Bookish Gardener

The Manchurian Hydrangea

The war in Korea was over. Captain—now Major—Bennett Marco had been reassigned to Army intelligence in Washington. It was, by and large, a pleasant assignment except for one thing. Night after night, the major was plagued by the same reoccurring nightmare.

(From the movie The Manchurian Candidate)

In Captain Marco's "nightmare", he and his men (including "Manchurian Candidate" Raymond Shaw) believe they are at the Spring Lake Hotel in New Jersey, listening to a Mrs. Henry Whittaker speak to a garden club on the topic "Fun With Hydrangeas". But they're not. They're on stage in an amphitheater in Manchuria, subjects of a brainwashing demonstration being conducted by their North Korean, Red Chinese and Soviet Communist captors.

I'm a big fan of this movie, and a big fan of hydrangeas, so I was tickled to see that director John Frankenheimer's DVD commentary included this bit about the hydrangea speech:

Oh, incidentally, this whole business of hydrangeas...I said to George Axelrod [who wrote the movie's screenplay], I said, Now look, George, I said, We have to have a whole speech here that's going to enable me to get this camera to go 360 degrees around this room. And...I need a lot of words. And he said, Well what do you want the speech to be about? [I said] Well, she should be talking about hydrangeas, so obviously the speech has to be about hydrangeas. He said, Dear boy, I know nothing about hydrangeas. However, you shall have your speech. And so what he did was, he got a seed catalog, and he copied the seed catalog almost word for word, and that's what we have here.

"Mrs. Henry Whittaker's" speech:

Another modern discovery, which we owe to the hydrangea, concerns the influence of air drainage upon plant climate. Many years ago, when I was traveling about the country, I noticed magnificent hydrangeas on the hills, where the air drainage was, er, perfect, and very poor specimens, or perhaps none at all in the valleys. Formerly, we used to consider sheltered valleys more favorable to plants than hilltops, but the avoidance of late spring and early autumn frosts enjoyed by sites with good air drainage, where the cold air can drain safely away to lower levels, gives the hills a decided advantage. Thus it was the hydrangeas that gave the first pointer in another modern discovery of horticultural importance. From this, it might appear that the hydrangea is a fairly simple plant, but there are more complications. The cultivation of hydrangeas was evolved from a number of varieties originally found in Japan, not all of which of course have the same characteristics. Two of them do not share the qualities of producing blue flowers in mineral-rich soils.

I've seen this movie over and over again without tiring of it. I used to think of it as being bleak, violent and creepy, but then realized that that wasn't how I was experiencing it. Bleak, violent and creepy things happen in it, but it's odd and funny, in nearly every scene. ("Oh, Raymond...What is the matter with you? You look as though your head were going to come to a point in the next thirteen seconds.") I think you miss the point if you take it at face value. It's not a "political thriller". It's not even the saddest story I ever heard (speaking of stories you can't take at face value). It's really Alice in Wonderland, Red Queen and all.

Meanwhile, even Manchurians may have some hope of growing mophead hydrangeas this year. The new new thing, of course, is Hydrangea macrophylla 'Endless Summer', hardy to zone 4 and "perpetually flowering", although I'll be waiting for the prices to come down before introducing it to my garden's "Hydrangea Row". It's a selection from Bailey Nursery in St. Paul, Minnesota, and discovered by Michael Dirr, who writes, "My goal for this particular (blue-acid/pink-alkaline) selection is to breed a new race of perpetual flowering H. macrophylla." (May I suggest as cultivar names: 'Bennett Marco', 'Eugenie', and 'Friendless, friendless Raymond'?) Exciting news: A new Michael Dirr, Hydrangeas for American Gardens, is coming out from Timber Press in June. (Dreaded news: A remake of The Manchurian Candidate is coming out sometime later this year. To be perfectly closed-minded about it, I can only say: Jonathan Demme, Meryl and Denzel, you are tremendous, but I can't believe you're going to get this one right.)

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.