Some New Beginnings

This is the kind of precision I’ve come to expect from my partner

It’s difficult to know where to stand, horticulturally, when 2 inches of rain falls on already frozen ground and the temperature swings from 5 degrees to 65 degrees Fahrenheit in the course of several days.  Unable to permeate the soil, large vernal pools turn to ice rinks and then sit for a week as the false spring takes its time to make the ground friable once again.  And yet if you hadn’t been paying attention, the view from today’s window would be a typical January day: damp and dreary with little to draw you outside.

So I suppose it’s a good thing that we have a stack of seed catalogs and a pile of foundational gardening books by the fireplace to help us prepare for 2023.

Last year we put countless hours into regrading the area near the barn, putting up fences, erecting a greenhouse, building raised beds, and amassing all the gubbins (lights, heat mats, seed trays on an industrial scale) to start seedlings for what we hope to be an extensive future garden.  Last year’s results were satisfying, but I like to think we were just limbering up for this year’s main event.

On the other hand, some of us are more tactile

Laura and I have very different ways of planning for the future; I’m a single-tasking analog guy and she is a digital multi-tasker.  So it’s no surprise that our approaches to seed starting are like night and day—she has a smart computerized Gantt chart and I lay seed packets.  She’s thinking about beets and I dream about armloads of flowers.  But we get there in the end.

Along with our usual Johnny’s Seeds, Swallowtail Garden Seeds and John Scheeper’s Kitchen Garden Seeds catalogs, I’ve placed a big order with Outside Pride (I know it sounds like an LBGTQ+ friendly hiking group, but its actually a seed company with a wide selection and really generously-sized packets). I’m excited to see how things turn out.  Successes have been finding largish quantities of Dame’s Rocket and Miss Willmott’s Ghost, balanced by the failure of being unable, yet again, to source Yellow Rattle to make a start on the pasture.  Our last frost date comes in around April 23, and some seeds can be started eight weeks in advance, so we’ll be in the potting shed in a couple of months.

We also have so many recently acquired gardening books to get through that we can barely turn around.  We’re not hoarders, but from a distance it would be hard to tell the difference.

Whether you garden or not, this is a cracking good read

One of the most satisfying of these is Stephen Anderton’s irresistible Christopher Lloyd: His Life at Great Dixter.  Part biography, part chronicle of Britain throughout the 20th century (a la Anthony Powell or Evelyn Waugh) it leaves you knowing, and liking, Sussex’s most famous gardener even more.  Dixter, the Lloyd family, and any number of up-and-coming gardeners give you a real sense of the times, and Lloyd’s bittersweet Bildungsroman reveals the sensitive man beneath the curmudgeon.  If nothing else, you come away with renewed respect for Fergus Garrett, his long-time amanuensis, friend, and fellow visionary (and now Great Dixter’s Head Gardener).

So imagine my surprise when, spurred on to order even more of Christopher Lloyd’s books …

I’m lucky to have four autographed books from people I admire: Sir Roy Strong, Simon Schama, Julia Child and now this

… I found that my latest find was not only a first edition, but a signed copy as well.  Fate, I guess.  And as a collection of his most noteworthy columns from Country Life, it puts on display his deep knowledge and gentle wit.

I got to about page 30, and bailed out

I can’t say the same about Gertrude Jekyll’s Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden.  I’m reading it because, I suppose, one should read her—a sort of “shake the hand that shook the hand of. . .” approach to understanding British gardening from Capability Brown to the present.  She knew William Robinson and worked with Edward Lutyens (who designed parts of Dixter) and patted a young Christopher Lloyd on the head and anointed him a “future good gardener.” Lloyd mentored Fergus who shares a stage with Dan Pearson, and so on.  But in spite of her status as a sort of “Turner-meets-Titchmarsh” artistic horticultural impressionist, her writing is fusty and hidebound—as out of date as the carpet bedding and flower clocks she sought to replace.

Waiting for the sweet spot of thawed ground without an Agincourt-like mud pit

But sometime soon, when the sun shines and the wind abates, I’ll venture outdoors.  With any luck the ground will stay unfrozen and I might just have a go at installing some corten steel edging in the new walled garden space.  In the meantime, I just need to stay busy babysitting some traveling friends’ Mediterranean plants, draw up plans for some new greenhouse benches, and wage a fruitless war with our local deer population.