I already know how she feels

A piece by Perdita Buchan in the weekend edition of the NY Times:

LOOKING out the window to see who was at the bird feeder, I noticed buds on the Carolina jessamine. It was one of the first things I had planted in the garden; when I found it at the nursery, I was transported back to an island off the Georgia coast where it climbed high into the trees, perfuming the air and showering me with golden petals. That was eight years ago, and it had never bloomed.

I rushed outside to be sure, and, yes, there were quite a few delicate pale yellow buds. I was thrilled, but eight years is a long time, and that thought brought a faint chill to the bright spring afternoon. Time hovers over me and the garden. Time does that a lot these days.

Gardeners will tell you smugly that you can’t have a garden overnight, although I have seen them put in pretty fast, mature trees and all, in upscale California developments. But for the rest of us the garden is a process, and our relationship to that process depends on our own age.

Eight years ago, when I started to garden, I wouldn’t have bought a parrot. Parrots are extremely long-lived and get very attached, and one would easily outlast me. Of course, gardens are meant to outlast their creators; world-famous gardens can be centuries old, and I well remember the poignancy of finding clumps of lilacs near the old cellar holes of long-vanished houses in the Vermont woods. Just as I can imagine a life in which I would grow old with an African gray parrot, I can imagine what it would have been like to garden in my 20s and 30s, translating to my flower beds that unhurried youthful horizon. I could have experimented more because I wouldn’t have seen every lost plant as lost time, simply as an interesting experiment. There would have been plenty of occasions to plant it again or to plant something else.

I would have taken the chances I avoid now, just as I took chances then with transient jobs and transitory people. I could have planted an acorn and looked forward to an oak. A sapling planted when my daughter was born, for instance, would be huge and bowery now, and my grandchildren could play in its shade.

The great English gardeners Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West began designing gardens when they were in their 30s. In my 30s, I borrowed other people’s gardens — large gardens like the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, especially on Lilac Sunday, when I wandered drunk on the fragrance of hillsides of lilac; small gardens belonging to city friends; and everything in between.

I spent most summers in England and, with everything from Kensington and Kew to family gardens, there was plenty to admire. Staying with my cousin Emma, shuttling between her gardens in Herefordshire and Scotland, I learned about 19th-century roses and the charm of mixing flowers and herbs.

However, the garden I really considered mine was the chapel garden of the school where I lived and worked. Stone steps led down through mountain laurel to a sweep of lawn bordered by beds of peonies, poppies and other perennials against tall dark hedges of arborvitae. It had been planned to bloom in June for graduation ceremonies, but when snow fell and the lamp by the chapel was lit, it looked like the entrance to Narnia.

Propertyless, I squandered decades, and now here I am, seduced by the selective tangle of gardens pictured in magazines, a carelessness that I know takes years to achieve. I guess you could use annuals to similar, if brief, effect, but a garden full of cosmos, zinnias, morning glories and the like would have no structure. A garden needs shrubs and trees. It needs bones, and bones take time.

My garden in coastal New Jersey, when I finally acquired it, had trees and shrubs, but except for two white lilacs and a native cherry, they are not ones I would have chosen. Yet I know if I took out the Norway maples, it would take 20 years to grow shade trees of similar size. So I live with them and their endless seedlings.

There is no question that time has shaped, and will continue to shape, my garden. Time tells me that I will never have allées of anything, that copper beeches need many years to mature, bluebells spread slowly, peonies can take seasons to flower, even lavender is slow to produce bushes the size of the ones in Emma’s borders. At some point in life, you realize that certain avenues are closed to you. If you haven’t become a doctor or a ballerina, you probably never will.

I no longer buy those mail-order perennials in the three-inch pots; I go for gallon containers. Reading the catalogs, I look for “vigorous grower, flowers in first season.” My heart sinks at “slow to establish.” Even “vigorous but well mannered” is doubtful. I consider fruit trees that flower young, but flowers on a spindly sapling, despite their adolescent bravura, don’t have much presence.

I want to plant Baptisia “Purple Smoke,” but when I read “mature plants in three to five years can bear over 50 blooming stalks,” I move on to Baptisia “Twilite Prairie Blues” — “long lived, easily grown, quickly maturing.”

I have had slow starters in addition to the jessamine. For five years, I got no blooms from either the blue “President Lincoln” lilac, a favorite from Lilac Sundays, or the trumpet vine I had planted. I tried everything — applications of phosphorous, girdling the roots of the lilac. Finally I was rewarded. The trumpet vine bloomed for the first time last summer, and this year “President Lincoln” came into its own. But I have decided to pass up “Adelaide Dunbar,” the gorgeous dark purple double lilac I covet; five years seems too long a wait.

If you could be sure of your garden’s permanence, you might take the long view, in the spirit of seeing beyond your own earthly years. But over the fate of a garden you have no control. My mother had her garden for 40 years, and it already had mature plantings from the 1920s. When the house was sold, the buyer tore out the box hedges and much else.

So I live in the garden present, resisting the temptation to plant an overnight forest of bamboo or the royal paulownia tree, advertised in the back pages of magazines, that grows 10 feet in one year and is listed as invasive in a number of states. There are even days in summer when I am staggered by how much I have managed to cram into the space and time my garden has occupied. So I am willing to garden for a limited future, hopeful that something, like the lilacs in the Vermont woods, will remain.