Simple Pleasures of the Garden: Stories, Recipes & Crafts from the Abundant Earth

Introduction:

Earthly Delights

"The lesson I have thoroughly learnt, and wish

to pass on to others, is to know the enduring

happiness that the love of a garden gives."

—GERTRUDE JEKYLL

Like many folks, pleasure is not a concept that is native to me. A serious, A student, high-achieving, puritanical type all my life, I’ve been what author Stella Resnick calls, in her book The Pleasure Zone, pleasure resistant. It is only recently, in my mid-forties, that I have begun to try to focus on, indeed relish, the good things in life. The first step was to identify the things that gave me pleasure. In so doing, I came to see that they were all very simple—lying in warm water, the smell of sweet olive blossoms in the air, the feel of clean sheets, or the sight of a hummingbird darting on my deck. From that foray came the book Simple Pleasures: Soothing Suggestions and Small Comforts for Living Well Year-Round, in which my coauthors David Greer and Robert Taylor and I asked people what were the simple things that added delight and meaning to their lives.

In collecting the stories, I was struck by how often people spoke of gardening—both indoors and out—as one of the primary pleasures of their lives. I realized that without my being consciously aware of it, it was also true for me.

Some of my earliest memories relate to garden pleasures—the subtle smell of my mother’s bearded iris, my father’s yearly (always unsuccessful) attempt to get peaches from a tree his father grew from a seed in the ghetto of Boston, the taste of homegrown tomatoes, and freezing green beans in the steaming hot August kitchen. With the exception of my father’s peach failure, my parents both possess green thumbs. My mother is the kind of person who can put a pineapple top in a glass of water in her Cape Cod house, and not only will it grow, but it will flower and produce another pineapple! When I was growing up, gardening was simply the backdrop of my parents’ lives, something I could participate in if I wanted to but with no obligation. Once I went away to college (my mother turned my bedroom into a plant room the day I left), I quickly acquired a host of houseplants and became one of the mainstay tenders of our commune’s vegetable garden. I didn’t even think about it; it just seemed like a natural part of life, like love and family.

Whether you’re new to gardening or grew up with dirt under your fingernails, gardening offers a unique kind of pleasure. Perhaps it is its elemental nature. Daily life is so complex these days, but gardening can be so simple: put a seed in the ground, water it, and some day you will have a carrot. The results are so tangible—a rose bloom, an avocado tree, a philodendron that cascades down your office bookshelf. In the information age, so many of us do work that is so abstract; gardening is enormously satisfying because you can see the concrete results of your labor.

At a deeper level, for many of us, gardening is the one way we have to connect to nature on a regular basis. Even if you live at the top of the highest skyscraper with nary a tree in sight, your home can be filled with live green plants, and in tending them, you connect again, if only for a brief moment, to nature and thus to all that lives beyond human beings. For thousands of years, humans lived in close partnership with nature, and, at some almost imperceptible level, we hunger for that connection still. Our fuchsias and hydrangeas and moth orchids help fill the void left by the concretization of modern life.

Gardening can’t help but put you in touch with the cycles of nature: houseplants should be transplanted in late winter for spring’s growth spurt, tomatoes must have the hot summer sun, and winter frost brings death to the vegetable garden. These are natural laws and, again, because we humans lived so long in harmony with such truths, there is great pleasure in aligning ourselves with those laws. Henry David Thoreau, the master of simple pleasures, suggests that we consciously Live in each season as it passes: Breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.

And so you will find Simple Pleasures of the Garden arranged seasonally to help us connect to the rhythms and cycles of natural life. The pleasures of each season are quite different: Spring, the season of new beginnings, is a very active time in the garden for pruning, preparing the soil, and starting seedlings. Summer is the time to really enjoy your garden, to crank up the barbeque, to sit outside on balmy evenings, to invite friends for candle-lit dinners on the patio, to enjoy the myriad perfumes your garden gives off—the summer garden is the place to relax and entertain. Fall pleasures are those of a more subtle variety—the harvesting of all your labors, the crisp tang in the air, and the sense of winding down. Winter is fantasy time—the time to hibernate inside, to plan for next year.

In each season, garden enjoyments are not restricted to the garden itself. Each season offers a chance to bring the garden indoors. That’s why Simple Pleasures of the Garden, in addition to offering many stories by happy gardeners, gives a myriad of garden-related arts and crafts, recipes, and aromatherapy treats you can make yourself and enjoy with family and friends. I hope it inspires you to savor each precious moment and to find new delight in the simple, earthy pleasures that gardening can bring.

Spring

Spring shows what God can do

with a drab and dirty world.

—VIRGIL A. KRAFT

In the Garden

In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near

the white-wash’d palings,

Stands the lilac-bush tall frowing with heart-

shaped leaves of rich green,

With many a pointed blossom ringing delicate,

with the perfume strong I love,

With every leaf a miracle…

—WALT WHITMAN

About to Blossom

One of my favorite times in my flower garden is pre-bloom time. The blush on the plant about to bloom starts to glow. It resembles a young girl of that certain age—twelve? thirteen?—just starting to fill out, grow up, straining to show her hidden promise. Then, a shine and dominance as it pushes everything out of the way to say, Watch out, world, here I come! Tomorrow or the next day, I know it will be soon. Its arms reach out to the warm sun and soft spring rains. Everything surrounding it stays down and low, letting this one have its turn in the sun. I await anxiously for the peak to arrive. Tomorrow?

One of the most delightful things about a

garden is the anticipation it provides.

—W. E. JOHNS

Signs of Spring

Nature signals the return of spring to each of us in a different way. For some, it is the blooming of a redbud or forsythia; for others, it is the determined daffodil, who is the trumpeter of spring, in bold pre-Easter yellow. For me, it is the dogwood tree, budding up everywhere with pink-infused blossoms of thickest cream. I love that the dogwood is such a democrat, growing anywhere and everywhere, in places where no other such beauty dares show herself.

A man ought to carry himself in the world as

an orange tree would if it could walk up and

down in the garden, swinging perfume from

every little censer it holds up in the air.

—HENRY WARD BEECHER

Wildflower Meadow

I don’t know about you, but I believe a lawn is vastly overrated. It takes a tremendous amount of water, too much labor, and causes vast quantities of chemicals to be dumped into our water supply. So I decided to dig mine up and plant a wildflower meadow instead. It took some work to get going, but within four weeks I had my first bloom. It was a glorious sight for six months, and, unlike a lawn, virtually maintenance-free. Plus, I had an almost endless supply of cut flowers from late spring to late fall.

The tricks are to till the soil in the spring, select a pure wildflower mix (no grass or vermiculite filler) appropriate to your growing area, and blend the seed with four times its volume of fine sand so it will disperse evenly. After you’ve spread it over the dirt, lay down a layer of loose hay to keep the seeds from blowing away. Usually, the mixes are a combination of annuals, biannuals, and perennials. To keep the annuals going, you have to rough up parts of the soil and reseed just those every year.

To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers

is a delectable form of defeat.

—BEVERLEY NICHOLS

The Way to a Woman’s Heart Is

through Her Nose

I have always been extremely sensitive to smells. Blessed (or cursed) by a finely tuned sense of smell, I find I am often led around by my nose. I have fallen in love because of the way a man smelled; when I was a child and my parents were away on a trip, I used to steal into their bathroom and smell their robes hanging on the back of the door. One of my favorite books is Perfume, the story of a man so affected by scents he can smell them from hundreds of miles away.

Naturally enough, I am attracted to flowers primarily for their scent. All my roses are chosen for odor—spicy-sweet, musky, peppery—if they don’t smell good, I don’t want them. My current favorite is a climber called Angel Face. I also love the heady smell of lavender, the spiciness of daffodils, the romance of lilacs and lilies of the valley, and the subtlety of certain bearded irises. I particularly love the elusiveness of fragrance. You catch a scent in the garden and follow your nose to…where? Now it’s here; then it’s gone. That’s why I love the sweet olive tree that blooms in Southern California in early spring. The fragrance is strong in the early evening as you walk down the street, but press your nose against a blossom and the scent diminishes.

My husband, who knows of my fragrant passion, surprised me last spring by planting me a huge patch of multicolored sweet peas and an entire bed of rubrum and Casablanca lilies. Batches of sweet peas perfumed my office throughout the spring. Extremely long-lasting as cut flowers, the lilies bloomed for two solid months during the summer and, all that time, the house was full of their heady scent. I don’t think any gift has ever pleased me more.

And because the breath of flowers is far sweeter

in the air (where it comes and goes,

like the warbling of music) than in the hand,

therefore nothing is more fit for that delight

than to know what be the flowers and plants

that do best perfume the air.

—FRANCIS BACON

Fragrant Plants

Smell is so individual—I love narcissus, but know many people who can’t stand it, and folks wax eloquent about wisteria, the smell of which makes me sick. So in creating a fragrant garden, let your nose be your guide. Here are some suggestions: jasmine, honeysuckle, sweet autumn clematis, mimosa, hosta, stock, evening primrose, nicotiana, angel trumpet (especially the white), moonflower, sweet pea, ginger, lily of the valley, peony, and pinks.

Working in the garden gives me something

beyond the enjoyment of senses. It gives

me a profound feeling of inner peace.

—RUTH STOUT

My Primrose Patch

As a young girl, I was particularly taken by a row of primroses my mother had in a border planting. The colors were deep and pure like my favorite crayons—purplish blues, intense red-orange, and buttery yellows. I loved that such beauty came up out of a rather commonplace and cabbagey foliage. When Mom showed me how to carefully separate the babies from the established adult primroses, I planted my very own in my favorite mysterious blue in my part of the garden. Mom, who ran a small but busy dairy farm, also showed me her secrets of accelerating plant growth, without the blue hormone-filled potions you could buy at the hardware store. (That was cheating in her book.) She would take well cured cow dung and mix it into the soil around her plants. I took her cue, and by the next spring I had a prim little row of primroses that had all sprung from the baby I had brought home and transplanted. It was at that point that my mom nodded approvingly and I was pronounced to have a green thumb.

One of the daintiest joys of spring is the

falling of soft rain among blossoms.

—MARY WEBB

A Flower Bed

I found an old bed in a neighbor’s trash. It was too pretty to be thrown away. It had only the foot and headboard. I set them at each end of a row of flowers in one of my gardens. When a passerby asks me why the bed is in the middle of my garden, I reply with, Haven’t you ever heard of a flower bed? I now have an herb bed too. I’m looking for an old crib to set around my seedlings, and that will be my nursery bed.

The first gathering of salads, radishes and herbs

made me feel like a mother about her baby—

how could anything so beautiful be mine?

—ALICE B. TOKLAS

The Boldness of Tulips

I love tulips better than any other spring flower: they are the embodiment of alert cheerfulness and tidy grace, and next to a hyacinth they look like wholesome, freshly scrubbed young girls beside stout ladies whose every movement weighs down the air with patchouli. Their faint, delicate scent is refinement itself; and is there anything in the world more charming than the sprightly way they hold up their little faces to the sun? I have heard them called bold and flaunting. But to me, they seem modest grace itself, only always on the alert to enjoy life as much as they can and not afraid of looking the sun or anything else above them in the face.

To dig one’s own spade into one’s own earth!

Has life anything better to offer than this?

—BEVERLEY NICHOLS

The Pleasure of Sound

If you want a more sophisticated sound for your garden than wind chimes normally offer, consider garden bells. They are a set of cup shaped metal bells on wires that come with a base. Like chimes, they peal when blown by the breeze. Unlike chimes, however, the tones change when they are filled with rain, and their sound can be adjusted by bending the wires.

And all it lends to the sky is this—A

sunbeam giving the air a kiss.

—HARRY KEMP, THE HUMMINGBIRD

A Spring Reverie

In the enclosure, the spring flowers are almost too beautiful—a great stretch of foamlike cowslips. As I bend over them, the air is heavy and sweet with their scent, like hay and new milk and the kisses of children, and, further on, a sunlit wonder of chiming daffodils.

Before me are two great rhododendron bushes. Against the dark, broad leaves, the blossoms rise, flame-like, tremulous in the still air, and the pear rose loving-cup of a magnolia hangs delicately on the gray bough.

May all your weeds be wildflowers.

—Gardening plaque

For Love of Weeds

As I work in my vegetable garden, tenderly planting seedlings of peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes, I suddenly spot the weeds and regretfully rip them out by their roots. Regretfully, because I’m a great fan of weeds. Weeds are the wonder workers of the world.