Our Life in Gardens by Joe Eck

Author:Joe Eck
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429944502
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

NERINES

IT TOOK US MANY YEARS to understand the specific needs of nerines. Thirty, to be precise, because it was that long ago that we acquired our first one from beside the garbage can of a friend in Marblehead, Massachusetts. “They are one-shot deals,” he explained, “like paperwhites. You can’t make them bloom again.” But they seemed so promising, each one sitting on top of the soil and looking like a fat daffodil bulb. There wasn’t any foliage, but there was one wizened pink flower on a long stem that seemed to tug at us. Anyway, bulbs always give you that feeling of potential life that makes them hard to throw away, even if they are only sprouted onions in the crisper drawer. The bulbs were shoulder-to-shoulder, not nicely spaced like you’d plant a pot of tulips for forcing, but joined at the base and pressing against the rim, as if they had multiplied to that extent. And there was also the pot, an old clay one, white-crusted with lime. In any case, at that time we seemed to be running a Shelter for Unloved Plants, rescuing half-frozen ficus trees from city curbs and shrunken, dust-covered African violets from the rubbish room of our apartment building. So we took these nerines. At the least, the pot would be nice to have.

The first thing you feel about anything you rescue is that you should be especially good to it. So we tipped those nerine bulbs out of their pot, divided them carefully, and then repotted them into two pots, the first the one they came in and the other recycled from somewhere else. We used the richest compost we had, and fertilized them carefully all that first winter, during which very healthy, straplike, eight-inch-long leaves appeared. We were really hoping for abundant bloom in autumn—from two pots now—but nothing came. Our plants ripened their leaves and then quietly went to sleep for the winter. This happened for several years, but as they were no trouble and we had hopes that flowers would eventually occur, the two pots just hung around. But still, our friend had been right. They seemed a “one-shot deal.” And we hadn’t even had the first shot.

Then we had the great privilege of visiting a very old garden in a small village in Normandy that had been tended for over forty years by its owner, the Comtesse d’Andlau. Like many antique French houses, hers presented a blank north face flat on the street, but its south side opened through wide French doors into a large walled garden. When the house was built in the eighteenth century, much of that space would have been a paddock, a small home orchard, a place to tether the family cow or even to raise a pig or two. But it was now planted with remarkable trees and shrubs, some—like the white-berried Sorbus cashmiriana—of extraordinary credentials. (“Clementine Churchill gave me seed of that.”)

Sadly, our visit was in late October, on a cold gray and

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