A Secret Garden, and A Few of the Books That Inspired It

A Secret Garden

and a Few of the Books That Inspired It

When the Songwriter and I became engaged to be married, the minister we chose to formalize the process requested we meet with him to answer a few questions and receive a few learned words of advice, something we were more than happy to do.  There were far too many stars in my eyes for me to have been expected to retain all he told us, but one nugget of wisdom took root and has flourished over the years, bearing fruit in all sorts of far flung areas.  To avoid the pitfall of financial disagreements, we were told, always consider any grand purchase to be “exchanging one form of wealth for another”. 

 The Songwriter remains wryly amused that this is all I can recall from that momentous meeting, but throughout our life together I have found it a useful bit of wisdom.   It has encouraged us to take leaps that have resulted in irreplaceable memories and has, on numerous occasions, made our lives better.  It also enabled me to back away from the trendy, thus saving my feet from the mile-high, toe-pinching Sex and the City shoes of the nineties and the humiliating peplum skirt phase of the eighties.

We employed this much relied upon wisdom once again last fall when we decided to add our birdhouse screened porch onto our bedroom.  One enters this porch via a very special door in our window seat and follows a screened breezeway down the side of the cottage to the round, pointed-roof porch.  Here no one can find me, here it’s all birdsong and wind chimes, here Edward and Apple curl up in their matching tartan beds and doze as I write, and knit, and read, and dream.   And here, I am surrounded by our back garden, a garden that, sadly, was utterly ruined during the building of this lovely screened hideaway.  

So, throughout the Christmas holidays, all during those long, cold days of January and February and the unreliable warmth of March, I planned.  With a stack of favorite gardening books at the ready, I made notes and grew pictures, went spelunking deep into Pinterest boards and wandered nursery aisles.  I’m happy to say, all this paid off wonderfully and our new garden is now a reality.    

Presided over by a serene stone Humpty Dumpty, it is filled with Mauve Lenten Roses, Pink Astilbe, Chartreuse Hostas, Japanese Forest Grass and and Foxglove.  There is a round flower bed in a circle of  English cottage stone with masses of white verbena spilling over and around, calling forth butterflies of every size and colour, and a flagstone terrace with Mazus Alba flowering between the stones. And best of all, old-fashioned Gardenias by the door and under the old stained glass casement windows.  I sit in my gothic willow chair, listening to the exuberant splash of robins in the birdbath  and the lugubrious hum of fat, lazy bumblebees as they hover around the blooms.  

Truly a fair exchange of one form of wealth to another, wouldn’t you say?

  I have recently returned from a visit to a very special, very happily haunted, garden and will share all with you soon, but till then I thought you might like to take a look at some of the books that inspired the creation of this secret garden of mine.  I found as much inspiration from narrative as from instruction.   Perhaps you will too, I’ve shared an irresistible quote from each, just click on the books to see more.  
If any of you love gardens, and gardening, as much as I do,
 please share your favorite flowers, and gardening books, with me! 

Onward and Upward in the Garden

by Katherine White

“I have read somewhere that no Japanese child will instinctively pick a flower, 

not even a very young child attracted by its bright color, because the sacredness of flowers is so deeply imbued in the culture of Japan that its children understand the blossoms are there to look at, not to pluck.”

The Morville Year

by Katherine Swift

“I love the way wild foxgloves have their bells all on one side,

 as if straining to catch the last notes of some far-off tune…”

In Your Garden

by Vita Sackville-West

“The charm of annuals is their light gaiety, as though they must make the most of their brief lives to be frivolous and pleasure-giving.  They have no time to be austere or glum.  They must always be youthful, because they have no time to grow old.  And so their colours are bright, and their foliage airy, and their only morality is to be as cheerful as possible….”

Merry Hall

by Beverley Nichols

“But whatever else people may see, they cannot help seeing the lilies.  They are all over the house, like groups of dancers, poised and waiting; those that stand near mirrors seem to take on a silver sheen, and those that catch the glow of the candles are lit with gold; in the full light they sparkle like sunlit snow, in the shadows they are luminous…and always, upstairs, downstairs, in every nook and cranny, there is fragrance.”

The Writer in the Garden

edited by Jane Garmey

“That evening, for instance, as the light faded, and the tree branches grew black against the pink sky, I knew it was getting on toward dinnertime, and I felt so peaceful sitting like a child in the warm earth.  It was dark as I strained my eyes, searching out infinitesimal parsley seedlings among the weeds.”

Virginia Woolf’s Garden

by Caroline Zoob

“…a weekend of no talking, sinking at once into deep safe book reading; & then sleep:  clear, transparent, with the may tree like a breaking wave outside & all the garden green tunnels, mounds of green:  & then to wake into the hot still day, & never a person to be seen, never an interruption:  the place to ourselves:  the long hours.”

The Gardens of William Morris

by Jill Duchess of Hamilton, Penny Hart and John Simmons

“The garden, divided by old clipped yew hedges, is quite unaffected and very pleasant, and looks in fact as if it were a part of the house, yet at least the clothes of it:  which I think ought to be the aim of the layer-out of a garden.”

Beatrix Potter At Home in the Lake District

by Susan Denyer

“Beatrix was not preserving a cottage garden; what she was doing was creating a garden  - her own garden - in the cottage style.  It was in this way that she conformed with what was then being written about gardens:  the imagery of gardens, the way spaces within then should be divided up and above all how gardens would be seen as an extension of the building to which they belonged.”

Writing the Garden

A Literary Conversation Between Two Centuries

by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

"No one gardens alone."