, Vermont. The nursery consisted of his little house and, behind, really an open field parceled out into perhaps a hundred narrow rectangular beds, each occupied by a single plant, and all divided by grassed paths a mower’s width wide, so one sweep could keep them tidy. The idea was that you could—during business hours, though there was no fence to keep you out otherwise—stroll up and down the paths, buying what you liked, in flower or out. We mostly bought “in flower,” and Johnny would pull out the plant, shake off every particle of earth, cut off the pretty flowers and leaves (you could take them home, for a vase, if you wanted to), and wrap the roots in damp newspaper. He had a thick bracelet of rubber bands on his right wrist for the purpose, and if you watched carefully (for he was shrewd), a bit of root and stem would always be left on the grass to restock the hole your purchase made. You “totaled up at the house,” and everyone was satisfied.
Satisfied later, too, for though Johnny’s methods were rough, they were those that any generous gardener practices when he gives plants. For plants taken vigorously alive from the open ground always do best, and if that were not so, old country gardens would be poor things, and we’d all have no heirloom plants. It is the old country way. And if you looked doubtfully at Johnny while he shook off the dirt from a clump of daylily or iris or astilbe, he would say bluntly, “I sell plants, not dirt.” A surprising number of his plants have flourished here over a quarter of a century. He has been dead for most of that time, and his nursery is now a “multiple dwelling” with asphalt parking lots where the beds once were. But if V. sororia ‘Freckles’ does not survive there (it well might, given the ways of violets), it does here and probably will for many years to come. Above all others, it is for that reason that violets are valuable and valued by the many gardeners who grow them.
WILLOWS
AT FIRST, willows would not seem to be plants to get excited about, much less to collect. None has flowers that are showy, certainly not like a magnolia or a dogwood. They are not characterized by brilliant autumn foliage like a maple or stewartia. With the exception possibly of the weeping willows, few are as noble in stature as oaks or beeches or ashes. Generally they are short-lived, weak-wooded, and messy. Still, our garden is rich with willows, each of which possesses some modest charm that far outweighs any defect.
The genus Salix is a relatively large one, with more than four hundred species and as many as two hundred hybrids. (Of that latter number no one is really certain, for many hybrids occur unrecorded in the wild.) In growth, species can range from one hundred feet to alpines that rise barely two inches above the ground. There are willows grown for the charm of their flowers, which, though modest, appear at the first turn toward spring and are the earliest harbinger of its arrival. There are also willows with beautiful foliage, and willows with brilliant twig color, especially in the depths of winter, when any spark of color is precious. And of course there are weeping willows, a miracle of sturdy upright grace and down-hanging twigs, however banal their use might seem as obligatory plantings next to ponds.
Among the many willows we grow, it would be hard to select favorites, for all of them give us great pleasure in their season. But the ones with brilliantly colored twigs do that first, starting off the willow year in the dead of winter, so we should begin there. Several forms of the protean Salix alba grow along the steepest banks of our stream, a conscious imitation of the “willow ditch” in Margery Fish’s famous English garden, East Lambrook Manor, about which we read years ago. Like hers, all of ours are pollarded, which is to say that they are cut back each spring within two inches of the previous year’s growth so that they form dense heads above their brown-gray trunks. Pollarding is an ancient technique, familiar to Roman gardeners and still prominently practiced along the edges of fields and drainage ditches in northern Italy, France, and the Netherlands. Originally it was an agricultural practice, for the process produces long willow wands that could be woven into baskets and wicket fences, or split into wythies to bind things together. But it also resulted in great beauty, producing richly colored twigs from December until March, intensifying with the advancing year until spring, when they were harvested to produce another year’s crop.