Dear Reader,
We have had a challenging week, with my beloved aunt in the hospital after a fall. She loves flowers more than anyone I have ever met, with two exceptions: her older brother (my father), and my husband, who is the real gardener in our family. If you can spare her a good thought I would be grateful. We’re really hoping that she’ll be home to see the dogwood bloom outside her window.
Meanwhile, it is magnolia week! I love the mad energy of this one in my neighborhood, which blooms over a stone wall with a secret door.
Review
Garden Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden
Eleanor Perényi
The Modern Library, 2002
289 Pages
$21.00
If growing older entails the accumulation of lost worlds, it is in the garden that we participate in the making of new ones. There is the world of the windowsill, where the seeds wake, push, and stretch for the sun. There is the world of the cold frame or the glass house, where lettuce and spinach can carry on quietly even amid the snows. And there are worlds of beds and patches, of paths and pots, balconies, patios, porches, all of them filled with plants . . . all agglomerating into an irreducible private cosmos that quivers with possibility. Hope may have feathers, but joy has a leaf structure.
Eleanor Perényi knew a thing or two about lost worlds, not to mention the world’s wars, and I will share a bit of her unusual biography. She was born at the end of the First World War, as Eleanor Stone. Her father was an American naval officer and her mother was a novelist. The family traveled extensively, and nine-year-old Eleanor counted corpses in the Yangtze River during the revolution in China. She despised boarding school in England, and was expelled from the National Cathedral School for Girls in Washington for smoking cigarettes on the roof. She thought of becoming a painter, worked at a New York art gallery, and was a key proponent of Arshile Gorky’s work.
At a diplomatic dinner in Budapest in 1937, the teenaged Eleanor met Zsigmond (Zsiga) Perényi, a liberal-minded nobleman descended from a long line of Hungarian statesmen. After their wedding in Venice, they repaired, short on cash, to his down-at-the-heels castle on a 750-acre estate called Szöllös, in what was at that time eastern Hungary but is now western Ukraine. The young chatelaine set to work charming the locals and restoring the gardens, farms, and vineyards. But there was no ignoring the menace of Hitler’s Germany, especially in pro-fascist Hungary. At her husband’s urging, she fled to America in 1940, where she gave birth to their son. She soon went to work as a writer and editor in New York, for Harper’s Bazaar and then Mademoiselle, where she became Managing Editor. Zsiga went underground, joined the resistance, and survived the war. The marriage, however, did not. Eleanor never returned to Hungary, but she did write a memoir about that her time there, More Was Lost.
Perényi spent time visiting her mother, Grace Zaring Stone, in Stonington, Connecticut, and later moved in with her. In the Foreword to her garden memoir Green Thoughts, she writes,
. . . I am one of those unfortunates who when they lose something they love can’t immediately replace it with a new model. I grieved over my lost garden and all that went with it, and I didn’t want, ever again, to be attached to a piece of ground.
Here is a small vignette of the garden at Szöllös, from More is Lost.
A flagged path led from the gardener’s house down to the vegetable garden. A white fence along the length of it shut off the chicken houses and the pigsty. I liked the chicken houses because of the Hungarian names from poultry, “little beef,” or better still, “the winged.”
There was a pretty white cottage in the vegetable garden, covered with grapevines, where the gardener kept his tools, little packages of seeds, and the oddments that collect around a gardener. There was also a greenhouse . . . There were oleander, papaya, and datura trees in big tubs and cactus and palms. There were hundreds of pots of little laurel bushes, fuschia plants, chrysanthemums, and begonias; and I found that all this in the spring would be stacked on wooden stands around the house—except for the trees, which were arranged artistically on the lawn.
With her hurried departure in 1940, this world of potagers and allées, of orchards and vineyards, was lost forever. One thinks of Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden in Book XI of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
O flowers,
That never will in other climate grow,
My early visitation and my last
At even’, which I bred up with tender hand
From the first opening bud, and gave ye names,
Who now shall rear ye to the sun, or rank
Your tribes, and water from the ambrosial fount?
Perényi lost this world utterly, but she did garden again, superbly, at her mother’s home in the precinct of Stonington Borough. The house was a gracious Colonial that Grace Zaring Stone had purchased with money earned from sale of the film rights to her novels. The poet James Merrill lived nearby, and became a close friend. He even immortalized Eleanor’s parsnips in verse. While her mother continued to write fiction at one end of the house, Eleanor wrote mainly non-fiction at the other end. Her 1974 biography of Franz Liszt received a National Book Award nomination, though it garnered somewhat less praise than she had hoped. She then turned to this garden book, which is now rightly considered a classic of the genre, and in particular the sub-genre of garden books by writers.
Why then presume to write a book about gardening? The simplest answer is that 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 eventually overtaken by the desire to pass it all on.
Green Thoughts is an abecedarian compendium of 72 short essays, and this format affords a loose yet purposeful feel, as we march not through the seasons—or through the taxa, as a specialist might do—but through the alphabet. This is, after all, a writer in the garden. The book’s structure creates delightful juxtapositions and jump cuts: Evergreens —> Failures —> Fennel. Her approach also creates opportunities for boffo paragraph endings: “Of power mowers I speak elsewhere (see LAWNS).” And there is yet another virtue here: most gardeners have unreasoning passions, a few burning questions, some particular frustrations, and a running dispute or two with partners and gardening pals. Green Thoughts gives you permission to hop to these topics per your mood and inclination. It’s perfect for the bedside table.
I went right to the entry for Compost. I’ve been volunteering with a climate action group called Mothers Out Front. Our local leaders have developed a campaign to promote municipal and backyard composting. Perenyi’s entry is replete with the history and lore of composting. She traces the practice back to back to ancient farming cultures around the world, and later through Jerome Irving Rodale—who revitalized and evangelized organic growing methods after World War II through his Rodale Press. Here’s her pitch from forty years ago.
When fully “cooked” it looks like the blackest richest soil in the world—or a devil’s food cake. In mine, leaves and grass clippings are the chief ingredients—then cabbage stumps, pea vines, hydrangea heads, apples, hedge clippings, spent annuals, carrot tops, and . . . all the debris, in short, that the unconverted pay good money to have raked up, bagged, and carted away or removed by the garbage men. The compost heaps devour them all and return them in a form that is priceless while costing nothing.
. . . Without the microorganisms at work in compost, soil would literally be dead. Nature supplies the model in field and forest, whose base is in a perpetual cycle of decay and renewal—a vast program of soil building that a compost heap merely imitates.
We are thinking of a new perennial bed, so I thumbed forward to Perennials. Briskly reviewing the cycles of fashion regarding perennial beds, from early twentieth-century England (IN!) to late 1970s America (OUT!), Perényi gets right to her pointed opinions:
dinkiness is to be avoided . . . As for those planting diagrams, copied from [Gertrude] Jekyll’s, that one is advised to make before putting a spade in the ground, I don’t believe they serve any useful purpose today. They are based on improbable premises—the first that you know enough about plants and their habits to be certain in advance of what you want; and the second that you will be able to find it.
This is news you can use as a home gardener. If you have enough gardening expertise to disagree, one senses that Perenyi would be happy to hear you out, over an iced tea or a kir on the porch. But she probably wouldn’t change her mind.
Notwithstanding the fact that Perényi is gardening in a very specific place, the book is loaded with universally applicable advice and enlightening historical detail. It also embodies a global perspective. You will learn about Japanese cloud pruning, Mogul tree houses (“garden thrones”), the tapestry hedge, and Pliny’s favorite sort of path, “where the soil is soft and yielding to the bare foot.” There are, perhaps, a few off notes for me in this book. The tone might be a bit aloof at times, and she includes an entry on the subject of paid help that does not exactly ring with solidarity for working folk. And there are also moments that hint at vulnerabilities, such as the anxieties of aging. About her scarecrow she writes, “Dressed in my cast-off clothes, this figure had become an increasingly derelict version of myself, and though it didn’t really keep off the birds, it had begun to frighten me to death.”
In the engrossing entry for Blue, she discusses not only her highly relatable failures to grow delphiniums in New England, but also the fruitless labors of commercial hybridizers to create blue-flowered roses. “I am guessing but if I am right, the rarity of true blue in nature would be accounted for . . . [by] its resistance to corruption.”
Perhaps there is a way in which Green Thoughts is about corruption’s opposite: integrity. There is an integrity to life in the garden. We query the clouds for the chance of rain. We strain to rake those last oak leaves from the beds. We chase the rabbit with the rage of that famous Scotsman. We hit rock with the trowel and make it ring like a bell. We mourn the spindly clematis that just won’t thrive. We speak tender welcome to the peony. And we tear those warm, sweet cherry tomatoes from the vine to gobble them on the spot. When are we more complete?
Other Voices, Other Forms
Green Thoughts makes me think of another Connecticut artist and gardener, the great potter Frances Palmer. If you don’t know her work, by all means acquaint yourself.
From the Library
Green Thoughts is a wonderful book, yet in many ways its equal is a treasure that was printed in very limited quantity. If you are persistent, you might find a copy online or by calling Mark at our local secondhand bookstore, Manchester By the Book. Knowing Your Onions by Carroll Cabot is an elegant, witty, and uncommonly wise book— very much in keeping with its author, whom I am blessed to call a neighbor and friend. The book is a compilation of columns that Carroll wrote for the Manchester Cricket, our local weekly, and it features delicate illustrations by Marilyn Heinrichs. Here is Carroll’s essay on a not-so-minor garden miracle.
Poem
There are so many garden poems to admire and keep close, but writer Nicky Gonzalez pointed me to “Foreday in the Morning” a tribute to his mother’s morning glories by the great Jericho Brown, and I want to share it with you.
I love my mother. I love black women
Who plant flowers as sheepish as their sons. By the time the blooms
Unfurl themselves for a few hours of light, the women who tend them
Are already at work. Blue.
For your Reading Radar
I am intrigued by the UK artist Simon Moreton’s graphic memoir entitled Where? Moreton self-published in serialized zine format this set of reflections prompted by the death of his father, and Little Toller is now bringing out the complete memoir in hardback. You can pre-order here for the May release.
For your Calendar
On Wednesday, April 21st at 7 PM Eastern, Annalee Herwitz will be talking via Harvard Bookstore about their absolutely fascinating new book, Four Lost Cities, in conversation with historian and novelist Arkady Martine.
Bookstore of the Week
Eleanor Perényi’s local bookstore was Bank Square Books in Mystic, Connecticut, owned and operated by the energetic Annie Philbrick. She has Perényi’s titles in stock, not to mention lots of nautical books and other items of interest. If you are visiting Mystic Seaport or Stonington, you should really stop in if it’s safe to do so.
Happy Earth Day! xoxo Nicie
I will carry with me for quite a while "Hope may have feathers, but joy has a leaf structure." Thank you, Nicie!