White's essays offer glimpses of men and women who once lived in their gardens, growing crops, hybridizing, dreaming up colors, shapes, and smells that pleased them, and then turning their emotions into words, hoping their catalog will appeal to many. of attention. . gardener Heart: There is no shrinking in the world of roses, dahlias, marigolds, tulips, daylilies and chrysanthemums. It's not a black hole, it's a rabbit hole.
And of course there's White and Lawrence, wise, opinionated, fascinated by the mix. In his first letter, Lawrence recommended that White write for Cecil Howdyshell's catalog (which always began with "Dear Flowery Friends"): "I think he's ninety now, so you'd better hurry." In response, White admitted, "I'm always nervous when I write about old people." Both women saw Lewis Carroll, a garden writer. In a review of his first catalog of New York nurseries, referring to the map of gardeners growing roses in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, White wrote: "Lewis Carroll was a prophet; today gardeners are just as busy changing the colors of the flowers. They are changing their shapes and sizes. A year later, Lawrence wrote in a letter: "If I have to listen to flowers, I'd rather read Through the Looking Glass , my favorite gardening book ."
"Is this height good?"
Cartoon by Lin Hu
[Their conversation led me to re-read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which I first read after Vincent's death. The book, of course, has nothing to do with neglected or lost options; Instead, they make a very unreliable alternative.]
After I got home, I ordered twenty-five hyacinth bulbs (Delft Blue) and buried them randomly in the corner where I was sure they wouldn't disturb the existing plants. When you think about it, twenty-five years is a very small number - a gesture, not a plan, the beginning of a dream, an unfulfilled dream. But a gardener, like a writer, has to start somewhere. (I planted eight hundred bulbs last fall; seven hundred the fall before.)
Thanks to these twenty-five bulbs, garden catalogs began to appear. Let's be realistic: it won't take long to distribute addresses to childcare centers. We can even be romantic: imagine this ephemeral group of bulbs as tiny insects signaling a budding gardener. The catalogs, although radically improved graphically from those revised by White, still bear the same names: White Flower Farm, Wayside Gardens, Park Seed Company, W. Attlee Burpee & Company, and several others. I saw the catalog as a figment of White and Lawrence's imagination; Although I was new to this literature, I could not form my taste and form my opinion.
One day it occurred to me that no one had yet listed gardeners: professional gardeners, perhaps of important cultivation, with poetic or whimsical names; As amateurs, common carnations and cornflowers; And those, like me, who only fantasize about being gardeners. A catalog rich with human stories would certainly be fun to read, wouldn't it? Then I realized that I was once again loyal to my profession, the novelist.
When I was growing up in Beijing, my family lived on the ground floor of a building, so we were lucky to have a very small plot of land, about two meters by 1.5 meters. My father, from a poor farming family, gardened with sensitivity: the vines bore abundant sweet grapes (often spoiled by wasps), our beloved green beans (called "pig's ears"), lufa (squash when ripe young and tender Good for soups; when you get old. and scaly they make the best kitchen cleaner honeysuckle (dried honeysuckle flowers can be used as a medicinal tea) One year when I was four or five she planted potatoes and gave me the unforgettable taste of new potatoes Described - I heard an enthusiastic description of the new potato from an Irish poet in Cork.
My father did not garden for beauty. A few years later she planted a bunch of impatiens, which she called "nail flowers" because in the past the pink and red petals were used to paint girls' nails. The only constant display of flowers in our garden is the morning glory, which is self-sown and very vibrant. One day two women made fun of our roadside garden and called my father a lazy gardener who planted flowers that were only weeds. I was too young and too scared to protect him: he was a nuclear physicist, but he also did all the shopping and most of the housework, cooked three meals a day for the family and gardened in his spare time.
People who grow peonies, roses and orchids are not necessarily good people, and this is not surprising. I've learned from Chinese history that cold-blooded dictators—Chairman Mao, for example—also wrote heartbreaking poetry, and that capricious dynastic tyrants were often master calligraphers and painters. On the other hand, those who are cruel to garden plants can easily extend that cruelty to humans. One day my mother pulled the honeysuckle plant for no other reason - and she was going to hurt the plant. My father cried and I screamed, though we both did it silently.
When the spring of 2018 came, I, my pragmatic daddy's girl, started planting vegetables in pots - still waiting for the flowers to bloom in the garden and reveal themselves to me. Over the next two years I planted Chinese celts, baby bok choy, green beans, eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, okra and various herbs and eventually had many opportunities to see birds, squirrels, snails. And slugs and aphids and spider mites and all other garden enemies. Various campaigns were carried out: I ordered hundreds of live ladybugs and released them at night after rain, in the hope that they would not fly away; I hung the nest box and waited for the wrens to settle and feed their young on insects from my garden; The fake snakes are strategically placed to repel rodents and scare the crap out of you whenever you step on their rubbery bodies.
Then there is the unsolved problem: large animals. Deer graze indiscriminately (but luckily, in my case, only in the front yard, because the back yard is fenced). Of course, fences don't stop rabbits. (When he visited the Irish writer William Trevor at his home in Devon, he showed me a roll of gauze, sunk to a certain depth—inches? feet? I forget—how deep into the earth I never was so thirsty as a 'rabbit ' fence.) Rabbits Appearing at the end of May or beginning of June, their fur is the size of a fistful, and after a month they can stand on their hind legs and extend their bodies a foot long. They ate everything and turned me into an angry mistress. McGregor. (I would never trust any catalog that would dare label a plant rabbit resistant.) Next is our resident mushroom. Maybe there are several, but they all look the same to me: giant and cool. Groundhogs are the most efficient destroyers of the garden. I named our pet after a famous politician, although a wise friend pointed out that naming a grain of wheat after a politician is an insult to the animal: earth hogs don't do what they're supposed to do, but trample and feed with what they think. . . Garden
