Bookish Gardener

He's got my number

Has it been too long since I've mooned over Henry Mitchell in public? Oh yes it has. Talk to me, baby:

A gardening friend of mine has quite lost her mind — not that it distresses her much — and no longer makes an effort to conceal her madness.
. . . .
She was very bad about garden centers; we all noticed that from the beginning. She would go on some stated mission of acquiring a sack of peat moss, but would surreptitiously (entering stealthily at night, I suspect) bring home several flats of snapdragons and the Lord only knows what else.
. . . .
She no longer hid her packets of seed. They sat there in great rows. She had two hundred packets of seed at once — eggplant, tomatoes, thunbergias, snapdragons, zinnias, and endless other things.

"Do you think you have room for eggplants?" her saner friends would say — before it finally dawned on them that she knew she was mad, and did not wish to be sane.
. . . .
Where the produce of two hundred packs of seed, growing madly in the basement, is supposed to be planted in this garden, nobody knows.
. . . .
My friend, as I say, does not seem to suffer much. She is tremendously busy throughout the year, and has mastered the fine art of the scalpel, opening little slits here and there for one more plant, and she has become expert at last rites for the dying. On the whole, she is happier than she was before this madness set in.

From Henry Mitchell, One Man's Garden (pub. info here).

Cantatrice

I'm having my own little variety of religious experience these days, courtesy of Henry Mitchell. As promised (threatened?), I have been happily, hopelessly devoted to Henry Mitchell On Gardening these past few weeks. If you're of genteel sensibilities, you might say I've been luxuriating in it; otherwise, it might be more accurately said that I've been wallowing in it, like the proverbial pig in its preferred ecosystem.

As with his other books, there is more than can be digested and appreciated in one read, and as with his other books, how I look forward to dipping into this one over and over again. One thing I'm taking away from this go-round is Henry Mitchell's love of Brazilian morning glory, Ipomoea acuminata, a recurring guest star throughout the book. The several mentions of this flower don't strike me as repetitive, but rather endearing, as if to say, "by the way, you really ought to check out this plant", and again, "did I mention that you really ought to check out this plant?". I guess I really ought to check out this plant.

There's a piece in the book that I've already begun returning to, nearly daily. It's wedged in the middle of the pieces in the "April" chapter. Its unassuming title, "Budding Romance", bears a tinge of the irresistible garden pun, with scarcely a sign of the matters of which it is about to speak.

The daffodil 'Cantatrice' is the icon here, a favorite daffodil of Henry Mitchell:

Just the other day I sneaked out to see if that white flower out there was not the pretty old trumpet daffodil 'Cantatrice'. As if I wouldn't know it out my window a mile off. And what a pleasure to see it once again, and what a great glow of having put one over on Fate, because although this flower has grown like a weed in this scrawny cat-run of a garden for so long now, there were whole decades in which I could not grow it at all. Couldn't keep it even for two years in my former garden a thousand miles from here.

But this piece isn't really about successes and failures in the garden. You realize that it's really about something else, by sheer dint of the great pains taken by Henry Mitchell to seem almost off-handed about it:

When I discovered I could grow it here -- I like to say any jobbernowl can -- I was as pleased as a dog with two tails. Or a pilgrim in sight of Jerusalem.

And then open the floodgates, spilling the beans:

A cantatrice is a beautiful singer, the kind, I suppose, that sits on rocks and lures sailors to their doom, or maybe something not so grim. Any gardener, once he gets set in his ways, will find a few flowers that work like talismans or magical beasts. I have even known gardeners who choked up at clover fields or geese chomping Johnson grass in the cotton. They don't say so, but when they see the field or the flower they know they are on holy ground.

There is nothing wrong with that gardener's head. Except no mortal is strong enough to absorb what you may call 100-proof infusions from the farthest galaxies, not strong enough to bear the surge from the farthest core of life. He may pretend he has not known it, but it does him no good. He has known. Right there in front of him was the blessed cantatrice and he was not the same as he formerly was.

Then, on the off chance that one who had read thus far would need further convincing, he brings in Plato's Symposium. The 1958 Encyclopaedia Brittanica's thumbnail description of the Symposium is accurate, dry as dust, and dead as a doornail:

The immediate object of the dialogue, which professes to record the discourses made in eulogy of Eros by a group of eminent speakers at a banquet in honour of the tragic poet Agathon, in the year 416-415, is to find the highest manifestation of the "love" which controls the world in the mystic aspiration after union with the eternal and supercosmic beauty; to depict Socrates as the type of the aspirant who has reached the goal of "union"; and to set in sharp opposition to him the figure of Alcibiades, who has sold his spiritual birthright for the pleasures and ambitions of the world.

Leave it to Henry Mitchell to bring the dialogue and its true import to life, in a few spare paragraphs, in a gardening column, on newsprint:

...that sketch of a Greek party long after the age of heroes where a roaring drunk crashed in -- the golden Alcibiades, divinely smashed and unable to join the rest in their arguments about the nature of love. The wine scoured his poor brain, leaving only a direct perception of godly beauty in the person of that difficult and irritating philosopher Socrates. The drunk, famous for his beauty, saw himself as ugly when confronted by a philosopher whose body was no handsomer than a toad.

Sometimes he had to shut his ears when Socrates was talking, he blurted out. Otherwise the beauty of the old teacher would so seize his soul that he would grow old just sitting at his feet. The great thing here was that even a golden boy (not much admired by boys in school) when properly medicated could see a divine beauty far greater than his own, and could see the proper response to it. Divine beauty is where you find it probably. There is authority for the notion that God once spoke through a jackass, a real one with furry ears. But another time perhaps through a toad-faced philosopher? And beyond doubt, sometimes through a weather-defiant flower.

Now, how does one talk about the numinous, without making it sound like something that's only good for writing a paper on, or falling into the commission-driven patter of a soul-saving salesman? In a divinity school class over twenty years ago, the theologian Martin Marty told us about his impulse as a four-year-old child, dumbstruck at the idea of unbelievers, to erect a giant, glowing neon sign bearing the word "God", so that they too could "see" what he had seen. And I suppose that's the natural impulse of those who have heard the song of the cantatrice and seen, if they dared to look, the vision toward which she beckons. It's a relief, then, to find Henry Mitchell at the end of this piece, finally comfortable enough with us, and perhaps trusting by then that we are comfortable enough with him, to tell it like it is:

What the right flower can do, with luck, is heal the gardener, making him fit (more or less) to love, by steps however slow. Growing old, still in awe, still sitting at her feet.

All of which now means that I'll have to track down the narcissus 'Cantatrice' and find a place for it in my garden. Not as idolatry--for the worst thing would be to mistake the flower itself for what it's meant to merely be a reminder of--but for the chance to gaze upon this flower again and again, each time to be reminded of Socrates, Henry Mitchell, and the matters of which they spoke.

Isn't it time (you don't have to wait)...it must be time

I've known about the third collection of Henry Mitchell's gardening columns (Henry Mitchell On Gardening) for some time now, but have held myself back from acquiring (and devouring) it. This book was put together after his death, and edited by no-slouch-he Allen Lacy, who also contributed the introduction. I can't wait to read this, but I have made myself wait. Why? Because this, Henry Mitchell's third garden book, is his last garden book.

~ ~ ~

When I was a teenage bookworm, my reading tastes heavily favored fantasy, sci-fi and horror. One of my favorites was an anthology published by Scholastic books, titled 11 Great Horror Stories, selected and edited by Betty M. Owen. It has survived three decades of culling and triage, and moves from Okinawa, to Lake Bluff, Illinois, through three dorm rooms, an apartment, and a condominium in Chicago's Hyde Park, to San Francisco, California, and now rests comfortably on a built-in basement bookshelf in Madison, Wisconsin. Don't know quite how this happened, but it's now the book in my library that I've owned the longest (to put it more starkly: when I first cracked its spine, Spiro Agnew was not only still alive, he was the sitting vice-president of the United States). It includes stories by the greats (H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker), but the story in this volume that I have remembered most vividly and often re-read over the years has been "The Love Letter" by Jack Finney. It's a time-travel story, written before Finney's "cult classic" time-travel novel Time and Again. (Finney also wrote the novel "The Body Snatchers", from which the two great and creepy "Invasion of..." movies were made.) The story in a nutshell: bachelor in mid-20th century NYC--who still hasn't found what he's looking for in the bright lights of the big city--finds a portal to the 19th century and a brief ("yet eternal") courtship of a woman who lived and died long before he was born. This is a lovely story that takes only a few pages to move the reader from ennui to sentimentality. I heard that a "Hallmark Hall of Fame" TV movie adaptation of the story came out a few years back, but I haven't sought it out...although the thought of seeing the actors who played Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker in another film, as the protagonists in this movie, is bizarrely intriguing.

The thing is, the hero of the story "receives" three, and only three, letters from his bygone beloved, and, knowing that the third letter will be the last, makes himself wait before allowing himself to open it:

It was a long week. I worked, I kept busy daytimes, but at night I thought of hardly anything but the third secret drawer in my desk. I was terribly tempted to open it earlier, telling myself that whatever might lie in it had been put there decades before and must be there now but I wasn't sure, and I waited.

Then, late at night [...] I pulled out the third drawer, reached in and brought out the last little secret drawer which lay behind it. My hand was actually shaking, and for a moment I couldn't bear to look directly--something lay in the drawer--and I turned my head away. Then I looked.

~ ~ ~

So I've held off, but now I think it's time, with the winter solstice behind us and the New Year straight ahead, to open Henry Mitchell's third letter.

Henry Mitchell On Gardening. Henry Mitchell, Allen Lacy (introduction). Mariner Books, 1999. ISBN 0395957672.

11 Great Horror Stores Including The Oblong Box and The Dunwich Horror. Selected and edited by Betty M. Owen. Scholastic Book Services, 1969. No ISBN and out of print, but used book copies appear to be available from a number of online sources.

A "fun with Google" postscript: I came across this thread in one of the forums at Garden Web, on the subject "Who is your favorite garden writer, and why?" No surprise that Henry Mitchell figures prominently, and passionately, in the responses.

Paeoniaphilia

The fattest and most scrumptious of all flowers, a rare fusion of fluff and majesty

--Henry Mitchell on the peony, in The Essential Earthman (publication information at the end of this post).

"The Peony Bloom Time Project" is a new guide charting the bloom sequence of peonies, prepared by Michael Denny from data collected by himself and others. (I learned about this site from the Peony Group at Yahoo!.) Denny plans to update the guide at least annually with additional data which he hopes to receive from viewers of the site.

I was pleased to read that Lindsay D'Aoust of La Pivoinerie D'Aoust Peony Nursery of Quebec helped Michael Denny create the project's website. Peonies have been my favorite flower ever, for ever, and I was excited to learn, as a newbie gardener, that they do well in this (cold) climate and (clay) soil. So, the first perennials I ever planted were peonies from La Pivoinerie D'Aoust. In revisionist history, I'll claim that excitement trumped anxiety as I opened the box from Canada (oh, so that's what a peony root looks like!) and planted, carefully following the included instructions and using a desk ruler (this was before I got my trowel with inch-markings on it) to make sure the eyes weren't planted too deep. All four plants came up and flowered beautifullly the next spring: 'M. Jules Elie', 'Lillian Gumm', 'James Pillow' (a wonderful flower, but especially dear to me as one of the few plants with "James" in its name--the name of my middle child and my late father), and 'Dai jo kuhan'. And I thought: I have peonies. I have peonies! I've since planted even more from Lindsay's pivoinerie and am already making out my wish list for next year--I know just the place for a big, blowsy stand of them (see: front yard garden project).

Daffodils; Henry Mitchell

Last Saturday I finished planting the strip bordering our backyard (and fronting the athletic fields of our neighborhood middle and high schools) with daffodils and daylilies (100 each). The daffodils are "The Works" mixture, which "Amos" "Pettingill" (the creator of that pseudonym surely being some progenitor of a writer for The Simpsons) promises as comprising "top-size bulbs of no less than 30 varieties, never more than five of each, [...] blended to provide the widest possible range of color, form, and blooming time". We'll have to see next spring as to how truly varied these turn out to be, but I can attest to their size...these were plump, luscious bulbs, and the quantity packed included more than enough extra to cover the margin of error for the two or three that were found to be weightless and desiccated. I think I will always remember the pinch-me-please beautiful weather, and how the clay soil yielded without resistance to the spade and trowel, turning up more earthworms than grubs.

Funny thing about daffodils. A year ago this time I was making my first plans for spring bulb planting. I remember going from page to page of an oversized technicolor tulip catalog, nearly hyperventilating with the desire to possess everything pictured. Luckily, superego prevailed over id, and I whittled down my order by, say ninety-eight percent or so, and interplanted two dozen bulbs among the lavender (the better to deter rabbits with, my dear).

Some weeks later that year, I planted daffodils for what I can only look back and describe as utilitarian reasons: they were half-price (at that point in the season) at the garden center; rabbit resistant; likely to naturalize; and, as a flower, perfectly okay.

But when the bulbs bloomed next spring, it turned out that the tulips were the okay flower (although they were beautiful; and yes, the rabbits stayed away from them in the lavender border); the daffodils turned out to be the flowers I would come to love. I can't quite explain it, but it's something in the way that each daffodil flower draws one close to look upon and appreciate a quality of integrity in its beauty. (Evil self-editor: yes, you're right; you can't quite explain it.)

And so Henry Mitchell has been on my mind. He died ten years ago this coming November. It is reported in the introduction to The Essential Earthman, in the edition issued posthumously, that he died while helping a neighbor plant daffodils. The only picture I have seen of him is on the cover of my paperback edition of One Man's Garden. Earthman? All man. Shirtsleeves rolled up like he means business, with lit cigarette in hand. (And to think that it was just his prose that made me swoon.) Henry Mitchell wrote passionately and with encyclopedic knowledge about all sorts of plants, but especially daffodils. (An aptly titled chapter in The Essential Earthman is "Daffodil-irious".) The following excerpt, from a different chapter in the book, made me guffaw (not laugh) out loud the first time I read it:

Most of my daffodils have severe defects, by show standards, but then they make a brave show all the same. I have several that are to my eye distinctly ugly, but I like them too. One is a bicolor trumpet, white perianth with a really gross megaphone sticking out in intense neon-lemon, frilled to beat the band, like a whore on Easter. I never saw anything quite like it.

The last column Henry Mitchell wrote was titled "The Dawn Lies in Wait", which includes this gift:

The gardener must acquire plants, but amassing treasures is not the aim or the goal. The aim is to peer intensely at all of them, to enjoy the way in which they sprout up and in due season die down.

The Essential Earthman. Henry Mitchell. (First Mariner Books edition, paperback, 1999; originally published Indiana University Press, 1981.) ISBN 0-395-95768-0.

One Man's Garden. Henry Mitchell. (Houghton Mifflin, paperback, 1992.) ISBN 0-395-70937-7.