Bookish Gardener

Once more, with Giles

I've been very late to the party on the whole Buffy thing. So it's only recently that I caught the first episode of its final season, in which Willow is taking the rest cure in England, and summons a blossom of, er, passionflower vine from the good green earth. Rupert Giles points out, "It doesn't belong there," and further observes, "Passiflora caerulea. Native of Paraguay." Pahss-i-FLOR-a kah-eh-ru-LEH-a. May I never utter another botanical name unless I can say it just like that. Ah, the thought of Anthony Stewart Head reciting the Index Hortensis, entry by entry, cover to cover. A gardener's dream (and, no doubt, an actor's nightmare).

I say clem-a-tis, you say cle-mat-is

In a moment of serendipity, I flicked on the TV the other day while getting dressed for a meeting, just in time to happen upon a segment of Martha Stewart's daily show which featured Dan Hinkley of Heronswood Nursery. One of these days I'll order the Heronswood catalog, primarily to see the plants he's introduced from Korea (the flora of Korea being an interest that's gently simmering on the back burner...for now). My mental picture of Dan Hinkley is constructed from Jamaica Kincaid's descriptions in My Garden (Book): (pub. info. here), in which he appears as a friend and companion traveler on a seed-gathering expedition in China. I don't know quite what I expected, but I remembered this image from the book:

...but I could not keep up with Dan; he bounded up the mountain like a four-footed furry mammal (a bear) and disappeared. I only knew how to follow him by seeing the trembly branches and flattened undergrowth that were left in his wake.

On TV? Definitely not the wild-eyed, sunburned explorer...rather, a mild-mannered regular guy, wardrobe inspired by Mister Rogers (albeit with v-neck sweater instead of cardigan), who clearly has done a good job of remembering to use his sunscreen. He and Martha chatted about seed gathering and seed exchange organizations, and did a little "show-and-tell" on seeds collected from their respective gardens.

So, Dan Hinkley pronounces clematis "clem-a-tis". I myself bounce back and forth, but mainly settle on "cle-mat-is". This dictionary accommodates both. But I like Lauren Springer's attitude in her plant portraits' pronunciation guide in The Undaunted Garden (pub. info. here):

The pronunciation guide is not meant to be a rigid put-off--it is a guide, nothing more. There is no wrong way to pronounce a botanical name unless the syllables are out of order or a person's name is mangled in the process.

(By the way, Lauren favors "clem-a-tis".)

The pronunciation guides in the back of Horticulture magazine are also of interest, and helpful in using phonetic spelling ("KLEM-uh-tiss") as the guide instead of those symbols that I haven't thought about and can't remember since eighth grade. (Quick...what's the schwa sound...and the symbol for it?) I loved, in the way that only a true geekazoid can, this footnote in Horticulture's November/December 2003 issue on the pronunciation for Agave:

The pronunciation uh-GAH-vay, whether as a common name or a generic epithet, is nearly universal for these plants. The origin of the word, however, is not Spanish (which the common pronunciation might lead one to expect), but rather the ancient Greek agauos, meaning illustrious or noble. When agauos is Latinized as Agave, the rules of pronunciation for botanical Latin require a long a sound in the second syllable, hence uh-GAY-vee, which is favored by several authoritative sources. Of course, readers are free to regard this as nonsense and pronounce the word as they darn well please.

However, my faith is sorely shaken by Horticulture's prescription for anemone (September/October 2003 issue): an-ih-MOE-nee. Really? Have you ever met anyone who pronounced it that way, instead of ah-NEM-on-ee? Dictionary.com lists only one pronunciation (hah! the right one).

Then there are the blasted botanical family names, all ending in "ceae". It's been quite a trial, going from high school Latin pronunciations to Anglojurisprudential Latin pronunciations to, now, botanical Latin pronunciations. (Wish I'd had this, which is both a handy cheat sheet as well as an interesting historical guide to competing ways of pronouncing words in Latin.) It was hard enough figuring out in law school that "res" ("the thing" in Latin) wasn't to be pronounced "ress" anymore (as in "quae res et cibi genere et cotidiana exercitatione et libertate vitae" from the fourth book of Caesar's The Gallic Wars, not that I ever read that far), but "reese". Now, when I want to say Malva-ceae, or Ranuncula-ceae, or Lilia-ceae, the rules of botanical Latin seem to augur against the more mellifluous "see-aye" (without a glottal stop), and, instead call for "see-ee" (impossible to say without a glottal stop). Hard to pronounce without feeling like Nicolas Cage at the payphone in Honeymoon in Vegas, tripping over native Hawaiian ("is that 'Ka-pu-ah-ah' or 'Ka-pu-ah-ah-ah'?"). But here's another problem--wouldn't the purist call for the "C" to always be pronounced as a hard "C"? (Nar-KISS-us instead of Nar-SISS-us?) Thus, not "see-aye", and not even "see-ee", but "kee-ee"? Forget it. I'll do in Rome as the Romans do, once the Romans figure out what they're doing.

I christen thee...Willoughby

Willoughby? Whatever it is, it comes with sunlight and serenity...

Is it affectation to give your garden a name? Hadspen. Gravetye. Sissinghurst. Malmaison. Monticello. Giverny. Winterthur. Or, closer to home, Marlyn Sachtjen's Wind 'n' View. Or, much, much farther from home, Eden.

Willoughby. Just a whiff of anglo-horticultural correctness. Willoughby. "Farm in the willows." I like willows: Willow Weep for Me (as performed by Dinah Washington); Salix purpurea, purpleosier willow; and, of course, Willow.

And then there's Willoughby, refuge and sanctuary. In the opening scene of "A Stop at Willoughby" from The Twilight Zone's first season, a conference room is filled with suits waiting for either a conference call...or a round of B---S--- Bingo. Our hero is a gentle soul, trapped in the life of a gray-flannel-suited company man. He yearns of escaping to Willoughby, which is "...Peaceful. Restful. Where a man can slow down to a walk. And live his life full measure." And so he does...in a way.

Perhaps the calming and restorative powers of the garden are better appreciated (or the midlife gardening obsession is more acute) when experienced from the viewpoint of one who's run the ratrace and jumped its track. But enough of that. Let's just say--this is my Willoughby.

Willoughby? Whatever it is, it comes with sunlight and serenity, and is part of the Twilight Zone.

--Rod Serling, "A Stop At Willoughby"

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.

Redoute redux; Poor Napoleon

While thumbing through Katharine White for this post, I came across this helpful thumbnail history and commentary on Pierre-Joseph Redoute, the botanical illustrator previously mentioned in posts here and here:

The best portraits ever painted of the old French roses about which Graham Thomas writes are by Pierre-Joseph Redoute, the great botanical artist of the Napoleonic era. Redoute was born in Belgium; the Empress Josephine was his patron, and he worked at Malmaison for years, painting the roses in her garden. The Ariel Press, in London, published, in 1954 and 1956, a pair of folio-size volumes that reproduce four dozen of the Redoute plants .... I have seen only Volume 2, which has an over-ecstatic and none too accurate English introduction by Eva Mannering. The Redoute plates are what matter; every one of them makes a modern rose look clumsy.

Josephine retired to and died at Chateau de Malmaison, which she called her favorite house (no kidding: lose Napoleon and get great gardens and Redoute. I'd take that deal.). More Napoleon: The unseen presence of "Boney" looms large in the two latest installments of the Horatio Hornblower TV-movie series (only to be quickly and happily overshadowed by Ioan Gruffudd's scenes in long, flowing, curly locks and open nightshirt. /Homer Simpson 'mmm...burger' drool). And yesterday's Beethoven day brought a drive-time performance of the "Emperor" concerto (composed after Napoleon's invasion of Vienna), which, it's been suggested, would be more aptly titled "Anti-Emperor". Funny to have Napoleon (or the shade of his twisted, shrunken spirit) buzz-buzz-buzzing around here like his emblematic imperial bee.

[Technical note: The final e in Redoute should have an accent aigu, but my attempts to reproduce it look like this: RedoutJ. I've read the "Help" file in Typepad on adjusting my browser settings to fix this, but haven't been able to effect the recommended fix...I'll leave it for another day when I have more time, patience and brain cells. All apologies.]

On the tube from the land of the Tube: The Curious Gardeners

As we hunker down to face the, oh, six months or so where nothing will be growing outside anymore, our thoughts turn to what will be our gardening surrogates: books, catalogs, and yes, even TV. A Gardener's Diary on the HGTV channel is the one gardening show I watch religiously, even during the growing season. (Note to HGTV: the world [er, my world] is crying for a weekend marathon of A Gardener's Diary--trust me on this. Note to production company for A Gardener's Diary: Full-season DVDs, please, as fast as you can press them.) If you linger long enough after A Gardener's Diary has ended, you'll catch the next show on the HGTV lineup these days, a BBC import called "The Curious Gardeners". It's a hoot. The show opens with a visual montage of the two hosts and their jaunty convertible, which (the montage, that is) looks like it owes a lot to The Cars' "You Might Think" music video, backed by music that sounds much like the Emma Peel ("m. appeal") era Avengers theme, if it were used in a burlesque show. (Hmm. Second use of "burlesque" [now, third] in this blog. What wacky search string referrals lie ahead?) The show follows garden designers Guy Cooper and Gordon Taylor as they tool around the United Kingdom to visit gardens and talk gardening. Cooper and Taylor are a long-time couple, and their chemistry and personalities entertain, all while the viewer stares at the lush British countryside setting and asks, "How can anything possibly be that green?" The BBC site linked above has good backstory on the show and the hosts. A very heartening tidbit: both Cooper and Taylor were in their late thirties when they started gardening (in the early 1970's), and now these "late bloomers" can look back on accomplished careers in garden design and garden writing (as well as the TV bit). For role models, I'll take "Guy and Gordon" over "Grandma Moses" any day.

We're Gonna Pay A Call On...

Props to The Hallmark Channel for their Addams Family marathon today. Where would this show be without the late, great Carolyn Jones? Her Morticia is the ideal mother: affectionate, protective, interested and supportive, all without being smothering; the ideal wife: unconditionally adoring, passionate, indulgent and nurturing, all without being "enabling" or passive; and the ideal woman: confident in her beauty, unshakably secure in her worldview, with a will of titanium under her impeccably gracious manners. (I can't imagine Morticia ever saying "Um...") If anyone had been paying attention, Morticia could have been a useful counterpoint to the bleak, self-fulfilling vision in Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Morticia's devotion to family is utter, but not abject, as you find that her "self" (to use that fine Sixties' term) is fully expressed and enhanced (no, I won't say "actualized") in the sanctuary of the roost that she rules. It's an idyllic fantasy: the days spent hand-feeding Cleopatra, the man-eating plant-pet, knitting a multi-armed sweater for Cousin Eimar (an homage to Ray Bradbury's "Uncle Einar"? I've always liked to think so.), and playing the koto while crooning like Yoko Ono. (Okay, maybe that's where the idyll ends.)

Ever notice that Morticia is a gardener? Some scenes of the Addams front porch show an entry door flanked by a pair of containerized evergreens (possibly arborvitae) and accessorized with hanging baskets, leading to a lushly planted front garden (including a bayberry shrub along the walk, if I'm not mistaken). Other scenes reveal that Morticia had a heckuva hothouse, a veritable jungle of tropical plants and vines, including a trailing arbutus (Epigaea repens) entwined with, then strangled by, a fellow hothouse crawler. Finally, let's not forget Morticia's favorite household chore, as she expertly deadheads a dozen hybrid teas with secateurs to create a stem-only long-stemmed bouquet for the Addams household. (It's the image I carried in my play-acting mind as I went about my daily deadheading of the Cosmos bipinnatus 'Purity' this past summer.)

I missed a big chunk of the marathon today, but was lucky enough to catch my favorite episode. It may be the only one in which you'll see Morticia seriously lose her cool, as her beloved son Pugsley becomes a Boy Scout, acquires a baseball mitt, tennis racquet and roller skates, and brings home a new pet--a cuddly and curly-haired p-u-p-p-y. (Best Morticia line: "Eagle Scout? Is that the one where the eagle carries off the scout?")

All hail Carolyn Jones, although I'll never be able to shake the cognitive dissonance from having learned that she was once married to Aaron Spelling.

Update (April 24, 2004): Welcome to all the folks (uh, there have been quite a lot of you) visiting from Ask.FunTrivia.com for the answer to the question: "What type of flower did Morticia of the classic TV show 'The Addams Family' cut the buds off when she was arranging 'flowers'?" The answer is "a rose". I see in the comments at FunTrivia.com that someone has suggested "calla lily" as an answer. I respectfully beg to differ. See the show's premiere, "The Addams Family Goes to School", in which Morticia gracefully lops off the heads of what very clearly are long-stemmed hybrid teas, while Gomez looks on adoringly and remarks, "Lovely, Morticia...you have quite the way with roses."