Down the Garden Path

"Now 'tis the spring and weeds are shallow rooted,
Suffer them now and they'll o'ergrow the garden"
Shakespeare
Our suburban garden was a model of low maintenance when we acquired it sixteen years ago, just two or three meager shrubs, a sparse lawn and a little square of patio stones behind the kitchen door. No weeding to be done, no leaf raking, just grass to be cut once a week through the summer months and perhaps fertilized once or twice a year. I couldn't just leave it alone, of course.

We had to bring a few of my favourite peonies from the last house. We planted a couple of rowan trees, "for the birds, for privacy, and to soften the ugly fence." The children each gave me a lilac bush for my birthday, one white and two different shades of purple. Friends and neighbours gave us cuttings, we dug a flower border and built a little garden shed, and so it continues. We will never make the list of noteworthy gardens, but it gives us great pleasure.

An afternoon spent raking and weeding last week revealed some of the winter casualties. We have lost most of our azaleas. A little row of euonymus, planted last fall to border the footpath and replace work intensive annuals and perennials, has been eaten to the ground. We suspect the local rabbit population, but it was a bitter winter and they had to eat something. One clematis is thriving, the other is clinging to life. There is much to be done. I need some advice and sympathy. So I turn to a cup of tea and my garden books, where I am sure to find kindred spirits.
"It has not been all success."

Helena Rutherfurd Ely 1858-1920

Helena wrote three books on how to create and maintain a hardy garden, American style. They were very well received.The first,"A Woman's Hardy Garden", published in 1903, was reprinted many times and sold more than 40,000 copies. Beautifully illustrated, "with photographs taken in the authors garden" they take us back to gracious days when, she wrote,"it is well worth while paying a man a dollar a day to do the heavy work."

It was Helena's boast that in mid-summer she kept her house supplied with thirty vases filled with flowers from her own garden. One of the beautiful black and white photos shows white capped maids posing with overflowing baskets of blossoms.

It seems that they took great interest in the garden and, on occasion, volunteered in their own time to help with the deadheading of the masses of pansies in the extensive rose beds.

Despite the availability of plentiful help, Helena was very much a 'hands on' gardener, way ahead of her time. Her daughter wrote, "Her joy was to dig, to sow, to plant and to transplant. She worked on her hands and knees in the garden from four to six hours a day." The practical advice Helena gave is as applicable to gardening in North America today as it was a century ago, even allowing for the current scarcity of men willing to dig for even one hundred dollars a day. She is credited with changing the face of American gardens. Her own beautiful garden in upstate New York still exists and it is still privately owned.

These delightful books are keepers, they have their place on my bookcase beside those of Helena's contemporary across the Atlantic, Gertrude Jekyll. You might turn up copies at thrift shops, used book stores or other treasure trove locations. A paperback version was printed in 1990 but it did not include the gorgeous photos.

Some of my favourite garden books are those, all too few, that were written for children.

This one is very short on pictures and makes few concessions in the text to it's youthful readers. But it is well worn and who knows, perhaps a long ago child was encouraged and helped to create a little garden. I do hope so.

By comparison, H.E.Bates (The Darling Buds of May) wrote this book for his children in 1939, when the war clouds were gathering over his garden in Kent .

In the dedication he wrote,"That little garden of yours, with its daffodils and turnips and primroses and radishes and forget-me-nots and marrows, all mixed up in the same bed, has already given you a lot of pleasure. When you look back on it and the days you spent there under the pink plum tree, you may perhaps think of it as one of the happiest things in your life. But one day also you will, most probably, want to make a different, larger and better garden for yourselves."

I do sometimes wonder if a love of gardens is genetically linked with a love of books, or are they both a matter of of culture, time, and place. If children are nurtured on "All around the garden, like a Teddy bear" and picture books with "Mary,Mary quite Contrary" and " Daffy Down Dilly has come up to Town", if they later read books like " The Secret Garden", will they be led to go looking for these magical places, even if they are not part of their immediate environment? And then will they be inspired to create a garden for themselves? I do hope so! A garden can be created in such a little space, like the tenement window boxes with roses in Hans Anderson's "Snow Queen". But first it must exist in someone's imagination.

I can't find any information about the fabulous Molly Thompson, who devised and illustrated this darling book, except that she also illustrated for Enid Blyton. But wouldn't you love to step into that old fashioned orchard with the big apple trees?

The Fairy Land Trust is one organization attempting to beguile little children into an appreciation of nature. They have a lovely website that is well worth a visit. http://www.fairylandtrust.org/

Cat and Mouse

Spring has finally arrived in Southern Ontario after a long snowbound winter. The first snowdrops, crocus and scillas are pushing through the earth, the forsythia will bloom any day now, and the first little mouse has appeared on my doorstep. It is quite dead, neatly laid out, not mauled at all, the first offering of the year from our small cat.

Princess is a classic tabby, with the mottled markings that shift from stripes to spots as she moves and are such perfect camouflage for her hunting expeditions. The instinct for hunting is ingrained in her DNA, and reinforced by her early life as an alley kitten before we took her in.

But still, I shake my head as we decide on a final resting place for the poor mouse; we choose between a flower pot or under the periwinkle beneath the rowan trees. It was very much a country garden, Beatrix Potter type mouse. Like Timmy Willy "who went to town by mistake in a hamper."

I think I have all the Beatrix Potter books on my shelves. The most read copies are very tattered and precious, those I keep. But I do have two spare copies of The Tale of Pigling Bland, in good condition with green covers and dust jackets, and they are just waiting to be well read too. So I will give them away to the first two readers of this blog who send me an email at avriljoyce@cogeco.ca The Tale of Pigling Bland, in case you don't know, is the saga of a piglet who had to leave home and seek his fortune because his mother had too many hungry piglets to feed. "Yus, yus, yus! they eat and indeed they do eat!"

Some of the most treasured books on my shelves are a very small collection of childrens early school readers from days long gone. They were often illustrated by talented artists, in this case by the award winning husband and wife team of Maude and Miska Petersham.

The cover is well worn and I wonder, how many children were charmed into reading
by the engaging little pictures? But that is a topic for a future blog.

Too many books

It would be seemly, at my time of life,to have achieved a tidy house with family photos prettily displayed and Doulton figurines on polished tables. The problem is the books. Instead of sitting tidily on the bookshelves they overflow and drift all through the house, at a guestimate more than three thousand of them.

We have tried to reduce the number. The children have each taken their personal stash and we have taken boxes to the local charity store. But more flow in, on birthdays and at Christmas, and the 'must have' treasures, other people's discards found at the charity store.

I must take the matter in hand. Perhaps if I begin to assess them, one at a time, on this blog, I will come to terms with why I have kept them, what I must keep, and what can be given away. It is an eclectic,well thumbed, two person collection amassed over fifty years. It includes Doris Lessing, Rumer Godden, Kazuo Ishiguro, Enid Blyton, Damon Runyon, anthologies, gardening books, nice old dictionaries....you get the picture.

Now, having resolved, where to begin? My bedside table I think.
The first book that comes to my hand is a tattered, falling apart little paperback edition of Tolkien's 'Tree and Leaf. It contains his definitive essay 'On Fairy-stories' and an early short story 'Leaf by Niggle'. I think it is out of print. If I come across an intact copy I will buy it. But this one stays on my bedside table,I love it. It fits my hand so nicely and always falls open at the right page. "Faerie is a perilous land and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold".

Another keeper is Final Harvest, a collection of poems by Emily Dickinson. What is there to say that has not already been said about Emily Dickinson? It is a must for my bedside, a joy to open at random at any time. "This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me". The perfect way to close my first post to the blogosphere.