The Great Lies of Gardening

      Somebody asked me where to find this, the first Bob ever written, in spring 2005, and I couldn't find it -- but I'm sure I posted it some damn place.  Anyway, here it is again, with the caveat that the style has developed a bit since then.  This acts like it is for cripe's sake, a gardening column!

THE GREAT LIES OF GARDENING

BY ROBIN FORD WALLACE

There is a saying that nowhere are you closer to God than in a garden.  For those of us whose idea of heaven is rolling in the dirt with a trowel in our hand, the adage is a statement of the obvious.  To stumble across a perennial blooming in the spring, a year after we’d forgotten we planted it, convinces us there is something in the universe bigger than we are, that drinks less beer.

But there, I have noticed, the parallel between religion and gardening does not end.  For all gardeners have their dogmas and their creeds, and they will look you straight in the eye and tell you theirs is the only way – despite the fact that each is saying exactly the opposite as the one before.  If you got together a group of gardeners to discuss how to grow asparagus, you would probably hear more contradictions than you would at a scripture interpretation forum attended by Baptists and Muslims.  

At a rose pruning seminar, I learned that you must prune your climbing roses only after the first flowering, because roses bloom on old wood.  Then we split into groups to watch the individual experts prune.  The expert I was watching stressed the importance of pruning climbing roses in early March so that they would have time to grow strong new wood for the flowers to bloom on.   When I got home to my own roses, I stood there with my clippers like a surgeon wondering which organ to remove. 

In the end, though, I remembered noticing that no matter what they said, all the experts seemed to prune by the general rule:  Take no prisoners.  Given a pair of secateurs, every one of them turned into Lawrence of Arabia during the second half of the movie, the part where you wish it was in black and white.  If their roses could survive that, I imagined mine wouldn’t mind a few timid snips here and there.  

I’ve learned by now to ignore most of the experts’ advice and there’s nothing wrong with my roses, either.  All my friends admire them extravagantly, at least the ones who are Japanese beetles. 

So I’ve become the gardening equivalent of an agnostic, mostly because of the direct contradictions that I hear from different gardeners, some of them married to each other, and read in gardening articles, some of them in the same magazine.  I call them The Great Lies of Gardening, and I will share a few here:

q       You must water only in the morning.

q       You must water only in the evening.

q       You must water (you idiot) in the afternoon.

Morning proponents say if you water in the evening you are exposing your plants to fungal infection and disease.  Evening waterers say if you water in the morning it will just evaporate during the day and do your plants no good.  Both agree that you must never, even if someone is threatening you with a gun, water in the afternoon.  It is perfectly natural, they say, for plants to conserve moisture in the hot sun by letting their leaves wilt. 

Meanwhile, afternoon waterers say what are you, stupid?  The time to water your plants is when they need water, in the hot afternoon when they’re drooping from thirst.

Now, on to some lies of tomatoes:

q       You must plant two to a cage.

q       You must plant one to a cage.

q       You must remove all suckers.

Now, here I will say that one doctrine that even I, the gardening agnostic, adhere to is that the best way to grow tomatoes is in cages.  Not the ones you buy at gardening centers, those are always too small, but big ones that you make from concrete reinforcement fencing. 

But as for spacing, I think the reason some people tell you to plant two to a cage is that they start too many tomato plants and they don’t know where else to put them.  And I think the reason others say to plant only one per cage is that they have supreme contempt for those who lack the self-control to start a sensible number of plants.    I have been in both camps, and I can tell you I don’t see much difference in one versus two, unless you plant a red variety in with a golden, in which case you’ll spend the summer hopelessly confused as to which ones are ripe.  Trust me.

Whether you plant one or two, the tomato vines grow to fill all available space – unless, I presume, you remove the suckers.  I have been growing tomatoes for 25 years and my crops are famous.  I supply my neighbors, I give them to people I don’t even like, I give them to people who beg me to stop.  And what I have to say about removing suckers is:  What are suckers?

I never have figured it out.   “Sucker” sounds bad, like a tumor or something, but whenever I ask people what it means, they say, “like, a branch,” and I end up scratching my head.  Aren’t plants supposed to have, like, branches?  

There are many more lies than I have space to tell.  Broadly, the rule is that any definite statement about how to grow anything is bound to be untrue, even if your grandfather said it.  This year, with garden phlox, I triumphantly disproved a Germinate In Total Darkness lie I read on the back of the seed packet .  They came up fine in full sunlight.

It is only fair to say, though, that the seeds also came up in total darkness – just as the old-wood and new-wood rosarians both grow lovely roses, just as morning, afternoon and evening waterers all manage to save their gardens from drought, just as other gardeners manage to grow a few tomatoes in between nervously policing their plants for suckers. 

So perhaps the Great Lies of Gardening are really not lies.  Perhaps the only lie is: This is the only way.

END

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

Bob Reviews The Brother Gardener

The Brother Gardeners:  Before Spring, Let’s Curl Up With One Last Good Book

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this son of York.”

Yep, me again, starting off with a Shakespeare quote in partial and tardy justification of all the money my parents squandered on my liberal arts education.

I put in the whole sentence to point out that Richard III does not actually begin Act I by whining about the weather.  What he is trying to get across is something like:  “Oy.  Am I tickled that my brother (York) is now king of England.”

Nobody remembers that, though, because the positive side of the quote is so pallid compared to the negative.  Next to “the winter of our discontent,” “glorious summer” is like saying, “So.  Nice weather we’re having."

Not that this has been a winter of discontent.  It’s hardly been any kind of winter at all and it’s fading as we speak.  But look out!  Here comes another quote:

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” –  Cicero.

That’s right.  Winter is a better time for reading about gardening than actually doing it.  So before this one bursts into glorious summer, let’s curl up with one last good book.  The Brother Gardeners, by Andrea Wulf, a wonderful, wonderful garden history writer – who knew there was such a thing? – is subtitled “Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession,” and it describes how American plants changed both the the English landscape and the character of the English people.

In the early 18^th century, Ms. Wulf tells us, English gardens were stiff, geometrical affairs featuring high hedges and topiary.  They weren’t very pretty and anyway they were only in the grand estates of the rich. 

Fast-forward to now, when sweet old ladies cheerfully slaughter each other for the best blooms at the London Flower Show and when, as the preface to an English plant dictionary put it:  “The English are all, more or less, gardeners.”

What happened in between?  Ms. Wulf thinks it had a lot to do with the quirky long-distance friendship of Peter Collinson, an English cloth merchant, and John Bartram, an American farmer just outside colonial Philadelphia.  It is the archaically spelled, weirdly capitalized correspondence between these two that is the backbone of  Ms. Wulf’s charming book.

Collinson, though he was what the English of the time would have considered “in trade” as opposed to upper class, had educated himself well enough to become a fellow of the Royal Society.  This was a group of “Scientifick Gentlemen” who would get together for dinner and refer to the fish they were eating as Pleuronectes platessa. 

Bartram, by contrast, was what Collinson called “a plain Country Man.”  Though he read voraciously, there was only so much science one could find in English in those days and, as he admitted, “Ye lattin pusels Mee.”   

But though Collinson and Bartram were by background as well as geography thousands of miles apart, they were “Brothers of the Spade” and the rest is history.

Collinson was always interested in acquiring “curious Plants,” reminding his friends when they traveled, “Forget not Mee & my Garden.”  He did business in the Colonies, but it was through his unpaid work as London agent for Benjamin Franklin’s subscription library that he heard of Bartram and his expertise in New World flora.

So Bartram began collecting for Collinson in America, and in January 1734, after a long sea journey, the first of what was to be many boxes of seeds and plants arrived in London.

Collinson was thrilled.  What in England was as beautiful as a magnolia?  Or a rhododendron?  Or his lifelong favorite, the ladyslipper?  Tenderly, he set out propagating these treasures in his garden, and through the centuries the reader can still hear his joy when they grew.  “I am Charm’d, nay, in Extasie,” he wrote to Bartram when several flower species bloomed at once.

Bartram rode cross-country, canoed down rivers and climbed trees collecting samples all over settled America and into the wild, Collinson urging him on by letter.  Bartram had described a Venus flytrap in one letter, and Collinson replied he was ready to “Burst with Desire.”  If Bartram couldn’t find one soon, he wrote, “never write Mee more for it is Cruel to tantalise Mee.”

At one point Collinson wrote to Bartram, “Pray go very Clean, neat & handsomely Dressed to Virginia.”  Collinson wanted samples from the governor and feared Bartram would disgrace him.

He could be a little patronizing even when he was nice, assuring Bartram his writing style was better than “what one might expect from a Man of thy Education.”  He paid Bartram partly in English seeds, partly in cash and partly in goods – one letter referred to a “Suite of Cloths.”  Once he sent Bartram his old hat which he said had years of mileage left but which Bartram said had holes in it:  “I thought some Sory Fellow had thrown it in,” Bartram wrote.

Bartram eventually complained he received only “one Sixth part” of what he gave.  Collinson replied stiffly he had “affairs of greater Consequence to Mind.”  But then he not only sent more money but also fixed Collinson up with other English enthusiasts, enabling him to make a better living from his collecting – and in the process American flora was spread all over England.

The two friends’ correspondence simply bursts with charm.  In a broader sense, though, it struck me as an eerily perfect metaphor for Anglo-American history of the time, down to the exchange of raw materials for manufactured goods, not to mention the eventual rebellion.  What was the American Revolution but a larger version of:  “You call this a hat?”

The Brother Gardeners, by Andrea Wulf, is published by Alfred A. Knopf.

END