Dead Letter Department #108

I spent a good chunk of Sunday digging out a corner of the yard that has long annoyed with me—two roses, planted before I moved in, that probably bloomed beautifully back before the house next door got built, when their only shade was the white slatted fence & the gnarled apple trees just beyond. In recent years, though, despite first tentative & eventually vigorous pruning, they’ve bloomed only anemically, sending up long shoots over the fence in search of more sunlight, and a only few unlovely sprays of salmon colored flowers. I felt emotionally attached to them, despite their poor performance, as I tend to with the parts of the garden that were there before I moved in, especially those that belonged to the long-time owner of the house, who lived here before the people that added my occasionally ramshackle ADU.

It took a certain amount of wrestling while I shoveled to avoid being whipped in the face by thorned branches, which I was honestly beginning to take a bit personally by the end, and I finally had to take the saw out to get the most determined of the two loose enough to pull up, marveling at the enormous gnarled root when I finally unearthed it. I am going to try to replant them somewhere more suitable, but I’m not optimistic that after that amount of clumsy surgery either will survive.

I think that long ago inhabitant really loved the garden—there are stone borders, buried about six inches under the dirt, and a whole patch of day lilies that hibernated quietly for years until the big tree in the back came down in a storm, finally giving enough sunlight for them to grow again, old peonies that still send gallant shoots up every spring, a lilac that’s grown so colossal it nearly blocks out the second story balcony next door. The people who owned it just before, though, seemed to deal more in benign neglect, slapping a few herbs into the ground for curb appeal just before they sold.

Last year my neglect was slightly less than benign, what with the various accumulating horrors. I mowed, and did a little weed control, but everything else was largely left to its own devices, with the one exception of a Costco sized bag of lily bulbs which I had high hopes for until the deer found them, & I was left with long green stalks where I’d been hoping for fragrant flowers.

I’d like to feel pleased walking into the backyard or pulling up to the house, and I really don’t know much about gardening, so I checked out a bunch of books from the library, particularly on shade gardens, though one bore the rather seductive title Private Gardens of the Pacific Northwest, but here I ran into a bit of a problem.

There’s an untapped market, I’m convinced, for books that showcase particularly stylish or beautiful places that are, crucially, made & lived in by people with ordinary budgets. The most interesting interior design book I’ve looked at recently—I wish I could remember the title—insisted on not staging the rooms in that too-clean, uncanny way, meaning that there were still phone chargers in the walls & dog beds on the floors. It was so nice to look at spaces where you could actually picture people living, instead of second & third homes with aesthetically pleasing bowls of citrus—does anybody juice those afterwards, or is it all thrown away? Anyway, I need that book but for gardens, so if you have any suggestions, do write & let me know.

Also on the subject of plants—or in this case, plant & seed catalogues—Onward & Upward in the Garden has been on my reading list for ages. & I finally found a copy at the library sale a couple of weeks ago. Written by Katharine S. White, the legendary New Yorker editor (take a look at the link for the shortlist of authors she worked with), it begins with essays that essentially treat commercial seed & plant catalogs as literature, regarding them with the same graceful intensity & occasionally bristling opinions she brought to her other work. Camellias are clearly considered a bit slutty, & she cannot say enough about her disdain for the trend at the time of increasing the size of flowers. White writes about the history of gardens, going all the way back to how lawns were mowed by a team carrying scythes, with brooms to sweep up the clippings, and forward to her horror at the death of the wildflowers in her town in Maine when roadsides began to be sprayed by weed killer.

It would be worth reading for the introduction alone, by her husband, E.B. White, which he wrote just after she died: an obituary in flowers for their shared life. His restrained language only makes the clarity with which he saw her even more moving.

one good thing

There are two garden centers I go to most often—Garden Spot, behind the Trader Joe’s, which is perfect for a shorter wander, & My Garden, out on Bakerview, which is much larger, & probably where I’ll be heading for my aspirational shrub purchasing when the weather gets just a little bit nicer. I was there on Sunday for an amble with my friend C. after we had coffee, in & out of the houseplants section, which always smells so green & heavenly, where we both bravely resisted purchasing any new houseplants, at least until we re-pot our current residents. As usual, I was tempted by many things that would be improper for my current project, but I am determined to not get overambitious so early in the season. I only bought a couple of small things, but read a lot of labels, & thought a lot about various sections of my yard. On the way out, we discovered that the resident cats are named Mr. Dilly Pickles & Mrs. Dally Cucumbers, & that’s honestly enough of a reason to shop there on its own.

Thank you for reading—as you can tell, I am still fighting my way back to a regular schedule for these letters. If there’s anything in particular you want to see a letter on, you can always write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. More soon, & in the meantime, may you find a more suitable spot to plant what you finally decided to dig up.