What factors led a city boy, age 28, to purchase a rural property where he has now passed fifty glorious summers? Where he is as happy as a lark with a packet of seeds and a pruner, rake, and hoe.
It all began with my father's love for his backyard garden. "Have you ever seen a more perfect flower than this?" he would ask, pointing me to one of his splendid hybrid teas. During the growing season, he'd come home from work at 6:00 p.m. on the dot, hurry through supper, change out of his lawyer suit into his old clothes, and get to work. I never saw him more contented. He cultivated his 30' by 40' plot with the assiduity of a Javanese terrace farmer. I watched him carefully and participated when he would let me. I studied, with the concentrated attention of childhood, the growth habits of snapdragons, sweet peas, and marigolds. Then one year I was allotted a square foot of space, right next to the dwarf peach, in which to plant seeds of my choice. I chose a pumpkin, a vine that did not recognize boundaries, and produced two astonishingly large fruits. The die was cast.
There was also my maternal grandmother Sonia, originally a country girl, who never bought an orange or a grapefruit but that she planted its seeds on the window sill -- in one of those old wooden Philadelphia cream cheese boxes. Her tiny apartment had a pleasant hothouse-y odor. She loved her seedlings.
And then there were the three summers ('47, '48, '49) which my family spent on Makamah Beach near Northport on the Long Island Sound. It was my original rural experience, and the earliest hint that there were places other than concrete and chain-link-fence Flatbush. It was the first time in my life that I felt at ease in the landscape.
I must not forget the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where I spent many a happy hour. I remember in particular its famous Japanese garden. There was also a bank of colorful bottlebrush buckeyes that caught my youthful fancy. Many years later, I tried to reproduce that bloom in my Vermont garden. The curve and slope of the land were ideal, but the plant itself was not for our subarctic winters. The buckeye has survived, barely, for forty years now and has never produced a single flower, nor ever will.
It was at the BBG that I learned that gardening was not just about growing the biggest pumpkin -- it was about aesthetics and design. I started to read about the history of gardens and whenever I traveled I detoured to visit the great examples: the Huntington, Dunbarton Oaks, the Winterthur in Delaware. And scores more, all intimidating because they were created with the help of enormous fortunes, huge spaces, and unlimited supplies of labor. Good thing I had my father's example of "much in little."
I would recommend Longwood Gardens a short distance from Winterthur.
Posted by: Don Z. Block | December 18, 2020 at 12:52 PM