Jill Severn’s Gardening Column

Seeking a cure for November Blues

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It’s cold and wet, the sky is dark, and I’m in no mood to even think about gardening.

We went from endless sunlit summer to sudden chill and gloom, and the forecast for next week includes a 25-degree night and a chance of snow. The urge to curl up under the covers and not come out until spring has been strong this week.

But feeling an obligation to readers and – encouraged by a kind gardener who stopped me with a mood-lifting compliment in the grocery store parking lot a few days ago – I determined to try harder.

Determined

I went looking for inspiration in the gardening section of the library. At first those few shelves of books seemed dusty, dry, predictable, and flavorless. A bad mood is not easily vanquished, and I wondered whether there is anything to read or to write about gardening that hasn’t already been written and read a thousand times.

For instance, how many books do we need about raised beds, for heaven’s sake? Looking at an ample selection of them reminded me of a guest in my garden who said to her companion “Oh, look, she’s growing onions right in the ground!

Cranky

I have no quarrel with raised beds. They’re useful where heavy clay soil doesn’t drain, and for people with limited mobility. And some insist they make the soil warm up faster in the spring so they can plant earlier. But in the past few years they’ve become standard issue – an often unnecessary expense for the cedar or other materials they’re built with. In most instances, and for most people, planting right in the ground makes more sense.

That critique sparked an embarrassing thought: When a person feels blue and cranky, it’s quite remarkable what they can find to criticize and judge.

Chastened

Chastened by that thought and a looming deadline, I checked out an armful of books on non-raised-bed topics and went home.

Ah, color pictures of beautiful gardens! That’s what I needed. Gardens photographed in mid-summer, with sunlight and flowering abundance on every page.

The loveliest pictures were in a book called Beth Chatto’s Green Tapestry Revisited, edited and updated by her granddaughter. Chatto and her husband created a famous seven-plus acre garden and plant nursery that encompassed a wide range of growing conditions, which forced them to become experts in very diverse plant habitats. Their granddaughter and the crew that manages the garden since Chatto’s death in 2018 aim to preserve her legacy, and to focus on sustainability and climate adaptation.

Tamed

Chatto is among the giants of English garden literature. While writing about garden design and plant habitats, she provides a window into British and European garden history, including this explanation of the formal, enclosed 17th-century French gardens like Versailles: “In those days this had a practical reason: the forest was still full of wolves and bears, and so there had to be a barrier of walls and hedges around the garden. . . It was an age when gentlemen paraded up and down between geometrically designed parterres. They needed to feel safe and civilized; nature was not something to be enjoyed but something to be tamed or kept at bay.”

“Nowadays,” she wrote in 1989, “we are trying hard to return to nature, perhaps because we are overcivilized.”

One might quibble with describing the late 20th century as “overcivilized,” but we get her drift.

Sharp

The second book that distracted me from rainy day blues and pre-election anxiety was A History of the Garden in Fifty Tools by Bill Laws, an entertaining writer who is also the author of The Field Guide to Fields and Fifty Plants That Changed the Course of History.

In the book about tools, Laws informs us that our pruning shears were invented by the French Count Antoine Bertrand de Molleville in the early 1800s. The Count had been a governor of Brittany and ally of the hapless King Louis XVI. He fled to England to avoid the guillotine but returned after the French Revolution, and was perhaps inspired by the guillotine’s design of a sharp blade cutting against a flat metal surface.

It is odd indeed to think that the pruning shears so often in my back pocket are somehow the progeny of the French Revolution. So . . . Vive la France?

Restored

By the end of the day, these books at least restored my interest in reading about gardening, if not mucking about in the soggy ruins of my yard. And they reminded me that to read about gardening is to read about history, culture, technology, science, and the glorious mess that is human nature.

I hope all those afflicted with these dark November moods will find solace in that glory.

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers, and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com

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