Plant Dreaming Deep by May Sarton

Author:May Sarton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497646322
Publisher: Open Road Media

TEN

A Flower-Arranging Summer

MAKING A GARDEN is not a gentle hobby for the elderly, to be picked up and laid down like a game of solitaire. It is a grand passion. It seizes a person whole, and once it has done so he will have to accept that his life is going to be radically changed. There are seasons when he will hesitate to travel, and if he does travel, his mind will be distracted by the thousand and one children he has left behind, children who are always in peril of one sort or another. However sober he may have been before, he will soon become an inveterate gambler who cuts his losses and begins again; he may think he intends to pare down on spending energy and money, but that is an illusion, and he soon learns that a garden is an ever-expanding venture. Whatever he had considered to be his profession has become an avocation. His vocation is his garden.

How lucky it is for me, then, that Nelson is far enough north so there are four months of the year when there is nothing to be done outdoors! By late November the garden has been put to bed and will sleep until late April. Snowbound, I can at last concentrate on writing. But when the day’s stint is done I pore over seed catalogues and the brochures of nurserymen, and dream of next year’s garden. So, at least in my imagination, the garden is very much alive all the time … as with any other grand passion.

When Céline and I planted those first perennials, I had no idea what I was getting myself in for, for I had never had a garden of my own. But I did recognize the symptoms of the vocation from living near my mother, who could not inhabit an apartment for even a few months without taking over a little plot of earth under a porch or alongside a back entrance and making it flower. It is an English trait, as anyone recognizes who has approached London by train and seen, behind each smoke-and-dirt-encrusted row of sad houses, the diversity of tiny gardens, each an expression of the personality of its lover and slave. It is an English trait as anyone knows who has seen a work of the imagination such as Vita Sackville-West’s and Harold Nicholson’s Sissinghurst, a garden that wonderfully combines the romantic vision within a classical frame, a garden like a series of hedge-enclosed rooms that lead from one to another, opening classic perspectives toward moments of romantic discovery. Who can forget a small corner of massed blue poppies against a low brick wall, or the tall fox lilies like plumes of smoke against a dark hedge?

The need to create gardens may be an English trait but it can be transplanted, as I knew when I first saw Marjorie Sedgwick’s apparently casual planting of Chinese peonies under pink and white dogwood and Japanese maple in Beverly, Massachusetts. Her garden is

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