Carefully Tended Truths From the Garden
I have never owned a garden and probably never will. I can’t recall ever having planted a seed. In my New York City apartment, which is not, alas, flooded with light, there is exactly one water-deprived plant, which does not appear to be thriving. I may therefore not be the target audience for “My Favorite Plant,” a collection of essays whose contributors range from professional horticulturists to contemporary fiction writers.
But plants are metaphors for many things, and so, as this collection clearly demonstrates, writing about plants involves writing about love, death, toil, desire, hope, defeat, beauty, resilience and--over and over--childhood. (Many of the writers in this book were introduced to plants by parents and grandparents, and many of these pieces are as much about memory as they are about plants.) And so while the non-gardener may find some of the pieces here a bit too specific--”[C]rown rot occasionally causes problems, but can be stopped with a good greenhouse disinfectant like Physan 20,” one writer informs us--there is much to engage even the horticultural naif.
In her introduction, Jamaica Kincaid sets the tone of sober longing that dominates much of the collection: “I shall never have the garden I have in my mind, but that for me is the joy of it,” Kincaid explains. “A garden, no matter how good it is, must never completely satisfy. The world as we know it, after all, began in a very good garden, a completely satisfying garden--Paradise--but after a while, the owner and the occupants wanted more.”
Loving a plant is as subjective as any other sort of love. “[W]e like people not just because they are good, kind and pretty but for some indefinable spark, usually called ‘chemistry,’ that draws us to them and begs not to be analyzed too closely,” Geoffrey B. Charlesworth notes. “Just so with plants.” His favorite is the Physoplexis comosa--which, he admits, is not the world’s most spectacular plant, but which moves him deeply nonetheless. Other writers here are wowed by more overt beauty: Thomas Fischer rhapsodizes over the “pure, ravishing, longed-for blueness” of delphiniums, while Marina Warner describes the sensual wonders of the Guinee rose, with its “dark, tender and fat buds . . . tinged black on each petal’s furled edge. When the roses opened, sable shadows welled in between their velvet, with a sheen in its crimson such as the Venetians achieve with translucent glaze upon glaze.”
Beauty, of course, has its dangers. “A garden can labor under a surfeit of prettiness, be too sweet or cheerful for its own good,” Michael Pollan sensibly warns. “Sometimes what’s needed in the garden is a hint of vegetal menace.” So he likes the castor bean: because it is poisonous, because it “refuses to ingratiate itself,” because it is “the gothic double of the sunflower, its Mr. Hyde.”
In sharp, and unhappy, contrast is photographer Duane Michaels, whose essay reeks of pretension. “William Blake would like my garden,” he confidently asserts, then builds to an embarrassing crescendo: “My garden is the universe. I am the universe. I am my garden. All things are the same.” But this bombastic tone is thankfully rare, and other writers quickly correct it. Mary Keen points out: “[I]f, like me, you find rhododendrons overwhelming, rather like fat women dressed to kill, the bright and tidy auricula, like a child with a clean face, may capture your horticultural heart.” And Maxine Kumin pens a nicely matter-of-fact ode to beans: “Dried, they can be displayed in glass jars until the snowy February day you decide to make a thick bean soup.”
Plant growers are philosophers. Thus the early 20th-century botanist F. Kingdon Ward reflected upon loneliness as he trekked the Himalayas: “[O]ur dislike of solitude is at bottom fear. . . . It seems easier to die in the sunlight, and together, than in the darkness, alone, as wild beasts die.” Michael Fox’s remembrances of his grandmother’s peonies--”improbable, plucky, resplendent and impermanent”--lead him to contemplate the way in which she lived her life: “There’s no real locus for enthusiasm like this: it is wide-eyed, infectious; it seems to take in all of the world, and time. . . . Such gusto must be the best thing to cultivate in life, whenever possible.” And Charlesworth notes: “[G]ardeners do not dwell too long on catastrophe. Failure is an accepted part of daily life.” “My Favorite Plant”--which, incidentally, includes poems by D.H. Lawrence on anemones and William Carlos Williams on Queen Anne’s lace--is, for the most part, filled with such dry, light, tender truths.
