The Roots of My Obsession by Thomas C. Cooper

Author:Thomas C. Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Timber Press
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

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PENELOPE HOBHOUSE is a garden writer, designer, and historian. For fourteen years until 1993 with her husband, Professor John Malins, she was in charge of the National Trust Gardens at Tintinhull House in Somerset, England. She lives in Dorset and travels in Europe, central Asia and India, and the United States, lecturing and designing gardens.

A Rocky Start

Panayoti Kelaidis

When I was eight, my beautiful sister Mary (eighteen years my senior) married Allan, and for a while they lived in our house with my extended big, fat, Greek family. Unlike my short, aged, foreign-born parents (with accents and opinions to match), Allan was an Anglo—tall and incredibly cool. He soon began to build a rock garden along the north side of our house, spending every day outside on the project. Could I be blamed for wanting to help him at every stage of the process? In retrospect, I realize that I was an alibi as well as a nuisance: “Allan’s out there with the kid.” Ergo, it’s OK that he’s not in the noisy household. I shadowed him through the entire enterprise, talking more or less nonstop. I accompanied him on a dozen or more drives up Sunshine and Boulder Canyons to scrounge the roadside granite boulders that comprise the garden to this day. Most were large, one-man rocks (100 pounds more or less) and all must have been a chore to load. An eight-year-old isn’t exactly helpful in such enterprises. But I was company.

It is hard to imagine today (the rock garden is still there, shrouded with weeds) how raw it must have looked at first. The rounded, gray Precambrian granite boulders were harsh. Now they’re encrusted with lichens. We borrowed my father’s truck and brought down yards and yards of decomposed granite for fill. I would watch Allan wrestle and fuss and place rocks for hours and hours. I remember asking a lot of questions. The answers to the questions sometimes sounded just a tad perfunctory. An older or wiser child would have known I was driving him nuts—a strange Greek chorus to the drama of the garden’s creation. It wasn’t grand—some eight feet wide at most, tapering to a mere four feet at the east end, and some forty-five feet long, but I remember that it seemed to take forever to finish. I thought it was the most wonderful thing in the world.

I blush to say we stole many of the original plants. Back then it wasn’t exactly larceny: everyone thought it was perfectly fine to dig up plants in the wild. It was definitely not acceptable to filch bits from private gardens, however, but we frequently did. The principal source of new plants was a garden a block and a half away on Fourteenth Street. Namely, Paul and Mary Maslin’s garden. Allan stuck to sedums and sempervivums, which are admittedly extremely portable. I was excruciatingly self-conscious as we loped ever so casually along the front of the Maslin garden, pausing innocently enough, leaning down and then I’d see Allan was breaking off bits here and there and stuffing them in his pocket.

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