So don’t let yourself picture Cobbett seated at a desk, pen in hand, during the light of the day. Imagine, instead, that it’s early, early morning, and he’s dictating to one of his children before the sun comes up. After four hours of literary work, he turns to other business. He took over a long-abandoned house on Long Island, and he and his children restored the garden there. He raised pigs, oxen, chickens, sheep, ducks, and turkeys. And when that house burned down in the spring of 1819, he raised a tent, lined it with English newspapers, and camped out there for several months, dressed in “a shirt, a pair of nankin trowsers, yellow buckskin shoes & a broad-brimmed straw hat.”
Nearly all of Cobbett’s gardening advice is still good advice. It’s impossible to improve on his description of how to prepare the soil for planting: “Make the ground rich, move it deep, and make it fine.” He walks you through the double-digging of a garden plot, a task that hasn’t changed since 1821. With the manure of cattle or horses and a little effort, you could still make a hotbed of the kind Cobbett describes, following his instructions to the letter, and it would yield just as Cobbett says it does. No one has ever written a better or clearer description of how to eat an artichoke. And if Cobbett’s passions overflow from time to time—as they always did—they are excellent passions. To him, the locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) is the “most beautiful of trees and best of timber.” To him, sea kale “is, unquestionably, (after the Asparagus,) the very best garden vegetable that grows.” The geranium (the pelargonium, that is) “wants hardiness only to make it the finest flower-plant of which I have any knowledge.” The cranberry “is one of the best fruits in the world. All tarts sink out of sight in point of merit, when compared with that made of the American Cranberry.”
Cobbett urges the gardener to consider the neatness, the handsomeness with which he does things. Partly, this is for moral reasons. But Cobbett also urges neatness and beauty for practical reasons. “Next comes the act of sowing,” he writes. “The more handsomely this is done, the better it is done. A handsome dress is better than an ugly one, not because it is warmer, or cooler, but because, liking it better, being more pleased with it, we take more care of it.” Cobbett imagines the American farmer building a garden for the ages. When it comes to laying out the hawthorn hedge, “place a line along very truly; for, mind, you are planting for generations to come!” He describes how to make a rakelike tool for laying out drills, or rows, in the soil. If made, as he recommends, with white oak for the head and locust for the teeth, “every body knows, that the tools might descend from father to son to the fourth or fifth generation.”
You may not choose to garden directly from the pages of The American Gardener, though generations of gardeners have done so. But in its pages you’ll find another America, a place where the profusion of wild huckleberries on Long Island “gives rise to a holiday, called Huckleberry Monday,” where fine laburnums bloom “between Brooklyn and the Turnpike gate.” Best, of all, you’ll find a rich helping of the genuine Cobbett. Thomas Carlyle described him as “the pattern John Bull of his century, strong as the rhinoceros, and with singular humanities and genialities shining through his thick skin.” He’s a man of genuine tenderness. “For, count our real pleasures,” he writes; “count the things that delight us through life: and you will find, that ninety-nine out of every hundred are derived from women. To be the object of no woman’s care or good wishes is a sentence the most severe that can be pronounced upon man.”
And even if you don’t end up making a hotbed or planting a hawthorn hedge, you’ll still find yourself going down to the garden with Cobbett’s words in mind. “Seasons wait for no man. Nature makes us her offers freely; but she will be taken at her word.”
note to the reader
Nearly all the pieces gathered in this book were first published, in slightly different form, on the editorial page of the New York Times, usually under the rubric “The Rural Life.” I’m grateful to Andy Rosenthal—and his predecessor at the editorial page, Gail Collins—for their continued publication of the occasional editorial essay. I’m also grateful to my wonderful colleagues on the Editorial Board, who have been warm and supportive in good times and bad. I still owe an inexpressible debt to Howell Raines, who brought me to the Times when he ran the editorial page and who imagined there might be room on the page for something like “The Rural Life.”
Other thanks? As always to Flip Brophy at Sterling Lord Literistic. To Roger Cohn, a longtime friend and editor who has given me room at Yale Environment 360. To my good friends and neighbors—who also happen to be excellent publishers and editors—Kevin and Jennifer Lippert. To the designers of this book, Paul Wagner and Benjamin English, and to the illustrator Nigel Peake for making such a handsome volume. To the neighbors around me in the country—farmers and friends—who have taught me and helped me and put up with me. And, most of all, to readers who bring this farm alive in their imaginations. I often wish I were living a life as thoughtful and deliberate as they suppose I do.
I owe one more inexpressible debt, and that is to Lindy Smith, who for a decade shared this farm and helped make it what it is. She knows better than anyone its joys and its sorrows.
More Scenes from the Rural Life Page 28