A ‘Secret’ tip for cultivating joy, along with beautiful plants, in your garden – Daily News
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If you want to inspire children or grandchildren to garden of their own, read “The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett; The protagonist is Mary Lennox, a 10-year-old girl. This book has never been out of print since its publication in 1911, has sold millions of copies worldwide, and three films have been made based on its story.
When you’ve read – or not – the book and want to know more about how it was written, get a copy of Unearthing the Secret Garden (Timber Press, 2021) by Marta McDowell. It is a tape that is difficult to put down again once you pick it up.
“The Secret Garden” is a story of rejuvenation, rehabilitation and character enhancement of children and adults, all made possible through contact with a garden, gardening and horticultural activities. In an essay by Burnett called “In the Garden,” and as a sort of epilogue to McDowell’s book, we read: “As long as you have a garden, you have a future; and as long as you have a future, you live. Staying alive makes life worth living – not just staying on the surface of the earth. And it is the anticipation of a future that makes the difference between the two states of being. “
It’s worth noting here that Burnett didn’t develop her passion for gardening until she was nearly 50, and it could be said that it literally came to life then.
In the end, what is a secret garden anyway? To quote McDowell, “If you’ve ever walked into a garden and felt a chill – appreciation? Shy? – You had your own secret garden moment. Nature and gardeners have conspired to create a place that vibrates in the same harmonic frequency as your mind. . . It is an effect that every gardener strives for. “
As I ponder our transition from roses and camellias to agaves and yuccas, I wonder if such secret gardening moments will still be possible.
Here is another point to consider when it comes to designing a secret garden. In the words of Mary Lennox, who unlocks the gate to the secret garden, “It wouldn’t look like a secret garden if it were tidy.” As Burnett describes it, “One of the things that made this place look the strangest and most beautiful , was that climbing roses had run over the trees and swung down long tendrils, creating light, swaying curtains. “
This idea is confirmed by Dickon, Mary’s garden friend from the neighborhood: “I don’t want everything to look cut off, do I?”
In so far as The Secret Garden is a story of rebirth, it reflects Burnett’s own life; Impoverished as a teenager, she was divorced twice, had a teenage son who died of tuberculosis, and suffered from a variety of illnesses her entire life as she worked exhaustively to support a lavish lifestyle; She often threw extravagant parties for her many friends and spent the winters in Bermuda.
Born into prosperity in England, her family became impoverished after the death of her father. Forced to cross the ocean to live with relatives in Knoxville, Tennessee, she became the main breadwinner of her family in her teenage years, made possible by compensation she received from an amazing production of articles and stories for magazines and magazines. Starting from scratch, she didn’t even have the funds to buy the stationery and stamps needed to prepare her writings and submit them for publication. She raised money by collecting wild fox grapes (Vitis labrusca) and selling them at the local market.
After three decades in America, she returned to England and leased Maytham Hall, a property in Kent, southeast of London, which contained an abandoned garden that was to serve as the inspiration for “The Secret Garden”. This garden was essentially a rose garden, and roses became Burnett’s favorite flowers. She often packed large bunches of them to send to her friends. Her next favorites seem to have been delphiniums and blue flowers in general, which she could never have enough of. Nine pages of Unearthing the Secret Garden are devoted to a list of the plants Burnett grew in her gardens in England, Long Island and Bermuda.
I believe it was Burnett’s generosity along with her desire to share her love for plants, qualities gardeners are known for that fueled their tireless work ethic in their later years. She loved to entertain in a big way. Simply put, she had to keep earning to share at the highest level. At Maytham Hall, she invited all the mothers and children of a nearby village to spend the day on her property and visit her rose garden.
When the Kent property was sold, she moved to Long Island, New York. There she laid out an elaborate garden in which she wrote “The Secret Garden” and entertained her many friends, some of whom stayed with her for days. Huge shipments of bulbs, flowering plants, and ferns came to her door on a regular basis. She fled to Bermuda every winter because of her dislike of cold weather and what I suspect dormant gardens.
At the end of her book, Marta McDowell presents an essay by Keri Wilt, the great-great-granddaughter of Frances Hodgson Burnett. It contains instructions on how to get our children excited about not just gardening, but any activity that matters to us. “Our family’s love of gardening wasn’t the result of kneeling with our hands in the dirt side by side with the previous generation. It was born from observing the happiness that a garden creates. . . My mother never let me work in the garden, but she sowed the seeds by simply showing me how much she enjoyed it. “
Tip of the week: Roses seem to have become a minor, if not an anomaly, in the Los Angeles Gardens, and that’s a shame. I recently visited two major hardware stores and checked their inventory for roses.
There were no more than two dozen carpet roses in one of the nurseries; in the other nursery there were seven flower carpet roses, an iceberg, and that was it. While flower carpet roses in red, white, apple blossoms or pink make an excellent blossom-rich ground cover and iceberg roses produce white blossoms practically all year round, what happened to the rest of the roses?
Roses get a bad rap for the misconception that they require constant attention and watering in the areas of pruning, pest control, and fertilization. But as Nate Benesi demonstrated in a waterless garden at the San Gabriel Dam Recreation Center in Irwindale, certain types of roses – such as the pink Chinese rose “Old Blush” and the apricot-peach “Evelyn”, a beauty by David Austin – can live alone on winter rain , as rare as in recent years.
My own butterfly rose (Rosa chinensis ‘Mutabilis’), whose flowers change color from yellow to pink to mahogany, hardly needs any water and forms a beautiful living fence with individual plants that are three meters high and six meters wide. Established roses of all kinds are more likely to be drought tolerant, although they will bloom more profusely with normal water. Where there is drip irrigation and a three inch layer of mulch – which fertilizes and provides pest resistance when it turns into humus – roses are more than worth as long as romance remains a part of our lives. But yes, many types of roses require you to remove faded flowers to get more of them.
As winter approaches, there should be a selection of bare-root roses to choose from at local nurseries. You can also have potted roses delivered to your home through online vendors at sites like chambleeroses.com and davidaustinroses.com.
Please send questions, comments, and photos to joshua@perfectplants.com
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A ‘Secret’ tip for cultivating joy, along with beautiful plants, in your garden