I’m afraid I’ve lied to you, because I said I would be back after the octave, but here it is the end of the Christmas Season with the Baptism of the Lord, and I am only now edging my way back in. (I still have three Christmas cards to send.)
Part of the problem is that it is hard to think about the internet when at home surrounded by family.
Another problem is that, against all good judgment, I am auditing a course on Boethius despite my advanced age (in PhD terms) and thus the notable quotes I am recording at the minute are along the lines of
ita enim in mundi musica pervidemus nihil ita esse nimium posse, ut alterm propria nimietate dissolvat
(De institutione musica 1.2)
and
Quod vero non est ex hoc atque hoc, sed tantum est hoc, illud vere est id quod est; et est pulcherrimum fortissimumque, quia nullo nititur.
(after which I cease to understand anything in Chapter 2 of De Trinitate).
I have been reading for pleasure, but what I’ve been reading is not necessarily quotable: or, if so, is only quotable to the segment of the population who does not only like to garden, but who likes to read about gardening. If you’re looking for a way to spend the hours and days before it is gardening season again (or, like me, have no garden at the moment and can only garden vicariously), you might enjoy these three books, social histories disguised as gardening tomes:
In the “Mastery of the American Prose Essay” category, I give you Katharine S. White, Onward and Upward in the Garden.
A friend of her is Surrey was showing an ailing wisteria vine to an acquaintance. ‘Oh,’ said the visitor, ‘all that wisteria wants is a nice rice pudding. They love them!” Accordingly, a rice pudding was cooked, well sugared, and laid round the feet of the vine, which promptly sat up, regained its tone, and is now full of health and pudding. There is probably a chemical explanation for this, but I would rather not know about it.
(Katharine S. White, Onward and Upward in the Garden, Beacon Press, 155-156.)
In White’s collected essays from the New Yorker, she turns a reviewer’s eye towards the prose of seed catalogs, gardening books, and wildflower handbooks while discussing the history of gardening, her own flower garden on her Maine farm, and her memories of gardens in her childhood. I’ve reread it several times, and every time it makes me long to go find a patch of ground and a pile of seed catalogs.
For humor, there is the Czech Karel Capek (advice on typing the diacritic welcome) and his The Gardener’s Year. When not coining words like “robot,” it seems, Capek was quite the gardener.
For us gardeners the popular saws, too, have convincing validity; we still believe that “Matthias breaks the ice,” and if he fails we expect that St. Joseph, the carpenter of heaven, will chop it; we know that “in March we creep behind the stove,” and we believe in the three icemen, in the spring equinox, in St. Medard’s hood, and other such predictions; from which it is obvious that from the earliest times men have suffered from the weather. No one need wonder if he met with sayings like “on the first of May snow melts on the roof,” or that “on St. John of Nepomuk’s Day nose and hand may freeze away,” or that “on St. Peter and Paul’s let us wrap in shawls,” that “on St. Cyril and Method’s water freezes in the pond,” and that “on St. Wenceslas’ one winter has passed and another begun”; in short, popular proverbs mostly prophesy unhappy and gloomy things. The existence of gardeners who every year, in spite of these bad experiences with the weather, welcome and unveil the spring is therefore a testimony of the imperishable and miraculous optimism of the human race.
(Karel Capek, The Gardener’s Year, Modern Library Gardening, 30-31)
Finally, there is Richardson Wright’s The Gardener’s Bed-Book. One might call it, “cranky meditations for every night of the year,” but there is something I love about reading these short essays, often (but not always) on gardening from a man who, while very much of his age–and thus sometimes distant– remains compelling to later ages (unlike Charles Rede, one might say). The Forward is subtitled, “How to read in bed and still remain happily married,” his text is imbued with literary and Biblical language, and his prose is lovely. He is hard to excerpt, but here is the essay for July 15. It is titled “Sales Resistance”
My gardener, whose opinion I have come to respect, stated the other day that he planned to take a correspondence course in sales resistance this winter. His reason for this choice of winter diversion he said was, “because slick salesmen are always selling me things that I don’t want, don’t need and can’t use.” And so this countryman, God bless him, has his back up. He has cluttered his house and his living with all manner of things that he bought because he couldn’t resist the solicitations of glib-tongued solicitors. For the last and final time– when he had subscribed for those Letters of the Presidents in fourteen volumes– he had been taken in. Pity the salesman who approaches his doorstep next Spring, after he has mastered that course in sales resistance!
(Richardson Wright, The Gardener’s Bed-Book: Short and Long Pieces to Be Read in Bed by Those Who Love Green Growing Things, Modern Library Gardening, 187.)
The Truth and Antiquarians.
