What to do about the fox? The wisteria at the moment the fox appeared was not on my mind. The fox, seen in the shade of the euonymus, was gray in color, its coat looking like an ornament, a collar of the coat of someone who could afford such a thing, or a part of the handbag of someone who could afford such a thing, or a spectacle on the wall of someone who could afford such a thing and then not have the good sense to say no to it; when it (the fox) gallivanted into the part of the garden that was not in the shade, the part of the garden that was full of sun, he wasn’t gray at all, his entire coat looked as if someone had just put a light to it, as if he had just been set on fire. The fox did not run away from me, only advanced away from me as I tentatively went forward. The way he would run away from me with his head turned toward me, watching me behind him as he propelled himself forward, was frightening: I cannot do that. And then he disappeared into another part of the wild and I could not follow.
What to do about the fox? For that spring, as I looked worriedly at the wisteria, seeing the little nubs along the drooping stems grow fattish and then burst open into little shoots of green, I saw a small round thing hopping behind some rosebushes (Rosa ‘Stanwell Perpetual’) and then disappear behind some pots in which I meant to grow sweet peas. The small round thing moved faster than a chipmunk, did not have a long tail, and so was more attractive than a rat; it emerged from behind the pots slowly, peeking, and then came out altogether and stared at me. It was a baby rabbit, and I could see (I felt I could see, I thought I could see) that he was not familiar with danger; he was not malicious and never (as far as I could see) ate anything that was of any value (ornamental or otherwise) to me; he was a pest only because sometimes, when I did not expect him, he would suddenly hop into my view, startling me out of some worry or other (I mostly worry in the garden, I am mostly vexed in the garden). His mother must have worried about him, because one day I saw her (I felt it was his mother, I thought it was his mother) looking for him. I saw them once emerging from the woodland part of the garden, I saw them again in the company of some other rabbits, and I could tell them apart from the other rabbits because none of the others were as big as the mother or as small as he. And then I didn’t see them anymore and never even thought of them anymore, until that day I saw the fox emerge from the woodland. It still remains that I never see them anymore, but it does not remain so that I never think of them anymore. I thought of them just an hour ago, when I put three lobsters alive in a pot of boiling water, and it is possible that I will think of them tomorrow when I am eating the lobsters sometime during the day. Will the shells from the lobster be good for the compost? I will look it up in a book, I have a book that tells me what to do with everything in the garden, and sometimes I take its advice and sometimes I do not; sometimes I do what suits me, sometimes I do in the garden just whatever I please.
And what to do? For this summer was like no other and this summer was like all the others. I never had wisteria before; in any case, I had never had wisteria bloom in summer before, I had never heard of it. In this summer of the blooming wisteria the tomatoes (all heirlooms) yielded not abundantly, but they always do that—yielding not abundantly—and only when I taste them (‘Prudens Purple,’ ‘Striped German,’ ‘Green Zebra,’ ‘Radiator Charlie’) do I forget all complaints, only when I visit other people who, at the end of the season, have tomatoes lined up on newspaper all over their floors, tomatoes with no attribute other than “I grew them myself.” This summer (and it is now that summer) I reaped a planting of peas (‘British Knight’) and then shortly after planted another batch (and that was a success also), and the cucumbers yielded more than I could use, but the potatoes, the early ones, the late ones, all got a blight and that is the way of potatoes in my vegetable garden, wherever I plant them, whatever their time of maturity, they get a blight, something or other that makes them not attractive if you see them just lying in a wicker basket, just picked, but they are delicious anyway when boiled and tossed in butter and parsley. The beets grew slowly, the carrots grew slowly, it rained too much and then it did not rain enough.
In the holding bed a young Magnolia ashei bloomed, one large white fragrant flower sitting in the middle of some larger leaves, but I noticed it only because … because, well, of how I wanted the wisteria to bloom; I had such a picture of it, the wisteria, blooming in spring with late bulbs, and the sound of that bird that is going even farther north, the sound that bird makes is sweet and piercing, as if pleasure could also be pain (as if pleasure is not also pain), the blue of the wisteria (blooming now, or then) on one side of the patio, its white counterpart on the other, with an underplanting of yellow tulips (‘Mrs. J. T. Scheepers’) and an almost full-blooming Fothergilla gardenii, and Frittillaria persica nearby. And when I saw the Magnolia ashei unexpectedly blooming, it made me long for the wisteria, and I wondered if I had done something wrong (horticulturally, though on the whole I never wonder, I know for certain I have done something wrong); but M. ashei blooms at a very young age; a book I have, entirely devoted to magnolias, The World of Magnolias by Dorothy J. Callaway, tells me so.
That summer, this summer! The wisteria came into bloom just at that moment in the summer, in the garden, when I could not imagine that there could be such a thing as winter, when the fact of winter seems amusing, like something malicious (short of death) happening to someone I dislike in an irrational way. Oh, winter, what is it, anyway? What is it really, this thing where the air is cold, the trees are bare, and all beings, human or otherwise, look hungry, look as if there is not enough of anything and there never will be. But just then, just now (that summer, this summer! when the wisteria was blooming out of turn), the leaves of the trees had reached a green beyond which they could not go, they were only going to be green, certainly so, and the lawn would no longer be lush with grass, only untidy and overgrown and need cutting, and, and … Oh, the deliciousness of complaining about nothing of any consequence and that such a thing should be the case in a garden: because, (again) that wisteria blooming now (or then) so close to the buddleia, which in turn is not too far from the Phlox paniculata ‘Norh Leigh,’ which is also somehow in the middle of the Phlox paniculata ‘David,’ is all pleasing to my eye, as I was looking at it then (now); at that moment of the wisteria, turning left or right (counterclockwise or clockwise), this is what I could see in front of me, this is what might be the zenith of summer in this (my) garden: the perennial pea (Lathyrus latifolius) in bloom in its guzzling way (eating up all the space around it and slightly beyond and then really beyond that); some cultivars of Lobelia siphilitica (bought from Dan Hinkley because I was so taken by his description, and I remain open to seeing this lobelia just the way Dan described it) on the verge of blooming; an accidental planting combination of Platycodon grandi-florus blue and pink; a large amount of a tall monkshood that I did not stake and so it has bent over and mingled with the perennial pea; and the perennial pea, which has sent up a set of only white blooms into the dry brown thing that had been the huge bloom of Crambe cordifolia (and how perfect, for I could never have done this: white replacing white on purpose); and the leaves on the vine of the Clematis paniculata, its pleasingly smelly blooms to come in early September (I think, in this the summer of the strange blooming wisteria); the very later blooming monkshood, the fading delphiniums (some of them from Dan Hinkley’s ‘Melissa’s Hope’ strain, some from Bob Stewart’s recommended McClegnan’s Hybrids), the Malva (alcea and moschata), which I did not like and now (then) feel as if I cannot live without and look at the clumps in other people’s gardens with envy and obligatory admiration; the Codonopsis clematidea demanding that you bend over—bow—to see them if you want to do that—see them, they are worth that. And while still looking, my head going from right to left, I cross the pathway that divides this part of the garden (the pathway is a convenience), and on the other side of the pathway is pure hideousness, some cup plants, some plume poppies, and there are other things (a grouping of yellow hollyhocks, yellow trumpet lilie
s, yellow and close-to-yellow blooming kniphofia, but I like them); a much treasured tree tobacco plant (Nicotiana glauca, I believe, and not Nicotiana tomentosa, though I can’t tell the difference and don’t really care to); a banana tree (Musa ‘Lord Cavendish’) growing in a pot and looking happy amid a background of plants alien to it (evergreens, the monkshood); two pots holding the dark red, glossy-leaved dahlia ‘Bishop of Llandaff’ (gotten from Dan H.), the yellow-flowering buddleia; the ever-blooming rose ‘Pristine’; the once-blooming roses ‘Henry Kelsey’ and ‘Alchymist,’ and the, for me, sometimes blooming ‘Stanwell Perpetual’; two clematis of Himalayan origin from Dan H. (I cannot remember their names, only that he was so enthusiastic about their good qualities, and I can’t remember those, only that I like them very much and do not know any other gardeners who cultivate them); the white wisteria, which did not bloom and so did not cause me any disturbance at all (it just threw out many vines, which I assume will grow into limbs, and then from there will come stems and on them … flowers?); and then the Lilium orientalis ‘Black Beauty,’ which is not black at all, but how I long for it to be that, black—a flower that is the color black, black like the night or like something that is instantly recognizably black is so rare that in the garden, in a flower, I long for it; and then, in this episode, in this part of the garden, I stop where the agapanthus ‘Blue,’ bred by the great Eric Smith, is in full bloom in a clay pot. How I love Eric Smith, especially since I know him only in the most impersonal of ways; I do not know if he preferred meat to vegetables or wool to cotton, I only know that most small-leaved blue hostas (‘Halcyon’ especially) are the product of his interests and efforts.
Oh, how I like the rush of things, the thickness of things, everything condensed as it is happening, long after it has happened, so that any attempt to understand it will become like an unraveling of a large piece of cloth that had been laid flat and framed and placed as a hanging on a wall and, even then, expected to stand for something. In this summer, in that summer, evenings would come on, and the birds would begin their annoying, or frightful (if I was in that mood), or cheerful (if I was in that mood), or simply birdlike noise, if I was in a mood to understand that a bird was often, itself, birdlike. There was a woodpecker, and one day while marveling or muddling (they were the same, really) over the wisteria, I heard its loud hammering and looked up and saw it picking away with its beak at the eave of my house. I love especially to sleep in the mornings until when the sun is almost in the middle of the sky, not quite, just almost, and sometimes, when I was asleep and in the middle of a most enjoyable dream, I would be awakened by that hammering, not the sound of the hammering of a carpenter who was repairing my wall, but a hammering all the same. A man who is not a carpenter makes a monthly visit to my house, and his visit has to do with controlling the presence of rodents inside the house (this is only a way of saying that he makes sure that rodents do not live inside my house and that if they try to live inside my house they will soon die). When this man, while looking at my house to see the places a rodent might find convenient to enter, saw the holes on the outside of my house left by the hammering of the woodpecker, he said to me, There are insects living in and eating up your house. What should I do? I said to him, and he said something, only now I have on purpose forgotten, for whenever I find a bird dead not far from my house, and in the garden, I wonder if it is because they ate the insects who were eating my house. I found the woodpecker dead in the yellow border; I found robins dead not far from the yellow border. What to do? I asked myself. And just when I was really perplexed, and engaged in an argument with myself about my own fears and my responsibility to others (birds, at that!), another woodpecker appeared and was hammering away at the house, and one day was so loud that I could not concentrate on my reading (I was reading Jeremiah, the Hebrew prophet). And then I found the broken shell of a robin egg in the dwarf evergreen beds, and something else, a bird whose name I did not know, built a nest just behind the red shutters of the window, and laid eggs there and the mother was very discreet, but her children were a perfect nuisance, especially at half past five in the morning.
And in that summer, this summer, in which the wisteria bloomed out of turn, it first rained too much, and then it did not rain enough, and then it rained too much again, and then it did not rain again, just not rain again, really. It was not a drought, and by a drought I mean absence of rain and at the same time a heat that purposely (maliciously) reaches deep into the soil and removes as much moisture as it can find, enough moisture to make me worry and then fret and then be vexed. The irritation to be found in the garden, the pleasure in it—for it is not an irritation like the kind met when putting on a favorite dress after a little while and then finding that the buttons at the waist, or the ones that are supposed to secure the opening across the chest or the ones that are supposed to secure the opening at a vulnerable part in the back, are missing or simply won’t go anywhere near the buttonhole—the irritation to be found in the garden will not lead to any loss of face; it will only lead to this question: What to do? and the happiness to be found in that!
The yellow border does not work; the aurelian lilies are too, are too … something, and the something is not quite right for the yellow border, they hang oddly; I have nothing in bloom at the same time to give them proper company. The kniphofia is in bloom at the same time as they (the trumpets are), but the kniphofia is not a good enough counterpart, the kniphofia should not be so near to the trumpet lilies. The yellow hollyhocks (Alcea ficifolia) are good towering above the aurelian lilies, but I do not have enough of them, for a reason (I could not afford to buy as many as I needed, or as many as I wanted) I always find humiliating: a lack of money. I do not like money, I only love the ability to dispose of it, and sometimes my disposing of it leads to some comfort for others, but mostly my disposing of money leads to much disappointment for me; for with me satisfaction is elusive (and so worth pursuing); for example, the horrible cup plant (Rudheckia maxima) with its blooms the color of a universal yellow (and sometimes the universal is reassuring and uplifting and inspiring, and then again sometimes the universal is not, just not so at all). And in that summer, this summer! I had been traipsing around, tramping around in the garden, looking at the failed yellow border (looking at how I had misunderstood the shapes and the colors of some things, the presence of some things, the effect of all of them making a whole), I was in despair (but again, of the pleasurable kind, the kind that everyone living in the area of the world that starts in the Sudan and ends in southern Africa ought to have, just to begin with). And in this traipsing up and down with a gait that I must say has its own integrity (it certainly was outside and beyond the one I once thought proper when wearing a Brownie uniform, when expecting to meet someone who at the moment of their being born was better than I), I met another of my misunderstandings: the Carpinus betulus ‘Pendula’ was doing very nicely, thriving in its spot, which is in the middle of the middle of the bed I have called ‘Hispaniola’; but I have surrounded this beautiful specimen, with its stout trunk like a strong backbone, I have surrounded this beautiful specimen, with its long, weeping branches and corded leaves, with thalictrum and Scabiosa ochroleuca and Filipendula ‘Venusta’ and plume poppy and some lobelia (ordinary blue) and some turtlehead (pink) and some Aster tataricus and more late-blooming monkshood and some Eryngium yuccifolium and the poor thing, the Carpinus betulus ‘Pendula,’ that is, looked as if it had found itself orphaned and in care of people who could not love it in the way it had thought appropriate in which to be loved.
I moved the Scabiosa ochroleuca into the yellow bed—it is yellowish and tall and airy and wants to go everywhere it feels will be susceptible to its presence (I am reminded of myself, except for the yellowish part). Next year, next season, in the summers to come (I imagine myself in the summers to come, and I believe in my continued existence in the summers to come far less than I believe in the fact that winter will come again), I imagine it airy, that is, moving in an und
esperate way, in front of the climbing roses (R. filipes ‘Kiftsgate,’ ‘Paul’s Himalayan Musk,’ and some other roses whose names I cannot recall and whose records of purchase I have misplaced), replacing the rudbeckia, making the kniphofia appear desirable (“How I should like to have those,” a friend of mine will say), making the hollyhocks appear as if they were a new idea, giving the planting across the walkway (perennial pea, lobelia, delphinium, monkshood, platycodon, Codonopsis clematidea, the autumn-blooming clematis that had attached itself to the long-past large blooming heads of Crambe cordi-folia, and then in early autumn will come small white star-shaped flowers smelling like honey or something like that, something that made you want to eat it or bathe in it). The Scabiosa ochroleuca would bring all this, my vision of that area of the garden to rest, the sort of rest that leads to satisfaction, the sort of satisfaction that leads to reflection and contentment (even if the contentment is disturbing, but it is the sort of contentment that leads to disturbance, the disturbance in the mind). The Scabiosa ochroleuca comes from east and south of Europe and in its Scabiosa ochroleuca self, I am sure it had not imagined my garden and the scheme I had in mind: it would brighten the hollyhocks (which were great by themselves without brightening but why not that—brightening, if only just to agree or disagree, brightening? not brightening?). I moved the Scabiosa ochroleuca, it immediately withered, starting from its top stem all the way to the ground. Next year (that summer, this summer!), when I see the results of my handiwork, the results of my vexations, I feel sure I will be irritated with the joy of success or deeply vexed by the results of my miscalculation.
My Garden (Book) Page 2