21-23 December 2019
My Roots by Monty Don
I certainly don’t want to get in trouble with Montagu Don by sharing too many takeaways from this wonderful older book of his. This is to inspire you gardeners to find it; I got it from the public library in Aurora, Illinois via interlibrary loan. This is also a glimpse for my reading friends who do not have a great interlibrary loan resource like Timberland Regional Library and may not have the book budget to find a copy to buy.
The back cover has my favourite takeaway, about a method of getting a solitary staycation.
The book contains thoughts that go beyond gardening.
I wish I had said that last bit so I could use it in my blog description.
Monty’s wife, Sarah, appeared in the telly series Fork to Fork, and she co-wrote The Jewel Garden, but I have never seen her on Gardeners’ World, and so I love when she appears in his books, as in the preface.
And later, on page 115:
Takeaways:
“If you garden with gaiety, then you are immediately at the heart of a great mystery that will unfold revelations for the rest of your days. If you garden with solemnity you will rapidly become–if you are not already–a boring old fart.”
“Spend! Spend! Spend! ….People begrudge a hundred pounds on a dozen plants that will last as many years whereas they will blow that much on a bad meal with friends they don’t really like.”
Which reminds me of one of my favourite gardening quotations…..
….although there have been years when my annual gardening budget, in order to pay the mortgage and bills, was $25 or less.
Monty describes winter gardening as “tooling around doing little things between gaps in the weather….like rearranging the plates in the cupboard, which, if I am honest, is one of the reasons I like doing it.”
In 2005, Monty resolved to “rely less on labour-saving kit. I am starting to feel profoundly irresponsible using endless noisy machines to do jobs that could be done as well by hand… There are few bits of mechanical baggage that improve the quality of the garden and equally few that improve the quality of life for the gardeners and their neighbours.”
I do love his self-deprecating humour. “[My list] of unwritten books grows longer every year–which may be a blessed relief to the book-buying public but is a source of real dissatisfaction to me.”
He writes of how important a wood is in the garden, making me happy for my Bogsy Wood, even if it is just alders. “….the way that the light constantly plays inside the trees, falling in beams and spangles or distant splashes.”
And later:
Monty also suffers from celandine in the garden. I should have been out in the past couple of not too rainy days digging it up.
Why I feel I was born in the wrong country:
I live on a street which has, in a ten block stretch, only about six good gardens, three of which, including ours, are cared for by Allan and me (and a fourth one, below, was created by us but then let go.) 
I believe that in any town of 900 people in the U.K., there would be gardens all along the street, maybe not at every house but at least at every few houses.
Below, this also applies to the repetitive nature of garden blogging:
Monty is more politically outspoken in this older book, it seems to me.
He also has some choice words for Thatcher, Bush, and even the RHS’s show gardens and the National Trust open gardens.
Everything he wrote rang true, though, and I think he had some influence on improving National Trust gardens and garden centres. I love him for it.
This, about makeover shows and designed gardens…
…made me think about how his own makeover show, years later (Big Dreams, Small Spaces), relies on the garden owners to mostly create the design and implement it themselves.
It reminds me of another favourite gardening quotation.
You’ll have to get the book to read his scathing critique of Chelsea Flower Show gardens at the time, including recreations of The Lost Gardens of Heligan and of a London blitz garden “complete with bombed ‘house'”. I probably would have liked them. He wanted to see original ideas.
I was well chuffed to find out that Monty and I have the same favourite gardening book.
And in googling about the book his son gave him, I found out that there is a documentary about Jarman’s garden, called The Garden, that I can watch online for under $5.00.
I used to carry this book with me to show any prospective client who wanted a garden right by the sea.
I also learned that Monty has two telly shows I had not heard of, Don Roaming and Real Gardens. I searched and could only find brief excerpts online. Later in staycation, I will allow myself to start watching garden videos again. (If I did that now, I wouldn’t get my pile of library books read.)
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30 December 2019
The Pawnbroker’s Daughter by Maxine Kumin
It must have been in The Last Gift of Time that I learned about this book. It began as a memoir of growing up in the 1930s, becoming a poet, and then about halfway through segued, to my amazed delight, to a memoir of life on a farm with an old house, horses and dogs, a huge swimming pond and a big vegetable garden. The farm was called PoBiz Farm, financed as it was by poetry. (That link goes to a long essay that became part of the book. In this article are two more poems about the farm, one about how much work it was, in which her husband says “I hope on the other side, there’s a lot less work, but just in case, I’m bringing tools.”)
I will now read everything that I can find by Maxine Kumin. I am smitten. Other than her poetry books, I especially want to find her essays about country life and her memoir about recovering from a terrible carriage accident. I have two on order already. She also wrote many children’s books; our library has at least one of them.
One of the themes in the latter part of this memoir is moving into an old farmhouse. This passage…
…reminded me of something else: I want to reread, in order, all the memoirs of Gladys Taber’s country life. When I was a child, my grandmother bought the Family Circle magazine each month. She’d send me down to the corner store for “our magazines” (also Woman’s Day and Better Homes and Gardens). My favourite part was a column called Butternut Wisdom. In my 50s, I discovered Gladys Taber somehow, and soon realized she had written that column. In the early 2000s, I painstakingly typed out all my takeaways from her books and posted them in a Taber group in Yahoogroups, and then changed my email, lost my password, and could never get back in to retrieve them. After fifteen years, the books will seem new again and the takeaways be easier with a digital camera. Owning them all will make the re-reading easier than interlibrary loaning.
Back to Maxine Kumin. In her Pulitzer Prize winning poetry, the garden looms large.
…
….
She includes the stories of…and eulogies for…all of their many rescued dogs. “I have never been able to keep my animals, their births, eccentricities, and deaths, out of my poems.”
About one of the dogs, who loved to run with the horses.
That made me weep, as you can imagine.
As for porcupines…
…my dog Bertie Woofter was born for revenge and caused us three expensive trips to the vet with a snout full of quilly pig stickers.
I am ever so excited about discovering Maxine Kumin; I predict hours of good reading ahead.
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Bonus book
School of the Arts by Mark Doty
Coincidentally, I had a book of poems checked out by the author of three of my favourite memoirs (Still Life with Oranges and Lemons, Heaven’s Coast, and Dog Years), with poems about flowers, Cape Cod, gentrification, sex, dogs, time, death. Dog lover friends, I encourage you to find the long poem called Letter to God.
…..
Part of a poem about time and death…
….which is on my mind a lot because of the death of my old friend Bryan.
And then there are poems about flowers…
…including a two or three page poem about a pink poppy that I send to my friends from Pink Poppy Farm.
Suddenly, I find that I must read all of Mark Doty’s books of poetry, even though I haven’t read much poetry since my early 20s.
School of the Arts was book 125 of my reading year. Some say they envy my reading time. I doubt they would trade with me. I have the tiniest of families; any smaller and it would be just me and thus not a family at all (unless I counted the cats). I have really only two highly focused interests, gardening and reading. My friendships have dropped off to those few who are not offended by my craving for solitude. Thus–I have much time for reading during proper reading weather.
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…..
Here are some more of the bits that spoke to me, which is to say they reminded me of my life….and I found it comforting that someone in such a different world (the world of Hollywood in the forties and fifties) had some similar thoughts and experiences.
Loomis Lake is the largest lake on the Long Beach peninsula. 
The 30 mph morning gusts had blown away. 
There is even a ‘yacht club’ of…
Looking through into the living room. With books, a boxy tv, couch and coffee table, there was barely room to walk.
The upper garden…
…Allan forgot his camera and my phone failed to capture the pasta entrees. We chose the 42nd Street partly because it has the best birthday sparkler…
They will be back on occasion as their people are the best of friends with the folks who live in the big house next door but still….I have so enjoyed treating these dogs almost every day.
