Although it hasn't made things totally impossible, today's liberal dumping of powdery snow--the most significant one of the season--has allowed me the opportunity to dig into the pile of reading that's been accumulating for quite some time. These rare interludes often open windows onto the world beyond The Gardens at Turtle Point.
A kindly neighbor contributed to the stack by supplying me with back copies of Country Life and Gardens Illustrated, both high-quality, glossy publications from the United Kingdom. The first, as might be expected, concerns all aspects of rural life across the pond, including gardening. It is PACKED with pages of advertisements for grand country homes in the UK and places where discriminating natives make their holidays (Mallorca, Spain, southern France, Portugal, etc.--think warm, accessible and Mediterranean). Many of the ads make liberal notice of the gardens surrounding these palatial cottages (at least they look that way), manor homes, country houses, estates, and yes...even a castle now and then.
Gardens Illustrated, a pricey BBC Worldwide monthly, bills itself--and it may just be right--as "the world's most beautiful garden magazine." People, places, procedures, and plants are all considered with top-notch writing and beautiful photography.
The point of all this blather is this...
Looking at the two of them, individually, and in juxtaposition to one another leads to the inescapable conclusion that the entire motherland is smothered--covered stem to stern--blanketed, with gardens. Nary a jot or tittle of asphalt (macadam if you prefer), concrete or steel is to be seen. The entire covey of countries is just a bacchanalia of bucholic, pastoral, romantic property. Just what the heck is going on over there?
The real estate is peopled by horsey-householders, in horsey-clothes, with horsey-horses, foxy hunting dogs--that are sometimes carried on horses, and an occasional wild animal or two to be run down...in the most appropriate and sporting way. Gardeners wear hats and jackets, and many have replaced their Wellies with Dubarry Galway boots--certainly a step up in the sartorial world.
And the gardens....oh, these gardens.... They tend to fall into one of two camps. The first is pretty formal. Geometric arrangements with limited plant palettes and countless, clipped, clumps of boxwood, or box-like shrubs abound. Great hulking hedge-walls, pruned tight as a ballerina's bun (note the singular) frame the designs when gorgeous rotting stone walls are absent. One feels one must don a coat (linen I think) and tie when strolling the verdant promenades.
Second is the blousey, billowy, bohemian circumstance known colloquially as a "cottage garden." These are the gardens that literally reach off the page and grab you. They are everywhere. Sometimes they even attend cottages. Everywhere there is not a formal garden, lusty drifts of perennials and ornamental grass hog real estate. Tweeds here.
Just what is it about the English (Scots, Welsh, Irish...) that drives them to this excess of chlorophyll production? Is it just that they need an honest day's work before their nightly pub stop? Is it a long repressed psychological urge from a barbaric past devoid of beauty? Or do they simply NEED to potter about at something....
One wonders if they've figured it out. The rest of us will never know. I'm headed over the ocean in a few months for a friend's wedding. Though not doing so empirically, I hope to gauge the pulse of the gardening nation. I'm looking for that mythical square meter that hasn't been covered over in roses and hellebores. I'll sit there and talk to the passersby. Scratching the surface of the concrete/asphalt/steel, I'll poke, probe and prognosticate. Like a seer, I'll attempt to divine the meaning of gardening life in Great Britain, plumb the depths of their horticultural frenzy.
...and then I'll pause. I'll come home. Back to my magazine pile. I'll thumb a few more issues...see if my findings resonate with the content of the burnished pages. I'll get to the bottom of this.... I will.
