I must first start out here by saying that I am not a gardener. I grew up deep in the country but had nobody to tell me the names of the various plants around except for those of three or four varieties of trees. Today, I can definitely distinguish a specimen of any species of moss from a sunflower, and both of those from a California redwood. I actually do know a few more species than that, but I have never really had a garden except for a horrible attempt at the house we lived in before Peter arrived, when I tried to keep the previous owner’s prize-winning rosebushes going. Buck planted a lot of squash vines the next year which tried to consume the whole house in their furious growth. That was pretty much it, as far as our efforts at gardening have gone.
Which brings me to one of the wonderful books that have just arrived in my morning mailbox, and no, not from my dearly beloved Amazon.com. It is Gardener’s Nightcap, by Muriel Stuart, and is from Persephone Books (persephonebooks.co.uk) in London. She was, judging from her bit of biography, a very passionate gardener, and it shows in this book which is not an endless bunch of chapters on how to raise rosebushes etc. and not kill them off. It is rather a string of small essays upon gardens, plants and the natural world. Each essay-let is short enough to be read easily before you turn out the light for the night. I am devouring them even though I have no similar experiences to go along with the reading.
Grown-ups never realize how close a child is to the earth, how intricate and detailed the earth is to him. Things that to older eyes are but tufts and pleasant tangles, are to him as distinct and individual as the furnishings of a doll’s house. He sees the tiny life between the stones, the entrancing growth of very small plants, just as Rossetti, face down among the grasses, noted that the wood spurge had ‘a cup of three’. We learn on dust, from Socrates, from the field daisy. But only in childhood do we live such lessons.
— Muriel Stuart, ‘Single Flowers’, Gardener’s Nightcap
white pebble 