Saturday, January 3, 2015

Flowers

The White Flower Farm Spring 2015 Garden Book has arrived in my mailbox, conjuring up the years, decades, really,  in which I opened it to seek inspiration for the coming growing season, to identify through the photographs flowers I had seen in other gardens but failed to remember the names.  More than that, it is a catalogue that one can spend the day with, large, detailed, entirely helpful, and with any number of photographs of beds of flowers grown on their extensive estate in Litchfield Connecticut.  These more than anything else are the true porn for a gardener; I have pondered those photos year in year out and sick with desire imagined the plants, the flowers, the patches of sun and the tender shade as being possible for me in my humble plot of land.  My real strength, however, came from a nursery in Hingham to which in the first year of our ownership of our new house at the seashore I trekked again and again to get advice, and buy and buy and buy flats of flowers, shrubs, everything that was blooming so dramatically and seemed destined for my space.  It was disconcerting after spending upwards of a thousand dollars, or so I imagined, to read an interview with one of the nursery's owners who insisted that anyone who would start a garden in such a severe drought year needed his head to be examined.  So said the heroin dealer about the addict he had created.  Still and all, despite it all, we watered and watered with brackish water from an eight foot deep well we had dug, close enough to the ocean to have an eternal supply.  Ten years later we had covered almost all the space of what had been sparse grass with stone pavements, raised beds, geometric arrangements with a fountain at its center.  Forsythia succeeded to lilac and in turn came wisteria followed by peonies, then roses, fifteen bushes of them, then the great buddleia plants with their myriad purple blossoms, standing tall over the beds of phlox, oh, every conceivable plant designed to bring color and variety straight through to the end of October.  It is odd to live now with my third floor terrace enhanced by an etagere holding terra cotta pots of geraniums, by a large terra cotta pot containing a variety of succulents and a large opulent and vulgar and thus "fun" urn on a pedestal containing a rather large species of fern.  I turn the pages of the White Flower Catalogue as though viewing a distant exotic land which I only dimly remember.  I wonder if the new owners, an innocent young couple, have been able to hold their own with the pergola covered with the most aggressive wisteria I have ever known, demanding cutting back at least once a week or seeing the tendrils reach the gutters on the side of the roof, with the de-buding of all those roses, the phlox, oh, I cannot even imagine it all now, it was an all day every day job from May through September, for two people who were not working.  I sit on my little third floor terrace in the morning coffee in hand gazing at the geranium blossoms and the weird shapes of the succulents in the pot.  Not quite the same as sitting on a bench amid blossoms staring at the water making its plash (as Henry James would say) into the fountain basins.  But I look at the clouds scudding overhead and it is good.

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