Shabby Chic in the Garden

Rainy day in February

In my imagination my garden is always a little earthly paradise where I can sit and talk with friends and family, enjoy good food, read good books and listen to good music. I love it any time of day, but especially in the early morning and early evening when sun sends dappled shadows skittering through the trees and across the faces of the flowers. The air is cool and fresh and everything is quiet.

It is always on my mind. In the summer it's a cool, serene retreat. In the fall it's bright, cheerful and picturesque. When the winter weather arrives and the rains begin, I gaze meditatively upon the dormant flower beds and dream of spring. We don’t have a front window in our house, so the back garden is my window on the world. It’s my special place of dreams. Often I go there to pray and think things through.

My husband, who was born in England and was raised in New Zealand, recently told me that my garden has a real English cottage feel. I thanked him! What higher praise could there be? He went on to say, “Yes, it has that familiar, slightly shabby, overgrown aspect to it.”

My spirits flagged a little, but I understood what he meant. He feels at home in my garden. It isn’t a showplace that inspires awe, it’s a cozy little work in progress. There is always something that needs trimming or transplanting, but that is part of its charm.

The saddest part of my garden has always been the little strip of Bermuda grass that bends around our brick patio. This past spring I seeded in new grass and covered it with topsoil, then I watered it faithfully and in two or three weeks was rewarded with clumps of tender green shoots coming up everywhere. Hooray! I was so happy the first time I mowed it and created an even swath of green grass all around the patio.

I waited a couple of months and then fertilized the new lawn with good stuff that would also kill any weeds that were growing. Within days all of my new grass died. I had burned my tender, baby grass with too much fertilizer. Since the end of May I have been watering a desolate patch of dirt laced with stringy Bermuda grass that apparently even too much fertilizer could not kill.

This fall I am going to try again. I am thinking of killing off the rest of the Bermuda grass with Roundup, tilling the ground and putting out new seed and topsoil. This time I am going to ask my husband to help me. I think that a missing ingredient in my gardening has been enlisting his good mind and skills to help me do it right.

By the way, here is a free gardening tip: One of the secrets of developing good soil is to find and employ the resources of a pet rabbit. My goddaughter has a bunny named Apricot that produces lovely droppings, full of nitrogen. Once a week or so, we dump a pail full of that stuff into my compost bin where it turns into magic fertilizer that my plants just love. It also attracts earthworms for some reason and they contribute their castings to the richness of the soil.

A garden is mostly dirt, green stuff and water, but it is also a canvas for the imagination. Some days it is perfect; everything is blooming and the herbs are fragrant in the warm sunshine. A week later it needs weeding and I have to cut away the finished blooms. But it’s those moments of perfection that keep me going...that, and knowing that I will get to start over in the next season.

E. B. White once wrote a posthumous introduction to a collection of articles written by his wife Katharine White for the New Yorker magazine. She was an editor and writer at the New Yorker, but also an avid gardener. He delighted in her passion for growing things and she constantly amazed him with the myriad ways she had for displaying her flowers. Here is what he said about her, looking back upon their life together:

“Armed with a diagram and a clipboard, Katharine would get into a shabby old Brooks raincoat much too long for her, put on a little round wool hat, pull on a pair of overshoes, and proceed to the director’s chair—a folding canvas thing—that had been placed for her at the edge of the plot. There she would sit, hour after hour, in the wind and the weather, while Henry Allen [their gardener] produced dozens of brown paper packages of new bulbs and a basketful of old ones, ready for the intricate interment. As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion—the small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.” ( From Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katharine S. White.)

“Plotting the resurrection.” Maybe that is why working in the garden is such a joy to me. It may become shabby and things may die off, but it is awesome to start over each season and watch the garden grow into paradise once again. For me it's a little bit of heaven on earth.