Henry Mitchell on Gardening
Segall, Vivian
Digging deeper Vivian Segall ~ eading about gardening is more fun than actually gardening, at least some of the time. The tired feet are on the ottoman; the back, throbbing from a day of...
...The garden you imagine on the couch is glorious and fully grown...
...an entire row of andromedas that withers and dies...
...Such a scheme would not satisfy a deep-dyed gardener," he writes, "but would bring much pleasure with virtually no labor to the new homeowner who is perhaps much preoccupied with small tots and a terrier and a job...
...Vivian Segall writes, and imagines gardens, in Noank, Connecticut...
...Growing old, still Commonweal 2 2 June 5, 1998 in awe, still sitting at her feet...
...If chinaberry trees couldn't survive at Monticello, Jefferson planted them anyway...
...You can judge a person by his response to failure, Mitchell writes...
...Of all the garden writers I've read, Mitchell is the most comforting...
...Funny and erudite, Mitchell turns a phrase effortlessly...
...Now those are refreshing thoughts...
...He forgets to clean the lily pool, loves butterflies and cicadas, and can tell you how to grow dahlias or tomatoes or trumpet vines...
...Locusts drown the orchard and the sky...
...vapor lamps, flood lights intensify, braceleting dusk...
...Life goes on...
...nearly any plant, superbly grown, gives him pleasure...
...that gardening is no job for rigid people...
...Someone buys coffee, steals crackers: a meal for kings and queens...
...We ran like children, our souls laughed to see them...
...He dismisses the envied British climate as bleak, saying it is "astonishing they even attempt a garden there, so sunless are their skies...
...Reflections of an Apollo Astronaut Nothing ever moves upon the moon except shadows, which circle the mountains and the maculate, still seas...
...These calamities may not happen in Martha Stewart's garden, but they do in mine...
...A garden is always full of catastrophes: expensive hostas devoured by slugs...
...This is a relief...
...A car drives on in the spirit country, with the radio off and the winged snow like a messenger...
...wind whistles in the dark pine...
...Home is a song, my friend, heard in the runner's step, heard through the chaos of springs and stars...
...That is gardening orthodoxy and Jefferson believed it with all his heart...
...and most of all, from the idea that perfection is an attainable goal...
...The gardener sees the project in all its finished perfection, conveniently omitting visions of the labor, the failures, and natural disasters that must go into making a garden...
...We say goodnights while planes fly on, rasping the hard resilient sky, gliding in ample dawn, landing with a final click, continuous...
...Ocean's sleepy chant enwraps the coast...
...Hypnotic voices charm the traveler siphoning his dreams-He wakes desireless, seeking just the placid drone of motion...
...From once-tiny buds, "these opulent gorgeous flowers spring forth like clowns from a Volkswagen...
...In a column about raising a favorite daffodil, Cantatrice, which he hadn't managed to grow for decades, he writes, "There is authority for the notion that God once spoke through a jackass, a real one with furry ears....And beyond doubt, sometimes through a weather-defiant flower...
...A musical dust burns at the air's edge, a musical light touches the towers of cities, and the amazed deaf wonder their souls should hear...
...Lee Oser Commonweal 2 3 June 5, 1998...
...I prefer now to see the garden as a succession of enthusiasms...
...Unheard, the lunar music radiates in sunlight on the cliffs and pours like wind across the tranquil sea...
...In Pennsylvania, in winter's quiet, snow ghosts the hills and semis sleep...
...Flight...
...He loves Judd's viburnum, Spanish squills, sedum Autumn Joy, and dazzling little flowers that bloom their heads off, like the roses Polyantha Grandiflora and Mrs...
...trucks speed east and west, white and red lights...
...In prospect from the Apollo Diner miles stretch away like open hands...
...People like to dig, and they like to dig with the same spade or fork that their predecessors used a thousand years before them...
...Tree peonies, which he loves, have blossoms the size of soup plates...
...He had copper beeches shipped in from Washington, Mitchell rejoices, "and if they perished then he tried again and if necessary yet again...
...The late Henry Mitchell, a Washington Post reporter, wrote his weekly "Earthman" column for the Post for twenty years...
...In view of the inevitable calamities, why do tens of millions of Americans, less eccentric than Jefferson, garden...
...the infant Peegee hydrangea flattened by the children's gigantic ball...
...You plant what you love, even if it's not the right spot or even the right gardening zone...
...It's okay, because "a garden is what results from years of adjustment in size and successions of enthusiasms...
...He is not a snob...
...Jefferson was always working on his garden in his imagination...
...Mitchell is dumbstruck by his daffodil, as gardeners sometimes are by a certain plant...
...Henry Mitchell on Gardening is the final of three collections of these columns (the others are The Essential Earthman [1993] and One Man's Garden [1992...
...The gardener does these things with pleasure nonetheless...
...from the plant snobs...
...the sourwood tree run over by a cement truck...
...What the right flower can do, with luck, is heal the gardener, making him fit (more or less) to love, by steps however slow...
...One of Jefferson's most endearing qualities was his serenity in the face of garden disasters, which were as frequent at Monticello as anywhere else," Mitchell writes...
...Is each new plant another beast in my zoo...
...Modern technology, he says, hasn't done much for the home gardener, who still must hand-weed the irises and stake the lilies (he once had 2,500 lilies...
...Often when I bring home a longed-for plant-the now-beheaded hydrangea, Stargazer lilies, a Styrax Japonica--I don't know where it will fit, or what it will look good with...
...He was going to have them and he did...
...Normal folk would give up at the first disaster...
...And when they're finished, they like to sit on a couch and read Henry Mitchell...
...Onyx and coral, Orion lusters in the moon's heavens, the Pleiades there are milky and virginal, beckoning to other seas and other gardens...
...Here is respite from the taskmasters who tell you what must be done this week or else...
...He praises Thomas Jefferson not for his successes, but for his plans, his passions, his equanimity...
...that storms and droughts blow and decimate, but "things even out...
...and the aching hands, scratched and red, are doing nothing more than turning pages and lifting a cup of coffee...
...And gardening on the couch, to Mitchell, is the mark of the true gardener...
...If you fail in small things and cannot perfectly manage your small garden, then expand and take on three times as much...
...and that you ought to make do with what you have...
...Mitchell is comforting because he believes that the gardener's life is full of woe...
...I cringe, because in my favorite garden design book, 100 Great Garden Plants, author William H. Frederick, Jr., warns that when you wedge in a specimen of this or that, you end up not with a garden but a "horticultural zoo...
...In "Not Everyone Wants to Go Whole Hog into Gardening," he suggests a landscape design featuring shrubs such as viburnums, flowering quinces, and skimmias, plus a few evergreens, bounded by simple plantings of daffodils, a hundred if you can afford them...
...At home there is no rest: blue seas are rich, yellow harvests brim, and sounds of engines fill the mountains and the fields...
...People like gardening precisely because it differs from the 'efficiency' of modern life...
...the back, throbbing from a day of digging and hauling, is ensconced on the couch...
Vol. 125 • June 1998 • No. 11
