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CHAPTER 1
January
New Year's and Ladybugs
It is a severe and bitter, perfectly classic, early January morning when I awake at 4:00 a.m. I am propelled out of bed by a host of thoughts and ideas that sit gibbering on the headboard of my bed ... all the usual things that disturb the rest of parents these days, perhaps at any time in history, and can cause them to stagger to the kitchen for a badly needed cup of coffee. These are the things that are sent to try us, I suppose, and remind us that earth is not our home. The person known ominously around here as She Who Must Be Obeyed is still asleep, although I would just say that, here in America where we have a right of free speech, we are allowed to add (mentally) the surname "But Against Whom Passive Resistance Is Tolerated, Though Strongly Discouraged." She would tell me to stop being such a Shetland sheepdog and go back to bed, but in this case, I resist and stay up with my thoughts.
My dog, Cosimo, who actually is a sheltie, is trailing at my heels, looking rather surprised by the early hour, but with nothing more on his mind than the pretty certain hope of an early breakfast. It is only ten degrees outside and still dark for hours yet. None of the Christmas lights, indoors or out, have yet tripped their timers and come on. It is not exactly the dark night of the soul, but all the same, it is very dark.
The furnace thermostats are still set to night time and so the downstairs rooms are chilly, but I have a mug of strong, hot, milky coffee in my hands, and in the reading room, I open the large illustrated coffee table book that I got for Christmas this year, English Country House Interiors. What superb, superlative rooms these are: wealth, taste, antiquity, tradition, and eccentricity all combined in a lovely materialist accretion and encrustation that seems to go on and on. My mind wanders in this fantasyland of wealth and taste and privilege for a long time, the whole "Downton Abbey" thing, before I am recalled to the more straitened present. I try to suppress the cares that disturbed my sleep, and think instead about the frozen garden outside.
Hours later, our two kids in their late teens are still nowhere to be seen, sleeping off their considerable exertions from a New Year's Eve that mysteriously involved some seriously illegal fireworks and a box of kitchen pots and pans. Sometimes a parent, in his growing wisdom, does not want to know what exactly his children are up to, and last night was just such a time.
Outside in the frozen garden, the hyacinths are an inch or two out of the ground, in their unflagging optimism, and so are hundreds of leaf- spears of daffodils. The extremely sharp cold of these bitter days will certainly kill off most of the pests in the garden, so we must rejoice over that, though of course, it is hard on the birds. I try to remember to put bread out for them and sometimes, when it is very cold, a dish of warm water, as water is more critical to them than food on a cold day when all water sources are frozen solid. Almost all the insect pests perish in cold like this, and just think of all the slugs and Japanese beetles that are doomed, though their successors will all be here next year. Many ladybugs survive all but the cruelest winters in our garden, or rather many survive in the garden and others prefer to find their way inside our rambling, not very airtight old house. I am forever catching them indoors and putting them carefully back outside. In weather like this, only these escapees will have survived the cold, plus a few with the good fortune or good sense to have burrowed deep into garden debris near a south-facing wall.
The first couple of years we lived here, I went out each spring to buy small containers of ladybugs to release into our garden, to establish this small friend with such a ravenous appetite for aphids and other pests. You release them at night so they get acclimated to your garden and don't fly away, and then by morning (in theory, anyway), they like their new abode and they and their descendants will be your allies and assistants forever after. Years later, they are legion here and I never see aphids in our garden any more. Victory!
When my son was very small, I took him to the garden center once on a ladybug errand and he was fascinated with the little cardboard container they come in, like the containers you get fishing worms in, but with screen over the top. He held the ladybugs while I was pushing the shopping cart through the garden center, and when I wasn't looking, he poked out the screen to see the bugs better. Of course they all escaped, and we left a long trail of ladybugs through the store. While I ineffectually tried to scoop at least some of them back into the container, he giggled with delight at all the escaped bugs and Daddy's manic antics.
This weekend was just barely warm enough to get out and do the last of the weeding before the year ended, and I ruthlessly cleaned the long herbaceous border of its infestation of a tiny but vigorous weed that looks something like watercress. Then I raked up the last of the autumn leaves, adding them to the mulch pile so the snows and rains of winter can create the dark, rich leaf mold that is worth its weight in gold in the spring garden. I am so greedy for this stuff that I would treat all the leaves that fall in our yard in this way if I could, but alas, then no other indoor chores or parenting — not to mention my day job in the city — would ever get done. So one does what one can.
But what a rich harvest this is and it does so much good in the garden, especially if you don't want to use chemical fertilizers. The soil in this garden has — just in the space of eight years of treating it with respect, strictly abstaining from chemicals of any kind, especially pesticides — gone from impoverished and clay-like stuff to dark, rich, and crumbly garden soil. You can turn over a spadeful of garden earth or sod and find it teeming with earthworms — and, yes a few grubs too, we must take the rough with the smooth after all — and what a joy it is to think of having rehabilitated this one fine acre of garden in so short a time. Weeding this last bed and getting the leaves all raked up once and for all were the last two chores I wanted to get done this year, and it is a nice feeling to have them accomplished.
I notice with joy that the pink 'Knock Out' roses are still blooming, and enthusiastically too, while their red cousins have completely given up, and it reminds me of what a weak color red is, overall, in the garden. Or rather, the color is not weak, but the plants that bear it generally are. I do not know why this is so, but the red version of any flower seems to be much less robust than its other exemplars. Perhaps there is a botanical theory that explains this. Red roses are typically much less florid than other colors, so too with peonies, daylilies, red rose mallows, red irises and on and on. It does not mean they are not worth growing but it is odd that a particular color should be associated with lack of vigor, or perhaps I am just imagining this, as I am fond of red in the garden and can never seem to get enough of it.
I feel the same way about blue, which also seems to me to be associated with lack of vigor, but I love it all the more too. Pastel colors, and whites and yellows in particular, seem not to suffer at all from this debility. I do like a bit of color variety in a species, and how boring a place the garden would be if every flower only came in one or two colors. But I also think that plant breeders tend to go too far and cannot rest until, merely for novelty, every plant is available in every color of the rainbow. Do we really need yellow and orange azaleas, for example? To me, they look hideous in the spring woods, blighting the bright green landscape with their toxic haze of mustard gas bloom. A golden holly is unusual and striking the first time one sees it, but would anyone really prefer it to the classic red, year in and year out for fifty years? Unthinkable.
One day last spring, at the end of a long walk around our town, I came upon a small planting at my neighbor's house where, among a festive and traditional gathering of fresh pink and white azaleas, they had planted a splendid, tall group of orange irises. And not apricot orange either, which would have been awful enough, but pumpkin orange. Have you ever seen such a thing? And the combination with pink and white was a premeditated insult to the eye. It stopped me in my tracks and I was thunderstruck by their unseemliness; I had to wonder who had seen fit to inflict this awful plant on the world and on unsuspecting and relatively innocent passersby.
I am all for letting people do whatever they want to do in their gardens, and to indulge their enthusiasms and whims as much as they like, however odd. That's part of the fun of gardening, after all. But honestly, there are limits. In the old days, in the live-and-let-live west, they used to say: "Around here, you can do whatever you want, so long as it doesn't startle the horses." And I think that's a pretty good way to organize a civilized society. But orange irises would definitely be in the horse- startling category and therefore should be outlawed. Or rather, not outlawed exactly, but I do think it would be okay for the sensible, steady sort of gardener to give a sniff of disapproval and move along, shaking his head in wonder at the folly of mankind.
* * *
Manure beyond the Dreams of Avarice
Perhaps it is time to tell you about the secret sauce, the gold at the end of the gardener's rainbow, the manna from heaven. For this gardener, it is: horse manure. My greed for the magical ingredient has finally led me to ask my daughter's formidable horse barn owner for some manure, a commodity he has in great supply, and of which I have a great need. One of the fine things, surely, about owning a horse, and there are many, is the free supply of manure, which is like precious gold in the garden. As my daughter's horse boards at his barn, some of the manure he has on his farm must, I think, belong to us, at least arguably. So I drove out to his farm, and there it was, piles and piles of it, all lovely and aged and available for the taking. But first I had to overcome my shyness in asking for it from Claude, the forbidding Swiss taskmaster who owns the barn and runs it with an iron fist, a sort of equestrian Bismarck (but Swiss, not German; you see how my metaphor is getting a bit muddled). And to my delight, he was happy to oblige.
I backed my truck up to his vast manure pile, and he very cordially steered me to an even more valuable pile, which had been aged and cured in the sun for years and was a mountain of black gold, a veritable Fort Knox of garden goodness. The light of pure, unguarded greed lit up my eyes. As Henry Mitchell says of people too foolish to use manure in their gardens: "It is no use to say you haven't got any; get some." So I now take our daughter to and from the barn when she is home, each way happily acquiring two huge trash barrels of the stuff, the largest containers that will fit in my SUV. I hesitated at first, thinking it was a bit unseemly somehow, but not for long, concluding cheerfully with the English poacher that I "may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb." Or was it "in for a penny, in for a pound"? Anyway, I am as pleased as a dog with two tails, to use an expression closer to home.
Most sensible people, and nearly all serious gardeners, perceive in the rich smell of well-rotted manure one of the great perfumes we humans are able to savor on this good earth. To us, it smells like the very essence of a healthy, life-giving soil, which indeed it is. My dog, Cosimo, for example, who is widely celebrated for his extremely good judgment, thinks it is just fine and in fact rather interesting. He is called The Wonder-Dog by those who know him and love him; I call him The Assistant Gardener, and his help in the garden and unwavering friendship are beyond price. He has been my constant companion in the manure caper, and he loves to frisk about the stables and visit the horses in his friendly way while I load my SUV with the golden stuff.
Unaccountably, however, other people who are important in our household have an unreasoning prejudice against the bouquet given off by this precious commodity. My teenage son, who has always had a hair- trigger gag reflex, can now scarcely bear to drive my car. And She Who Must Be Obeyed had quite a lot to say on the subject of horse droppings as we were going out to dinner one night, saying that she "would never again be taken out on a dinner spree in a foul manure-mobile," and adding quite a lot of further conversation that drifted volubly along this same rhetorical line. She embroidered this theme with numerous riffs about the pig-headedness of certain gardening folk and their greedy, selfish folly and so on, and I could not help thinking these subtle barbs may have been aimed at me. Still, we gardeners are past masters at putting up with adversity and prejudice, and we plough doggedly forward with the right and the true and the good, just as we were meant to do. We persevere, do we not?
When I got home from each trip to the stables, the wholesome stuff went right into the gardens, and my intention this winter is to put a rich layer of it over every inch of my garden. With the stock market now as uncertain as ever, hoarding manure seems a very sensible precaution and a perfectly viable alternative investment strategy.
We cannot, of course, stop gardening just because it is a revolting day in the dead of winter. So, inspired by a picture in a Penelope Hobhouse book of Russian sage blooming with yellow yarrow, I dug all the mangy grass out of the 4x7 bed on the street corner where we live, and where I started two Russian sages last summer to fill that hot and prominent spot with bright and lasting summer color. Today, I put down landscaping fabric around the center, leaving the edges empty for the yarrow that I will move from the crescent bed in the spring, when such tender plants may safely be moved. The two should bloom together a long time and stop traffic at that intersection. In my imagination, anyway. I added my secret ingredient, the manure, and covered the whole in bark chips for now, then was driven indoors by the pelting, freezing rain.
Inside, we have a huge red amaryllis open, with three bloom stalks, and it looks grand in the reading room, where you can look through it at the Christmas tree that is still up in the front room. Some friends gave us a second Christmas-red camellia as a gift, uncannily detecting that I had always had an ambition to have another camellia and, in fact, had been recently thinking of looking for one to place on the north side of the house, where it should do well. I intend to plant it beneath a kitchen window so that, when it is grown, it can peep in and watch me wash dishes and I can be cheered by its Renoiresque red blooms.
Outside, in welcome breaks of more mild weather, I have been cutting decades' worth of dead wood out of the rhododendrons in the hedgerow, as I can't do much else in the yard in the dark of January, and this is a job that badly needs to be done. Recently, I saw our old friend the resident cardinal, who seems to be sheltering in the dense yew by the trash bins, whence he explodes in startled flight if, in his opinion, you make too much noise on a trash bin errand. What a delight to see him again, after a mysterious absence of some time, dressed all in his Christmas red and adding some much-needed color to a dull winter landscape.
Also today, I got two large terra cotta pots for future tomatoes and filled them with manured soil, placing them by the corner of the garage next to the shaped yew, where they should get plenty of heat and sun this summer. If it ever becomes warm again. For now, the manure can rot nicely in the winter wet. Foul weather and rot and decay become new life before our eager eyes; delicious! After a hot shower, I re-read a favorite gardening book and extracted from it more than a full page of ideas for changes in my own garden. The winter gardener lives a rich and forward- looking interior life, planning for and savoring the sunlight and beauty to come.
So much for the garden in the dark of January as the New Year comes on strong. Inside the house, the mind of the gardener turns to penitent thoughts of the great excesses of the holiday season that concluded the year: the chocolates, the baked goods, the huge meals following each other in regular and unbroken procession, washed down by rivers of lovely wine and far too frequent depth charges of port and single malt whiskey ... and on and on. And let us not even mention the platefuls of almond butter toffee, shall we? (It was Enstrom's toffee, by the way, and it is the best in the world.) And so we find ourselves longing for food that is fresh, light, and wholesome to begin the year on the right note.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Garden Interior"
by .
Copyright © 2016 David Jensen.
Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
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