My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love
240
My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love
240eBook
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Overview
A delightful compendium of writing on plants.
The passion for gardening and the passion for words come together in this inspired anthology, a collection of essays on topics as diverse as beans and roses, by writers who garden and by gardeners who write. Among the contributors are Christopher Lloyd, on poppies; Marina Warner, who remembers the Guinée rose; and Henri Cole, who offers poems on the bearded iris and on peonies. There is also an explanation of the sexiness of castor beans from Michael Pollan and an essay from Maxine Kumin on how, as Henry David Thoreau put it, one "[makes] the earth say beans instead of grass." Most of the essays are new in print, but Colette, Katharine S. White, D. H. Lawrence, and several other old favorites make appearances. Jamaica Kincaid, the much-admired writer and a passionate gardener herself, rounds up this diverse crew. A wonderful gift for green thumbs, My Favorite Plant is a happy collection of fresh takes on old friends.
Other contributors include:
Hilton Als
Mary Keen
Ken Druse
Duane Michals
Michael Fox
David Raffeld
Ian Frazier
Graham Stuart Thomas
Daniel Hinkley
Wayne Winterrowd
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250331519 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 04/02/2024 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Sales rank: | 727,364 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Jamaica Kincaid's books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, A Small Place, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, and, most recently, My Brother. She lives in Vermont.
Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John’s, Antigua. Her books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, My Brother, Mr. Potter, and See Now Then. She teaches at Harvard University and lives in Vermont.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
It happens often to children--and sometimes to gardeners--that they are given gifts the value of which they do not perceive until much later. That is how it was with my first meconopsis. Seventeen years ago, when my garden in Vermont was so young that it was really only a nursery, I visited a very good gardener in New Hampshire. It was spring, and his garden, enviably long-established, was at its peak of vernal beauty. We walked about in that happy conjunction of need and generosity that all gardeners know, I admiring and he digging. My cardboard box was almost full of roots, slips, and young plants when we came to the stream that flows through his garden. He bent over a patch of mousy, furred, upturned gray leaves and said, "This is the very best thing. You have to have it."
It was Meconopsis betonicifolia, and he must have wondered why I did not immediately fall to my knees. Maybe he wondered, too, whether my ignorance made a waste of his gift. His instructions (repeated twice, as one does with children) were in any case very clear. "Divide it into single crows with a bit of root when you get home. Plant them firmly just at the crown, like strawberries, in rich decayed leaf mold. Bright dappled light. Maybe some morning sun. But pinch out the first flower bud. You must pinch out the first flower bud."
All those first steps were easy, and each single crown caught and flourished in the cool bed I had made them beside my own little stream. The first summer they made foot-wide rosettes of oval, dullish blue, hairy leaves, nice enough, but hardlyto be treasured like the lusty hosta `Royal Standard,' or the dusty pink, intensely fragrant Viola odorato that had also been in the box. They lived through a cold winter (I was to learn that they love that sort of thing), and the following spring each developing plant clasped a round, fat, furry bud in its center. By then I had discovered something of what I possessed, for I was keyed to the name whenever it appeared in books, as one is when an unfamiliar plant is out in the garden.
I learned that Meconoposis betonicifolia is the fabled Himalayan blue poppy (a blue poppy: words alone enough to shiver over), that it is to all other garden flowers what a milk-white unicorn might be in a barnyard, and that it is the envy of gardeners the world over. I read in T. H. Everett's Encyclopedia of Gardening that "in most parts of America these plants are difficult or impossible to grow," and in Wyman's Gardening Encyclopedia that it "always makes a great impression on American tourists, for it is practically unknown in most parts of the U.S." In The Education of a Gardener, Russell Page comments that its culture is "as ardently worked for and ... as difficult to succeed with as the philosopher's stone," and in Green Thoughts, Eleanor Perenyi whines wistfully that she "would give anything for a glimpse of it, even in somebody else's garden." And there it was, this nonpareil, in thriving health, in my garden.
And it was about to bloom there, for the first time. "But pinch out the first flower bud. You must ..." my friend had commented, and there was no ambiguity in his twice-repeated command. As a gardener of fifty years' experience (albeit meconopsisless for all but the last third) I am used to ruthlessness with plants. I can nip out the first hopeful blooms of annuals, and mess up their roots as well, knowing that it will be better for us both later on. I have plunged a butcher's knife into the hearts of magnificent clivias and agapanthus, prying their growth apart with a crunch at their crowns and trimming off their white, fleshy roots as one would cut up servings of baked noodles. I have beheaded ancient lilacs, hoary with lichens, so their youth could return to them. I am inured to these acts of violence, but to pinch out those first buds of Meconopsis betonicifolia, when even Eleanor Perenyi "would give anything for a glimpse ...".?
Fortunately, in the nick (so to speak) of time, I met H. Lincoln Foster at a meeting of the Berkshire Chapter of the American Rock Garden Society. Then old and very ill, he was still tending Millstream, his garden in southern Connecticut, and his authority as one of America's greatest gardeners hung about him like a fine, comfortable robe. He explained that meconopsis capable of becoming perennials will expend everything, when they are young seedlings or divisions, on their first flower. They then become "monocarpic" (as many of their tribe always are), fading away after bloom like any common biennial foxglove. But if that first flower is pinched out, some (not all) will settle down to form crowns and persist from year to year as true perennials. "So," he said, "if it is really betonicifolia that you have" (as opposed to a dozen other names he reeled off, and I was later to learn, of true biennials, which will be that whatever you do) "you had better pinch."
There it was for a second time, delivered with authority beyond question. And though I confess that in life generally, when faced with a choice between immediate, spendthrift pleasure and careful prudence, I have always tended to take the grasshopper's way, still, to have in my garden such a plant, and to know that one gesture of delayed gratification, one tiny painful pinch, would mean years of perenniality, years of returning pleasure . . . years of unweening pride and smug superiority and the most heartfelt sadness at the bad fortunes of other gardeners ... well, I pinched. I even smothered down the waffling thought that as I had five plants, perhaps then I could pinch only four, and from one at least see this glory straightaway, though I cost it its life.
It is lucky that I began with Meconopsis betonicifolia, because within its genus of about forty-five species, it is the easiest to grow and, when forced to it, the most reliably perennial. And though within its family three or four first cousins vie with it for the title, it is arguably the most beautiful. In its second spring after pinching, it will produce several knots of growth from a central crown, most of which form buds and eventually flowers on stems 4 feet high. Each stem is crowned with one magnificent nodding bloom about 3 inches across, and two to four smaller ones lower down the stem. Petals are usually four, though quite curiously, cultivated plants may bear flowers with six or more petals, a phenomenon never reported in the wild. True doubling, however, seems never to occur, and that is a good thing, as there is a grace about the carriage of the flowers, an almost Tanagra figurine poise, that would only be ruined by too much heavy petal.
Those who can grow the plant at all are quite snobbish about the color, which at its very best is a clear sky blue almost impossible to imagine when not standing before it. Either because of the provenance of collected seed, however, or--as some speculate--because of the alkalinity or dryness of the soil in which they are grown, plants can produce flowers in a range of color from weaker, more watered blue to mauve and even light brownish-purple. A perfectly blue flower is, one supposes, to be preferred over any other; but in facet, there are no ugly Meconopsis betonicifolia, and those that veer furthest from the purest tint do so by washes of one color over another, creating, in their own way, a curious effect of translucence. I even grew--from seed collected by Dan Hinkley on an expedition to Nepal three years ago--a single plant with flowers of deep grape purple. Alas, that one I didn't pinch, and I still wonder whether it might have been the only one of its color ever brought to the Western world or, indeed, the only one that ever existed at all.
What People are Saying About This
For an amateur gardener who learns slowly and needs her information beautifully told, this book is perfect.