Writing the Garden. Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

      IN THE SAME WAY that you don’t have to be a baseball fan to enjoy a good description of a Yankees-Red Sox game by a sportswriter like Roger Angell or to be a chef to savor the spice in the books of a food writer like M. F. K. Fisher, you don’t have to be a gardener to appreciate the knowledge, enthusiasm, and wit with which certain garden writers achieve a creative and fruitful liaison between words and nature. The garden writers I have in mind are not the professional landscape designers whose theories, ideas, and examples provide inspiration to garden-makers or the horticulturists and botanists whose works form the practical gardener’s basic reference tools. Rather, they are the ones whose own gardens are usually in full view as they write.

      This does not mean that there is not a great deal of important information and sound instruction being conveyed in this genre of garden writing—only that it is being delivered in informal, engaging, and sometimes droll literary prose. Typically, authors in this category write in the first person. This conversational style presumes a certain comradeship with the reader. Some come across as friendly tutors. Others create personae that make their words sound like neighborly nattering, gardener to gardener. Then there is the shriller voice of the polemicist with decided views on the proper approach to making gardens. In addition, there are the ruminations of the philosopher who finds the garden filled with metaphorical meaning.

      I would say that all of the books of this genre are premised on passion. They constitute a love affair between the gardener and the garden. Although horticultural love affairs are often tumultuous (nature can be frustratingly fickle, and in dealing with weather, pests, and other adversities, some garden writers assume a comically beleaguered persona), the authors of these books are lovers of place, the space in nature the writer-gardener claims as home ground, an arena for individual creative expression. Naturally, the volumes we are about to discuss display varieties of tone, style, and intent. What unites them is their status as classics—books about gardens and gardening that we can read and reread simply for pleasure.

      One could question the fact that, with the exception of Rousseau and Karel Capek, a Czech, we are dealing here with anglophone writers. I believe that is so because the origin of this particular genre of garden literature is essentially a British innovation. Beginning with Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Lord Burlington, which exhorts the garden-maker to “consult the Genius of the Place in all,” the primacy of the English garden as a particular style of landscape design was established. Its alliance with the rural countryside laid the foundation for the Picturesque, and with the rise of Romanticism as an international movement, the jardín anglais became a kind of national export. Further, it is reasonable to suggest that a preponderance of garden writing was British because of the simple fact that landscape gardening and literature are this island nation’s two principal art forms. Therefore one finds the garden serving as a setting in many English novels and providing the theme of many English poems.

      As American gardening came of age in the nineteenth century, it was obviously to England that gardeners and landscape designers looked for advice, drawing on the works of J.C. Loudon and his wife Jane, proponents of the Gardenesque style, with its emphasis on horticultural display. Both Loudon and Andrew Jackson Downing, his American counterpart, edited gardening magazines as a means of communicating new botanical knowledge, garden-design theory, and horticultural information. As Gertrude Jekyll and other English garden-makers brought the genre of literature we are examining here to full flower at the turn of the twentieth century, it was natural that their American cousins would follow suit.

      Differences in climate, history, and national ethos, however, account for divergent expressions between the two countries both in gardens and words. In Victorian England, sustained by a profession of trained head gardeners and their staffs, the Gardenesque style of specimen display enjoyed a longer period of fashion than in America. The subsequent Arts and Crafts movement helped foster a garden style that I like to think of as “Englishness Cherished.” It is one where the mellow stone walls of ancient manor houses are married with seemingly casual floral compositions in which many of the plants once found in humble cottage gardens blend with rarer horticultural specimens. This is a place-specific kind of garden making. Estate-defined, it often enjoys a Picturesque alliance with the surrounding rural landscape, yet its fundamental design principle is one of enclosure. In America, however, as might be expected in a land of continental dimensions in which notions of wilderness and scenic grandeur have traditionally challenged the national imagination, the designers of the nineteenth-century villas in the Hudson River Valley and the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Country Place Era houses in the Berkshires were able to incorporate into their garden landscapes views of the more awesome scenery associated with the Romantic Sublime.

      The present volume is, as the title suggests, a “literary conversation” for which I have provided the descriptive context for the voices of writers whose words appear along with mine. Garden writing flourishes today as vigorously as ever, and with so many wonderful books of this kind still being published, I do not feel that there should be an arbitrary cut-off date. Rather, I wish to set up a virtual colloquium that brings together garden writers from the end of the eighteenth century to the present.

      Since even within a particular genre authors write from different perspectives and for diverse audiences, I have placed the garden writers we are about to meet within categories. There are those who write articles for magazines or columns for newspapers, which are sometimes collected and published in book form. These authors, along with the inveterate letter writers who thrive on horticultural fellowship with one another—often one and the same since garden columnists invariably receive mail from their readers—I call correspondents.

      Other authors adopt the role of tutor, giving advice based on their own gardening experience and visits to other gardens. I have labeled them teachers. We also have here those whose random enthusiasms or strong opinions sound like the congenial musing or lively harangue you might hear over drinks. I have classified these writers as conversationalists.

      Irony is a great literary virtue, and the gardener’s foibles in the face of indifferent nature are the stuff of comedy. We therefore have a category of humorists. Then there are writers for whom the garden provides metaphors for subjects beyond botany, horticulture, and landscape design. I think of them as philosophers.

      We meet women who broke the barrier of the spade; spouses who cooperated or quarreled; nurserymen who blurred the boundary between disinterested advice and business promotion; foragers who tell of their adventures digging plants for their gardens in the wild; warriors who filled their pens with vitriol in order to acidly disagree with one another; rhapsodists who never met a flower they didn’t love tenderly; and travelers who write about the gardens of foreign lands. But, of course, teachers travel, travelers teach, philosophers can be humorous, humorists can philosophize, and so on. Therefore the reader should feel free to transpose these authors from one category to another as they see fit.

      Transecting all our garden-writer categories are certain universal themes. Several of our authors tell us how their love of gardening sprang from a seed planted in childhood. The gardening mother or grandfather and the advantages of growing up surrounded by nature and horticulture were for them formative. These autobiographical fragments help round out our sense of their backgrounds, characters, and personalities, as well as their predilection for certain kinds of gardens.

      Another theme that you will find sounded throughout is the importance of good soil. True gardeners always start in the most literal sense from the ground up. In their case “digging