Finding solace in the earth
For Southern Californians, January is not the best time to read about gardening. We should be out in the yard, getting the last of our fall plantings in before the big, theoretical rains come in February.
To read about gardening -- in Canada, of all places -- is a bit of an indulgence.
And yet, Liz Primeau’s “My Natural History: The Evolution of a Gardener” is a forthright and simple account of a nice lady who has spent her life tilling the soil north of the 49th Parallel. Along the way, she also has dug up personal salvation, and a career.
Born in Winnipeg, Primeau spent her formative years pulling weeds in her father’s prized World War II victory garden. “He soon had me weeding the rows of vegetables in his twenty-by-twenty foot plot,” she writes, “and generously allowed me to be the picker for dinner.”
When she wasn’t tending to her father’s vegetables, Primeau was out on the prairies with her friends. As she remembers: “We weren’t far from home, but these trips were like going on safari, an adventure with no adults around to ask us to help with the dishes or tidy our rooms.”
Primeau’s father died when she was 14, and her family moved to her grandmother’s farm in Southern Ontario. There, she found a new gardening mentor in her Uncle Ren. A masterful gardener with a weakness for flowers, his cuttings live to this day in her yard.
After moving to Toronto as a young woman, Primeau endured a perfect storm of a bad marriage. Postpartum depression and 1950s-era repression plunged her into agoraphobia and debilitating panic attacks.
But while Primeau is frank about this period, she’s not particularly probing, and clearly didn’t read her Betty Friedan.
“I’ve wondered many times,” she muses, “whether my need for individuality and control of my own space, combined with the fenced-in life I was leading as a round-the-clock mother and wife isolated in the ‘burbs, contributed to my emotional state.” One senses she is being polite, even a bit fusty, in her dogged pursuit of practical matters rather than emotional nuance.
As before, Primeau turned to her garden in these difficult times, and again found solace in the earth. She left her husband and began to work in journalism, which aligned with gardening when she became the editor of Canadian Gardening magazine, and then the host of Canadian Gardening Television on HGTV.
Primeau has written several how-to books, including the popular “Front Yard Gardens,” a lavishly illustrated volume that encourages people to replace lawns with flowers.
“My Natural History” is seeded with many helpful tips, such as when to harvest haricot verts and how to cook fava beans. Primeau also gives a thumbnail history of domestic agriculture and an extensive tour of Medieval and Renaissance Italian gardens.
But as interesting as this is, it only takes us away from the real subject, Primeau herself.
Memoir, after all, has its own microclimate. One must be prepared to dig deep, expose roots, graft story to fact and arrange anecdotes in harmonious groupings, while pruning away dead wood and offshoots.
Primeau, however, can’t help lapsing into digression. “But what is Canadian garden style today?” she asks at one point. “People have asked me this question at least half a dozen times, once at a garden seminar in Boston, and I generally fumble for a clear answer.”
The book would have been well-served by an editor with sharpened shears and a clear vision. If gardeners are born with “green fingers,” as Primeau points out several times, writers are born with ink-stained ones. Primeau’s fingers are very green indeed.
Perhaps Primeau’s greatest limitation has to do with her descriptions, which often end up as lists of plants. That’s too bad, because descriptive riffs animate the best garden writing. Primeau admires Michael Pollan’s account of his carrot bed as a subway car full of commuters, but doesn’t take the lesson. Her prairie descriptions, while serviceable, make one yearn for Willa Cather.
Nevertheless, there are always pleasures to be found in someone else’s garden, especially Primeau’s, which nurtures Dahlias and Delphinium, Canterbury Bells and Queen Anne’s Lace, flowers Southern California gardeners should only dream about.
There’s also a delicious bit of schadenfreude in reading about other people’s gardening woes. Thrips, powdery mildew and drought have you down? Try killing frosts. Or deer.
I’ll take a Santa Ana over a Chinook any day, thank you very much.
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Schickel is the author of “You’re Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom.”
