Green Thoughts by Eleanor Perenyi

Author:Eleanor Perenyi [Perényi, Eleanor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76966-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

NIGHT

A garden, however familiar, is another place on a summer night, and I don’t mean those changes wrought by stage designers with ‘moonlight’ and veils—nothing operatic. There are, to begin with, peculiar noises, faint rustlings whose source may be revealed by a flashlight picking up a pair of frozen green eyes. Or the drumming of katydids. Or a sound that occurs in August in a corner of my garden and is answered in the one across the street. In both places, someone seems to be hard at work on a typewriter, clackety-clackety-clack. Answer: clackety-clack. What on earth are they? Not locusts or cicadas, which have a different sound. The most bizarre and least likely explanation yet offered me is that they are raccoons. Raccoons? ‘Well,’ said the man who told me this, ‘that’s what my cousin who owns the garage out on Route 1 says, and they’re all over the back of his place.’ Why not, when you come to think of it? Perhaps, in lieu of the chimpanzees who one day will write Hamlet if the laws of probability are allowed to operate long enough, raccoons are hammering away at The Theory of the Leisure Class somewhere in my shrubbery.

Scents are stronger at night. Everybody knows that but not that they are also different. Faint whiffs of sweetness in nicotiana and clethra acquire a dose of pepper after midnight—when, on the other hand, the carnations, at their most powerful at dusk, seem to go to sleep and stop smelling. But the biggest change is that of proportion and texture produced by seeing things in black and white. My first experience of this phenomenon wasn’t in a garden, or at night, but in Rome in broad daylight, in the company of a friend who is color-blind. I had always known this about him and never grasped the significance until the day I stupidly said something about the apricot glow of Roman palaces. ‘You forget,’ he said gently, ‘I don’t see that. I don’t know what you mean.’ The words were more than an embarrassment, they were a revelation, for he was the subtlest of observers, who had often pointed out to me details and refinements in paintings and architecture, and even plants, which—blinded in my own way by color—I had missed. Thereafter, I observed things with different and in some ways better-informed eyes, and I haven’t forgotten the lesson.

To see things in black and white is to see the basics, and I would now recommend to any designer of gardens that he go out and look at his work by the light of the moon. He may well see that a certain bush is too large for the space it occupies, another too small, that the placement of a flower bed needs adjusting. Above all, he will be more conscious of the importance of form. Strolling among the ruins on the Palatine, my color-blind friend had again and again identified the wild flowers growing there by their shapes, pointing out

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