Cold Climate Gardening

I have been re-reading People with Dirty Hands: The Passion for Gardening by Robin Chotzinoff for the Garden Bloggers Book Club. Just like last time, I am amazed by her ability to ferret these eccentric gardeners out, and in awe of her willingness to drive hundreds of miles to talk to total strangers, some of whom are very weird.

This time I am a little more familiar with some of the gardeners she visits. I’ve actually grown seeds from Renee Shepherd’s company and read articles by Lucy Hardiman. And I almost met Robin …

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Have you ever been out with a friend, and another person joins you, who is a good friend of your friend, but you don’t know them? And the two of them start talking about people you don’t know, and even though the conversation is mildly interesting (this one had a baby, that one has a new job), after a while you feel bored and a little left out.

I’m sorry to say that’s how I felt reading Beautiful at All Seasons by Elizabeth Lawrence, the April/May selection of the Garden Bloggers Book Club. It kind of surprised me, as I believe I’d already read all her other books, including Two Gardeners (her correspondence with Katharine White), and No One Gardens Alone (her biography)–and enjoyed them all.

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Just as we wonder guiltily whether the food we put in our mouth is good for us, so we now wonder just as guiltily whether what we do in the garden is good for the planet. It was not so much that way back in 1991, when this book was published. In fact, I am pretty sure that Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education was my first introduction to the existence of gardening philosophies. Sure, I had realized there were practical considerations (will this help my plants grow?) and aesthetic considerations (does this look pretty?) but ethical considerations? Right or wrong? What a concept!

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I had read Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden a few years ago, and thought I might skip reading it for this book club, due to the press of other commitments. But I’m glad I didn’t.

No sooner did I crack the book open, than I came across this:

. . . a writer who gardens is sooner or later going to write a book about the subject–I take that as inevitable. One acquires one’s opinions and prejudices, picks up a trick or two, learns to question supposedly expert judgments, reads, saves clippings, and is

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A small change in routine can make a big change in the gardenI was the oldest of a large family, and I aspired to be a good girl. Not so much in the sense of morally superior; I wanted to do it right, correctly. Even as a child, I was a perfectionist.

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I suppose there exists, somewhere on this planet, an ornamental gardener who has never grown a plant that they had been given from someone else’s garden, but it is hard for me to imagine it. Before I even knew myself to be a gardener, when I was just a kid, I tagged along behind the lady next door as she planted annuals, despite the fact that our game balls were always flying into her garden, and she was always yelling at us, and I thought she hated all us kids. I don’t remember the conversation between us that day, but I probably pestered her with questions without realizing it, because she gave me half a dozen dwarf marigolds from her flat to plant in my own yard.

I wasn’t even out of grade school yet, and I had my first passalong plant, sort of.

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It probably would have taken me a lot longer to get around to reading Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web if Carol hadn’t suggested it for the Garden Blogger’s Book Club. Partly because I would normally wait until my library got a copy, instead of buying it brand new. Partly because my attitude was, “I already know we need microbes in the soil. Duh, that’s what compost is for.” Ah, but little did I know how little I knew.

Fine tune the pH of your compost? Who knew? Paramecia and amoebas, those one-celled creatures you study in high school biology, part of the soil food web? Who knew?

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