HELLO JI!
A WORD (OR TWO HUNDRED) FROM THE EDITOR
Image credit: HAMISH DUNCAN on Unsplash.
You’ll see that we are carrying a review of a gardening book in the Get Growing! column this month. Strange time of year to do so, you might think, gazing out at the bleak December landscape devoid of greenery, or a winter wonderland, based on how the weather is where you are.
Well, think again, it is actually the perfect time to do so. Because while the season isn’t remotely conducive to growing things, when gardens (and gardeners) rest, our hands might be idle but ideas are blossoming in our minds.
In this fallow period, we plan the coming seasons.
When I look out the window, warming my hands with a cup of hot chocolate, I don’t see the frozen landscape, I see possibilities. I notice the gaps in the beds that I can fill with new plants. Which is cause for much excitement seeing as how I spent the summer convinced that I couldn’t possibly fit in another plant. That I really Must. Not. Indulge.
That resolution goes out the window as I dream of new colours of iris or peonies or phlox that will be perfect in those spots. Where to move that clematis, how to source that coveted plant, the yucca that really must be divided this year...and so on.
And gardening books are our companions on this journey. Full of wise guidance and practical tips and stories of how others’ gardens fare in different circumstances. Mistakes made, lessons learned, triumphs celebrated, and friendships forged over the exchange of cherished cuttings. We exchange notes with garden buddies about which plants did spectacularly well this past year and can be shared. Or the ones that keeled over and oh, do you have a seedling (or two) to spare?
In the perfectly delightful Garden Stories (Everyman’s Pocket Classics, $29), I meet Doris Lessing and Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. There are excerpts from some of my favourite books, including The Secret Garden and Rebecca.
And this quote from The Glory of the Garden by Rudyard Kipling:
And some can pot begonia, and some can bud a rose,
And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows.
A garden is never as good as it will be next year, they say, and these books transport us to the gardens of our dreams.
As Jamaica Kincaid writes in The Gardens I Have in Mind, “I shall never have the garden I have in my mind, but that for me is the joy of it; certain things can never be realized and so all the more reason to attempt them. 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.”
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. Because we gardeners have our magic carpets!
Merry Christmas!
Shagorika Easwar