The grimness of winter for this gardener can be eased only by such things. On my night table now is a large stack of books and all of them concern the Atlantic slave trade and how the world in which I live sprang from it. The days will have to grow longer, warmer, and softer before I can pick one of them up.
THE GARDEN IN WINTER
One summer, early in the afternoon, I went to visit my friend Love. She and her mother (a perfectly nice woman, just to look at her) were walking in her garden. (Love’s garden is in the shape of an enormous circle, subdivided into long and short rectangular-shaped beds, half-circle-shaped beds, square-shaped beds, and it is separated from her house by a wide sheet of obsessively well-cut grass and a deep border of iris, foxglove, and other June/July flower-bearing perennials.) Love was in a fretful mood (her mother’s presence had made her that way) and was looking forward to seeing me (she told me so) and feeding me dinner, because I like the food she cooks (and in summer it is almost always something she has grown herself) and also perhaps because my presence would be a relief (this was not said, she did not tell me this). As Love and her mother walked around, they removed faded flowers, plants, and vegetables that were ready to be harvested (because Love grows vegetables and flowers quite freely together) and exchanged the silences and sentences typical of people who are bound together in a way they did not choose and cannot help (and so do not like), when her mother came on the bed where the Asiatic lilies were in bloom and broke one of their exchanges of silence by saying to her, “Just look at these nigger colors.” Love was shocked by her mother saying this, but not surprised; after all, this was her mother, whom she had known for a long time.
Not so very long after Love and her mother had been walking in her garden, I arrived, and while Love stayed in the house and made us cocktails and small snacks of vegetables and a dip, her mother and I walked through the garden, because I had asked to do so (I always walk through Love’s garden, but usually it is by myself), and her mother and I exchanged monuments of praise to Love’s gardening ability, and when we came to the bed of Asiatic lilies, I was visibly listening to Love’s mother tell me some not very important piece of gardening information (I cannot remember it now, and so that is why I say it was not very important), but to myself I was wondering if, since I did not know her very well and was not very sure if I liked her, I should be my natural and true self or unnatural and untrue with her. Without being conscious of which self I had decided upon, I blurted out something true. I said, pointing to the Asiatic lilies, “I hate these colors.” And then I went back to being unnatural and untrue, and would have forgotten that entire afternoon altogether except that after dinner, while Love and I were doing the dishes alone, she vented to me some of the irritation she felt toward the many people in her life whom she loved but did not like. She told me of her mother’s casual but hateful remark, and I became so annoyed with myself for not sensing immediately the true character of the person with whom I had taken a walk in the garden, for had I known, I would have embraced the Asiatic lilies and their repulsive colors with a force that perhaps only death could weaken. If someone will go to such lengths to nourish and cultivate prejudice, extending to an innocent flower the malice heaped on innocent people, then I certainly wouldn’t want to be the one to stand between her and her pleasure.
And then! The stone wall (visible from the back door of my house) that sensibly separates a terrace and a large flower bed from a sudden downward shift of the ground (but this is very nice to have, for when it snows my children like to slide down it) was in a dilapidated state and needed rebuilding. Two men, one overly fat, the other overly thin (this Jack Sprat style in couples is not an unusual sight in Vermont), came to rebuild it. One day, as they worked, I sat on a stone step (also in need of repair) observing them, reveling in my delicious position of living comfortably in a place that I am not from, enjoying my position of visitor, enjoying my position of not-the-native, enjoying especially the privilege of being able to make sound judgments about the Other—that is, the two men who were stooped over before me, working; and then I roused myself out of this, because I had to tell the overly fat man to save for me some of Mrs. Woodworth’s roses (which he had dug up in the process of completely dismantling the wall; they weren’t especially pretty roses, but they had been in that spot for over forty years and before that they had come from Mrs. Woodworth’s mother’s house in Maine and I had a feeling about them, a sentimental feeling that was completely false, a feeling no native can ever afford to have), and after I had told him that and he agreed to save the roses for me, he told me that he had been to New York City only once in his life and didn’t wish to go there again. And I made an instinctive decision to not make a reply, so he said that when he was a boy in school he had been to New York City on a day trip with his class, and on their way back home the bus he and his classmates were riding in had been pelted with stones by some people; and he said that not all the people who threw the stones were colored; and I said, Oh, but I wondered what he really wanted to say, and then he said that he liked colored people but his father did not. I said, Oh, to that, too, but I wondered what it was he really wanted to say; he said that his father did not like colored people because he was in the army with some colored men and they all got along very well until they were ordered into battle, and all the colored men in unison turned and ran away, and ever since then his father had not liked colored people. And then I was sorry that I had shared my organic cashews with him earlier that day, and I was sorry that I had brought him a nice glass of cold spring water to drink after he ate the cashew nuts; I said to him that it was so sensible of the soldiers to run away, I would most certainly have done the same thing, and he said nothing to that; and then I said that it was just as well that the soldiers were colored, because if they had been people who looked like his father (white), then most certainly his mother would have been someone who looked like me. And he stared at me and stared at me and said he saw what I meant, but that couldn’t be true at all, because I couldn’t see right away what I meant. The next day he brought me a small paper bag full of bulbs, each the size of three thimbles, and he did not know the name of the flower the bulbs would bear, he described it (small, white, star-shaped), and he said it would bloom early in the spring, much before anything else. I had wanted to plant the bulbs he gave me quite near the stone wall, and so I waited for the wall to be finished. And then the wall was finished and the paper that held the bulbs fell apart because I had left it unprotected on the ground and the bulbs spilled out and were scattered all over; at the beginning of each day as I began to work in the garden I would promise myself to plant them, at the end of each day I would resolve to myself to plant them; and then one day, with gestures that were completely without anger, I took the bulbs and placed them in the rubbish bin, not the compost heap.
It is winter and so my garden does not exist; in its place are these mounds of white, the raised beds covered with snow, like a graveyard, but not a graveyard in New England, with its orderliness and neatness and sense of that’s-that, but more like a graveyard in a place where I am from, a warm place, where the grave is topped off with a huge mound of loose earth, because death is just another way of being, and the dead will not stay put, and sometimes their actions are more significant, more profound than when they were alive, and so no square structure made out of concrete can contain them. The snow covers the ground in the garden with the determination of death, an unyielding grip, and the whiteness of it is an eraser, so that I am almost in a state of disbelief: a clump of lovage with its tall, thick stalks of celery-like leaves (with celery-like taste) did really stand next to the hedge of rhubarb; the potatoes were near the rhubarb, the broccoli was near the potatoes, the carrots and beets were together and near the potatoes, the basil and the cilantro were together and near the peas, the tomatoes were in a bed by themselves (a long, narrow strip that I made all by myself this summer with a new little tiller I bought, separating my garden from Annie’s (my daughter
); the strawberries were in a bed by themselves; all the salad greens were together and in a bed by themselves; the sunflowers, tall and short, and in various hues of yellow and half-brown, were clustered in groups over here, over there, and over here again; the scarecrow that scared nothing was here, the gun to shoot the things the scarecrow didn’t scare was right here (lying in between the bundles of hay that were used to mulch the potatoes), unloaded, as was the line of silver (aluminum pie plates strung together) between the tepees covered with lima-bean vine (they bore pods but they were empty of beans). These colors (the green of the leaves, the red/pink stem of the rhubarb, the red veins of the beet leaves, the yellows and browns of the sunflowers) start out tentatively, in a maybe, maybe-not way, a sort-of way, and then one day, perhaps after a heavy amount of rain, everything is strong and itself, twinkling, jewel-like, and at that moment I think life will never change, it will always be summer, the families of rabbit or woodchuck or something will eat the beet leaves just before they are ready to be picked. I plot ways to kill them but can never bring myself to do it, I decide to build a fence around the garden and then I decide not to, there are more or fewer Japanese beetles than last year, who can really care; there are too many zucchinis, who can really care; and then, as if it had never happened before, something totally unexpected: I hear that the temperature will drop to such a low degree it will cause a frost, and I always take this personally, I think a frost is something someone is doing to me. This is to me how winter in the garden begins, with a frost, yet another tentativeness, a curtsy to the actual cold to come, a gentle form of it. The effect of the cold air on the things growing in the garden is something I still cannot get used to, still cannot understand, after so many years; how can it be that after a frost the garden looks as if it had been to a party in … hell; as if the entire garden had been picked up and placed just outside the furnace of a baker’s oven and the fire inside the oven was constantly being fed and so the oven door was never shut.
I must have been about ten years old when I first came in contact with cold air; where I lived the air was only hot and then hotter, and if sometimes, usually only in December, the temperature at night got to around 75 degrees, everyone wore a sweater and a flannel blanket was placed on the bed. But once, the parents of a girl I knew got a refrigerator, and when they were not at home, she asked me to come in and put my hand in the freezer part. I became convinced then (and remain so even now) that cold air is unnatural and man-made and associated with prosperity (for refrigerators were common in the prosperous North) and more real and special than the warm air that was so ordinary to me; and then I became suspicious of it, because it seemed to me that it was also associated with the dark, with the cold comes the dark, in the dark things grow pale and die; no explanation from science or nature of how the sun can shine very brightly in the deep of winter has ever been satisfactory to me; in my heart I know the two cannot be, the cold and the bright light, at the same time.
And so between the end of summer and the shortest day of the year I battle a constant feeling of disbelief; everything comes to a halt rapidly, they die, die, die, the garden is all brown stalks and the ground tightening; the things that continue to grow and bloom do so in isolation; all the different species of chrysanthemums in the world grouped together (and some of them often are on display in a greenhouse at Smith College), all the sedum, all the rest of it, is very beautiful and I like it very much, but it doesn’t really do, because it’s against a background of dead or almost dead.
People will go on and on about the beauty of the garden in winter; they will point out scarlet berries in clusters hanging on stark brown brittle branches, they will insist that this beauty is deep and unique; people try to tell me about things like the Christmas rose (and sometimes they actually say Helleborus niger, but why? the common name sounds much better, the way common names always do), and this plant in bloom in December is really very beautiful, but only in the way of a single clean plate found on a table many months after a large number of people had eaten dinner there; or again they tell me of the barks of trees, in varying stages of peeling, and the moss of lichen growing on the barks of other trees and the precious jewel-like sparkle of lichen at certain times of day, in certain kinds of light; and, you know, I like lichen and I like moss, but really, to be reduced to admiring it because nothing else is there but brown bramble and some red stems and mist … It is so willful, this admiration of the garden in winter, this assertion that the garden is a beautiful place then. Here is Miss Gertrude Jekyll (with whose writing I am so in love and am always so surprised when I see a picture of her again to realize how really quite ugly she was; and then again, she is such a wonderful example of the English people’s habit of infantilizing and making everything cozy: a nice grouping of nut-bearing trees cannot remain a nice grouping of nut-bearing trees, they become The Nutwalk): “A hard frost is upon us. The thermometer registered eighteen degrees last night, and though there was only frost the night before it, the ground is hard frozen … How endlessly beautiful is the woodland in winter! Today there is a thin mist; just enough to make a background of tender blue mystery three hundred yards away, and to show any defect in the grouping of near trees.”
But this is not true at all (of course, not to me); I want to say to her (but I can’t, she’s dead): This is just something you are saying, this is just something you are making up. I want to say that at this very moment I am looking out my window and the garden does not exist, it is lying underneath an expanse of snow, and there is a deep, thick mist, slowly seeping out of the woods, and as I see this I do not feel enraptured by it. But you know, white is not a color at all (the snow is white, the mist suggests white), white only makes you feel the absence of color, and white only makes you long for color and only makes you understand that the space is blank and is waiting to be filled up—with color.
It is best just to accept what you have and not take from other people the things they have that you do not have; and so I accept that I now live in a climate that has four seasons, one of which I do not fully appreciate, certainly from a gardener’s point of view; what I would really like is to have winter, and then just the area that is my garden would be the West Indies, but only until spring comes, the season I like best, better than summer even. That is what I would really like. Since I cannot have it, I hope never to hear myself agreeing with this: “I determined to bring life to my garden in winter—to make autumn join hands with spring. Winter was to be a season in its own right, vital to the gardener who really wants to garden. I decided, like that innovative gardener, William Robinson, to banish the idea that ‘winter is a doleful time for gardens.’”This is Rosemary Verey, and it is from her book The Garden in Winter; there was not one idea or photograph in this book to make me change my mind, and besides, this is just the sort of thing to give pleasure a bad name. The effort to be put into finding beauty in a dry branch, a leafless tree, a clump of limp grass, the still unyielding earth, is beyond me and not something I can do naturally, without inner help.
One very cold night this winter, I had just had dinner with my friend Kristen in a dreary restaurant in Bennington (but it’s dreary only because they won’t change the menu; year in and year out, they serve the same dishes, and though they are very good-tasting dishes, they are always the same; I write hostile letters to the chef, but they remain in my head, I never send them), and just as we were walking toward our cars, she pointed to a charred stalk, the remains of a purple coneflower (I had seen it in bloom when it had been in bloom), and she said, “Oh, that’s so great. You know, I have decided to plant only things that will look good when they are dead and it’s cold in my garden.” Again this sense of the effort involved came over me and I thought of the lilies in my friend Love’s garden. The reason I do not like those lilies is that years ago, when I was young, for a period of about a year I used to take a hallucinogenic drug at seven-day intervals; near the end of the year I was doing this, the hallucinogenic part of the drug had no
effect on me, I experienced only the amphetamine part of it, and my stomach would be in a state of tautness and jitters at once. This hallucinogenic drug was sometimes square, sometimes round and glassy, and would fit well in the middle of my tongue; it was sometimes yellow, sometimes orange, the exact shade and texture of Love’s lilies. I never fail to see those flowers, their waxy texture, their psychedelic shades, without becoming aware of my stomach. Over dinner I had been discussing with Kristen how overwhelming I found the beginning of winter, the middle of winter, the end of winter, and how much I missed my garden, and she mentioned seasonal mood shifts (those were her words exactly) and the number of mood modifiers that were available to the average person today. She said the word “Prozac” and I remembered that in response to something someone had said, I heard Fred Seidel (he is my son’s godfather) say that Prozac was the aspirin of the nineties, and then not long after I heard Fred say that, I saw this drug; it was in the palm of a druggist’s hand, he was showing it to me; I had asked him to show it to me; it was two-toned: a slight shade of green and a smudged white, winter colors, colors from “nature’s most sophisticated palette” (Rosemary Verey). When my friend and I parted, she was still in a state of admiration over the asleep and dead before her, the remains of a fire by ice. At that moment I was thinking, I want to be in a place where people don’t say things like that, I want to be in a place where people don’t feel like that, see a landscape of things dead or asleep and desire it, move mountains to achieve its effect; by tomorrow I want to be in a place that is the opposite of the one I am in now. The only thing was, I did not know if that place would be a mood modifier or the West Indies.
My Garden (Book) Page 6