One day Mr. Harrington (Ken, not his brother Phil) came to my house and removed from various parts of the yard the rubbishy honeysuckle shrub, a large old pine tree that grew just outside the window of my son’s room (this was not a wanton act on my part, an act dictated solely by my obsession with the landscape; the large branches of this tree would rub against the windowpane and frighten my son); an old lilac shrub was dug out from one place and put somewhere else; he remade the driveway. It took him many days to do all this, and as he made the many places bare, I plotted the many things I could put in them. Along the road where the honeysuckle used to be I had decided to put in a hedge of buckthorn, but then I turned against this when I saw what was said about buckthorn in that tyrannical volume The Manual of Woody Landscape Plants by Michael Dirr. Is there a gardener who knows about this book who can resist the opinions expressed in it? My friends and I can hardly plant a shrub or tree of any kind without saying to each other, “What does Dirr say?” In the case of my buckthorn, what Dirr had to say resulted in my canceling an order of twenty buckthorn plants from Roger and Penny at the Equinox Valley Nursery. And even before I settled on the buckthorn, I had wanted to plant a hedge of arrowwood viburnum (V. dilatatum), but the Dirr is very scornful. Looking up from the Dirr, I was so comforted to see Mr. Harrington sitting in his bulldozer, driving his big truck or just whacking away at something, his wife and son taking his directions with great care. He is such a nice man. He loves trees, no matter what they are, as long as they have a good form, which the honeysuckle does not. He reminds me that there are two kinds of Vermonters: native Vermonters, people who look very much like each other but not in a disturbing way, not in a way that makes you feel so bad if you do not look like them; and then the rest of us, who have recently arrived in Vermont, and we all look like people in a witness protection program, that is to say, if we were seen while in Vermont, by people who know us not in Vermont, we would appear to be almost looking like ourselves. To live in Vermont without being born here means that one beautiful day in spring you were driving through, as I did on my way to the Talbots’, and saw so many beautiful houses set in the middle of so many beautiful views that you bought one of them. And then waiting to be discovered is: JANUARY! FEBRUARY! MAAAAAAARCH!
On those days when Mr. Harrington was helping me rearrange the small patches of my land, I walked around with a pencil and paper and did something I always thought too pretentious to even consider: I made drawings of my garden, or rather, I connected a series of lines to each other, and inside the lines I wrote down the names of shrubs and herbaceous plants I wanted to plant. I have now passed the point of planting only things I love without any prior regard as to how they will all look together. But still, my garden lacks something: it needs more shape, it needs more interesting things in its more shape. I started with around the house and in the back of the house and alongside the house; now I wish to move away from the house, go away from the house down to the bog, but still be connected to the house, I must never really leave the house. So, too, as I started with clematis ‘Nelly Moser,’ I now want Clematis marmoraria. I have fallen in love with species. They are harder to like, being always only themselves, and when taken out of their own context, untidy nature, and placed in the orderliness of a garden, where they are mostly meant to prop up the jellylike personality of the owner of the house, they in turn appear frail, not as floriferous as they should be, or much too vigorous, another way of saying a weed, another way of saying “annoying.” But I now want that very species, or plants not too far removed from that very thing. All this leads me to Bob and Brigitta Stewart and their Arrowhead Alpines nursery in Fowlerville, Michigan. It was while visiting them one day in late April that I purchased some Peltoboykinia (for me, this meant a step away from the rodgersia), some Primula farinosa, some corydalis, some Campanula betulaefolia, two mertensia, lots of Primula auricula, ephedra, a Paeonia peregrina, a Paeonia lutea, three Gentiana lutea. To walk around the Arrowhead Alpines nursery, with Bob and Brigitta, in and out of their greenhouses, is to go down the road of plants in a way from which you can never really return. He picks up something I have never heard of and mentions its connection to a man named Josef Halder, a Czech botanist who had excellent access to the parts of Asia that were formerly under Soviet rule. Josef Halder is the ephedra plant discoverer. Bob mentions Eric Smith and his work with hellebores. I happen to be devoted to Eric Smith, but only because of what I know about his work with hostas. Eric Smith hostas are mainly the blue ones, and I try to have as many of his hostas as I can afford. They are not cheap. Bob then told me of a nursery I must visit; the nursery is in Scotland and is run by a man named Jim Archibald, who knew Eric Smith. It was with Jim Archibald that Eric Smith worked on hellebores. While walking through his greenhouse with Bob, being introduced to a vast treasury of plants for the garden that until then were unknown to me (Mutisia spinosa, for instance; it may not be altogether hardy for me, but I know how to manage that), I met a man named Jim, and he was bent over a tray trying to see if finally some of the seeds he had received from a plant-hunting expedition in which he had bought shares were germinating. They were not.
March came to an end in mid-May. None of my fritillarias bloomed, but I loved the bluish-green of the leaves of the Persicarias and the water-diluted green of the leaves of F imperialis. The Primula veris, planted last year in June and grown from seeds I gave to Jack Manix, bloomed in a patch at the edge of a very old hemlock. Some daffodils I had bought for $1.50 at Whitman’s Feed Store (North Bennington, Vermont) bloomed. I had not paid much attention when buying them, for it was way past the time when any bulb should have been put in the ground and I only bought them as an afterthought, to fill in a spot (I was just beginning to understand the idea of underplanting). These daffodils turned out to be ‘Mount Hood,’ the most beautiful daffodil I have ever seen, or rather have ever liked. They start out yellow and then change—not fade, but change—to a spectacular ivory, the shade of dinnerware on a shelf, tempting a child to see just how it would look shattered into many pieces. I do not like daffodils for a reason that is not at all aesthetic, a reason much more serious than that. The rodgersia returned, stubby, crooked fingers piercing through the ground. The pulmonarias bloomed so spectacularly I was sure they belonged to someone else. Pulmonaria ‘Janet Fisk’ and ‘Mrs. Moon’ have seeded; shall I now wait to see if one of the seedlings is a sport of some sort? But I am not at all interested in such a thing.
However. On the day I returned from the Talbots’, I met the plants I had ordered from the White Flower Farm and Wayside nurseries. Those orders, along with the many plants I had just bought from the Talbots, along with some other plants Jack Manix had grown for me, were lined up on the floor of the garage, spilling out onto quite a bit of the driveway. The plants were in small pots, large pots, trays of six packs. It was not a pretty sight. When you look at a garden this is not what comes to mind. The children complained, and underneath their worry was the milk-money problem: had their mother spent all the money on plants, would they be hungry? They see the garden as the thing that stands between them and true happiness: my absolute attention.
Looking at all these plants spilling out of the garage at my feet, I thought of some people I know of who are connected with plants, and this was not in comparison, for it doesn’t bear it, I just thought of them: George Clifford, the possessor of an enormous greenhouse in Amsterdam who had employed Linnaeus, thus giving him the opportunity to invent the binomial system; of Reginald Farrer, of Kingdon-Ward, of Chinese Wilson, of David Douglas, of many other people, a long list of people who were interested in plants, not the garden, for the two meet only in secret and in people as ordinary as me. And when thinking of this array of people, I remembered again that many of them did not die in their own beds: Douglas fell down a bear pit in Hawaii, Wilson died in a traffic accident in Boston after surviving seeing Lilium regale in its natural place, a riverbed in China; Farrer died of diphtheria in Burma. I shall die in a nurser
y.
PLANT HUNTING IN CHINA
Laura Lu asked, “Frank, do you want some water?” Frank did not want any water and Laura Lu said, “Frank, you don’t want no water; y’all back there want some water?” We all back in the bus did not want any water, and Laura Lu said, “Y’all don’t want any water, I guess I’ll just drink all this water here all by myself. Y‘all see that bird out there, that pretty little thing,” but the bus was moving much too fast and so we did not see the bird, and Laura Lu said, “Y’all missed seeing that pretty little bird, I am telling you that was the prettiest little bird I ever see. This all so pretty, I’m so glad I came on this trip. When Frank came back last time he told me how beautiful this place was and he was right, it’s so beautiful, it’s so beautiful.” Pierre said, “You would think they would …” and he made some scathing but perfectly accurate observation about the inefficient or unsanitary way the people outside our bus were conducting their lives; John said, “Come on, come on, let’s go, everybody, let’s get going here.” John had a voice that was not pleasing to anybody I knew, and on top of that, he used it to excess. Dan sat in a corner at the back of the bus and made jokes and cleaned the seeds he had just collected with a not-ordinary intensity; Dan was afraid of the dangerous driving on the dangerous roads in Yunnan Province, China, and he contained his fears in this way—cleaning his seeds. George, a Swiss man who works for the German seed company Jelito, had big teeth which could be seen when he made his big smile, he had a big smile. Hans, who works for a nursery in the Midwest specializing in plants that grow particularly well in the shade, was tall and thin and pale and had big teeth but not a mouth as big as George’s, and laughed often but not inappropriately. Grace, a woman, the owner of a nursery in Oregon, was silent or did not speak so much; but when John had left our group to go off and join another group, who were going to walk all over Nepal, Grace said to me, “Well, now that John has gone, who do you think is the leading candidate for asshole?” Grace laughed, I laughed, I said, “Me,” and Grace laughed again and turned away. I did not laugh again, I stayed still. A few days before he left, John had called me a bitch, though what he really said was that I was always bitchin’, but I decided that what he really meant was that I was a bitch, because bitchin’ can’t be done by someone who isn’t a bitch, or so it seems to me. On the bus I sat way in the back between Ozzie and Dan. Ozzie cleaned his seeds in a way that was exactly the opposite of Dan’s: slowly, almost tortoise-like, and this made Ozzie seem thoughtful. Once, when we had gone into a restaurant to have our delicious dinner of pork, pork, pork, no fish, yak, vegetables, rice, and beer, we met a woman singing. Her voice was not familiar to us and we all shrank from it, hoping we would be seated in a part of the restaurant far away from her. John said, “Isn’t her voice horrible, doesn’t the sound of it just drive you crazy?” And Ozzie said, very quietly, certainly not loud enough for anyone in particular to hear, “Little does he know, his voice has a similar effect.” Paul, our group leader, a botanist and gardener with the Sarah Duke Gardens in North Carolina, a fervent Christian, wore a small gold cross on the tip of the collar of his shirt at all times. When I thought of the trouble he had to go through remembering to remove the cross from his dirty shirts and then to putting it back on his clean shirts, I became frightened of him; I am not a Christian, but I know all the same how fierce Christians can be toward people who do not feel the way they do; I never told Paul that I was afraid of him, and as far as I can remember, he never did anything, apart from wearing the cross on his shirt collar, to confirm my fear.
A journey like this, for someone like me, begins in so many ways: in a book by the plant hunter Frank Kingdon-Ward, Plant Hunting on the Edge of the World, an account of his travels looking for plants in China; a book by Ernest Wilson, Plant Hunter’s Paradise, an account of his travels looking for plants in China; a book by Patrick Synge, Mountains of the Moon, an account of his travels looking for plants in Africa; a book by Reginald Farrer, Among the Hills, an account of his travels in the Alps looking for alpine plants; a repeated reading of the Heronswood catalogue from a nursery owned by the American plants-men Dan Hinkley and Robert Jones; the journal that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark kept, an account of their travels to all that unmapped and unclaimed (by Europeans) land west of the Mississippi (they brought back all sorts of plant specimens to Thomas Jefferson); walking out into my garden to deliberately feel and feel again the underside of the leaves of my Rhododendron smirnawii (it is native to the Caucasus)—alt this is only a small part of how a journey like this, for someone like me, begins.
And what did I leave behind? Two children—a boy who is ten, a girl who is fourteen—a husband, a garden full of autumn color (hibiscus, aconitum, anemone, cimicifuga, crocus, maples, cercidiphyllum, franklinia, clematis, Heptacodium miconioides). And this was in front of me: Paul Jones (a director of the Sarah Duke Gardens in North Carolina), Frank and Laura Lu (two lawyers from North Carolina, married to each other), Ozzie Johnson (a landscape gardener and horticulturist from the Atlanta Botanical Gardens), George Ueberhart (a horticulturist with the Jelito seed company in Germany), Pierre Bunnerup (from Sunny Borders Nursery in Connecticut), Hans Hensen (from Shady Gardens in Missouri), John (just John), Guan Kaiyun (the director of Kunming Botanical Gardens in Kunming, China—he was our host and guide), Grace Dinsdale (the owner of Blooming Nurseries in Oregon, one of a very small number of women in America to own a nursery), Daniel J. Hinkley (Heronswood Nursery in Kingston, Washington), and an unknown landscape (unknown except for those books and the people who wrote them) of mountains and valleys and meadows full of plants (in seed) that I would like to grow in my garden, the garden I was leaving behind and which really needed my care. Everything I cared about needed me to care about it, but I went off anyway.
One morning I drove my children to the schoolbus stop, I got on an airplane that took me to Chicago, I took another airplane to Hong Kong, I took another airplane to Kunming, China. That first night (a Sunday) I experienced the first of many doubts that the life I had left behind, life in a small village in Vermont, really existed, really was there and continued to be there in my absence. We were having a delicious dinner of Chinese food (though in China it is not Chinese food, it is only food) in a restaurant, and I went to the bathroom; it was not far away at all, it was right next to the kitchen, and on a table that was jammed up against a wall that separated kitchen and bathroom was a cauldron in which tea was brewed. As we were leaving the restaurant, I saw a large family having a wonderful time as they ate their dinner; it was so heartening it made me homesick, and I wanted to join them; but the baby of the family was having a bowel movement on the floor right then; it was all very comfortable for them, but I had come to China to collect seeds, not to be comfortable with what Chinese people did.
Dan (that is, Daniel Hinkley) and I were rooming together; I had requested it because he is my friend, the only person I knew on this expedition, and I felt very safe (he would like me no matter what) with him. This arrangement, of Dan and me, a man and a woman who were not married to each other, caused a small wave of disapproval; but Dan and I are both married—to other people, he to someone named Robert and I to someone named Allen, and we both had in common that we think of our marriages like breathing: ultimately fragile, so nothing must be done to compromise it. Looking back now, I can see what a pleasant, almost ideal couple we were: we never quarreled, we never caused each other any displeasure, we never longed to be rid of each other’s presence. When I told my husband about Dan and me and how happy we were together and our lack of expressed irritation toward each other, he told me of that day’s Ann Landers column: a woman had written to say that her husband was most attentive, giving her candy, bringing her flowers, considerate in every way you could imagine, but he had no interest in making love to her; what did it mean, she wanted to know. After Ann Landers printed this letter, she received over two hundred letters from other women requesting the name and address of this man.
The next day, a Monday, we were given a tour of Kunming Botanical Gardens by Guan (he had immediately become Guan to us, he wanted it that way), and it was my first time seeing the real botanists, as opposed to the nurserymen and -woman, in the grip of their passion. Ozzie, Paul, George, and Frank disappeared and Dan would have too, but I kept close to him. He was desperate to find seeds from the Magnolia davidii, but it had flowered many months ago and its fruit, which held the seeds, had long since fallen to the ground and rotted. He was much disappointed, but he pointed out to me things I had never even heard of: Michelia maudii, Liriodendron sinensis (I have planted and have thriving in my garden Liriodendron tulipifera, the species native to North America) and an evergreen witch hazel. The botanists were restless and frustrated by this little tour; none of them lived in the same zone as the Kunming Botanical Gardens, the plants growing there were not compelling to them.
That next day was really when the thing we had in mind began: collecting seeds. We were to go to Zhongdian and to stay for two days in Zhongdian collecting seeds from Hongshan Mountain; getting to Zhongdian would take two days and we would have to spend a night in the small city of Dali. It took a whole day in our minibus just to get there, and that first day the pattern of how we would spend the next four weeks was established; it was on that first day, too, that our personalities began to emerge, and by the time we got to the Red Camellia Hotel in Dali, we were all quite fixed. The botanists, all men, said the meanest things to each other in the nicest way, or the nicest things in the meanest way, and it was very funny, everybody laughed, and if I don’t repeat them now, it’s because when I told my husband what was said (and I told him what was said much later, after I had returned and everything was in the past), he looked puzzled and I could see that it all had the quality of you-had-to-be-there. As they (the botanists) said these things to each other (mean and nice, nice and mean, all of it side-splittingly funny), their eyes were focused outside the bus, not so as to enjoy the scenery, which was increasingly beautiful in a way that I had never seen or imagined landscape to be, but to see if there were any places where they thought they might find something for their garden. They demanded a stop on what was a busy highway, they wanted to look around, but I suspect the truth was that, to them, sitting anywhere (a bus, a couch, a veranda) and looking at vegetation that might be in fruit was unbearable. The botanists and nurserymen and -woman all went off looking for things. They found nothing much on the way to Dali. I found a small flowering datura, unlike anything I had ever seen anywhere (in cultivation, or naturalized); it had small, perfect, trumpet-shaped white flowers and no fragrance (but it was the middle of the day and we were still in a tropical latitude). It was in fruit: fat pods with gently forbidding thorns. I gathered them, they are native to Mexico; how they made their way to China, I do not know.
My Garden (Book) Page 15