[A] series of obscure and eccentric English garden-makers who, between the early seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, created intensely personal and idiosyncratic gardens. They include such fascinating characters as the superstitious antiquary William Stukeley and the animal- and bird-loving Lady Read, as well as the celebrated master of Vauxhall Gardens, Jonathan Tyers, who created ... one of the gloomiest and most perverse anti-pleasure gardens in Georgian England. Others built miniature mountains, shaped topiaries, displayed exotic animals, excavated caves, and assembled architectural fragments and fossils to realise their gardens ...
The ticket to a flower show, ca. 1891, that inspired Tom Crewe's story, "The Fête," which is in The Paris Review, Issue 252, Summer, 2025:
Seven or eight years ago, a friend showed me a tatty packet of odd papers he’d picked up for six pounds at a sale … What got my attention right away was the remarkably pristine purple invitation to a flower show taking place on July 27, 1891. The back of the invitation, however, contained something unexpectedly dramatic. Someone had copied out another letter in a tiny hand, titling it ‘Mrs. Jacques’s account of the catastrophe that took place at this flower show.’ I read it, and felt the shiver of an idea.
From the story:
Two boys got into a fight. Another boy, Sam, kissed a girl, Mary, the two of them pressed up behind the tea tent, their feet in a rose bed, unsuspected by the aproned ladies cutting cake on the other side. For both it was their first kiss, and neither ever forgot it. Sam swore that Mary’s mouth tasted of roses.
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And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing. Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds, had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels.
I could not help myself, I fell in love with the florist. Each day he handed me arrangements of flowers: lilies-of-the-valley, chrysanthemums and roses, exotic willows and violets. As a lover he was strange and melancholy: he had an intense hatred for the out-of-doors and almost never left the house; the mention of sports made him dizzy and a car moving too fast would bring him close to tears. … When he threatened to leave I became the carnation in his lapel, I was his brooch. When the weather became warm and clear, somehow it was he who wrapped me in a blanket, dragged me outside to a park; and when we made love I was the one who wilted, I felt my color brush off on his chin.
Ira Sadoff, "Seven Romances." The Paris Review, Issue no. 68, Winter 1976.
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It was in Cut Bank that I saw the garden and the kind of gardener that I am not. In the front yard of each little house—the houses were small, bungalow-like, a style of architecture very much suited to vast expanses of landscape—were little gardens blooming with flowers. The flowers, almost without exception, were petunias (red, purple, white), impatiens, portulaca, and short, red salvia. There was one garden that seemed more cared for than the others and that had a plaque placed prominently in a garden bed that read: “Garden of The Week.”
And that is exactly the kind of gardener I am not and exactly the kind of garden I will never have. A garden made for a week is unknown to me. For years I have been making a garden and unmaking it too. It isn’t out of dissatisfaction that I do and undo, it is out of curiosity. That curiosity has not lead to stasis. It has lead to a conversation. And so it is, I have been having a conversation in the garden. And so it will be until I die.
One Friday in October, after dinner, we drove to the lake to look for the Northern Lights. They were barely discernible to our eyes—the faintest cast of green and red—but the camera trapped the light. Standing on the crumbly strip of city beach, the wind in my face, I heard the water washing against the concrete barrier, I saw flashes of distant faces, the other people scattered up and down the broken shoreline, illuminated intermittently by the blue light of phones, all of us looking hard into the dark, all of us aware, for just a moment, that we were standing amidst strange, fiery, near-invisible energies.
Now, here we are, standing in another broken place, looking into a different sort of dark.
Over the summer, I read quite a few books, and I meant to write about them here. Maybe I will, but there are three that I keep thinking about.
Derek Jarman, MODERN NATURE. You may have seen this image somewhere: a small austere house, rectangular and low, black, with two windows staring yellow, set in a field of gravel improbably tufted with flowers. Depending on the angle, a power station appears in the background. This is Prospect Cottage, the Dungeness home of the artist, poet, and filmmaker Derek Jarman. He bought it as a rundown Victorian fisherman’s hut after he was diagnosed with H.I.V. in 1986, and spent most of the rest of his life there, hauling in buckets of dirt to sink into the shingle, planting poppies and sea kale and bugloss and borage and roses that somehow survived in this stony, salty place. He filled the house and garden with art from friends and things he found on the beach; part of John Donne’s poem “The Sun Rising” runs along the house’s exterior cladding. This book is a chronicle of his time there and work in the garden, as well as his life before it; it is extraordinary. First, because it is a document of his mind. Jarman had the sort of brutally deep education in Western classics that more or less vanished somewhere in the middle of the 20th century and a relentless appetite for culture, learning, and thinking, and this suffuses every line he writes. It is like standing in a sea wind: bracing, challenging, energizing. Second, because it captures time in two dimensions, both Jarman’s own shifting feelings and experiences, as he lives in the uncertainty and doom that was an H.I.V. diagnosis in the 1980s, when so much was still unknown and fear was running riot, but also the broader time, the TV programs and the politics and simply the habits of being. All books are products of their time but they are often sloppy vessels; this is not. Maybe because Jarman was very aware that his time was limited and precarious; throughout the book, friends and acquaintances die. No one really knows what to expect. But he hauls dirt to the garden. He tries new varieties of rose. He gets aggravated by idiocy and ignorance and petty annoying things. He reads and walks on the beach. His friends are there for him (Tilda Swinton shows up for him again and again, and then there is the astonishing devotion of Keith Collins, Jarman’s great platonic love.)
And Jarman keeps dreaming.
Dreamt last night I held a bowl of the rarest jade, the colour of honey with a sage green iridescence. The bowl of precious stones was threatened by a thief. I preserved it through terrible trials, assailed by the demon thug intent on stealing it. He curled round me ceaselessly, like a crab, with switchblade claws; then suddenly it was over. He deflated like a balloon, disappeared like a little Michelin man with a gasp of rushing air.
Otto L. Bettmann, THE GOOD OLD DAYS—THEY WERE TERRIBLE! This book has the aesthetic of a title destined to live sandwiched between old copies of Reader’s Digest, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and Chicken Soup for the Soul in a jumbled rack near the toilet. I found it at a book sale in June and bought it for $.50, mostly because I was amused by the chapter subheadings:
The Kitchen: A vale of toil
Farm Women: Draft horses of endurance
Farm Children: They lead a life of numbing blandness
Loneliness: The West was haunted by loneliness, and its twin sister, despair
Those are all sections from the chapter on rural life; Bettmann also covers air, traffic, housing, work, crime, food and drink, health, education, travel, and leisure. When I sat down to read it, though, my amusement gave way to fascination and admiration. In 1935, Bettman fled to the U.S. from Germany, where he had been director of the state art library in Berlin. In New York, he assembled what would become the Bettman Picture Archive, a three-million-image resource for “publishers, educators, ad-men and the audio-visual media.” He pulled together this book in 1974, at the rump of the Nixon era, drawing from images and news clippings in his archive to offer a corrective to what he saw as the “benevolent haze” obscuring the United States’ collective historical memory of the late 19th and early 20th century:
I have always felt that our times have overrated and unduly overplayed the fun aspects of the past. What we have forgotten are the hunger of the unemployed, crime, corruption, the despair of the aged, the insane and the crippled. The world now gone was in no way spared the problems we consider horrendously our own, such as pollution, addiction, urban plight or educational turmoil. In most of our nostalgia books, such crises are ignored, and the period’s dirty business is swept under the carpet of oblivion. What emerges is a glowing picture of the past, of blue-skied meadows where children play and millionaires sip tea.
If we compare this purported Arcadia with our own days we cannot but feel a jarring sense of discontent, a sense of despair that fate has dropped us into the worst of all possible worlds. And the future, once the resort of hopeful dreams, is envisioned as an abyss filled with apocalyptic nightmares.
The book is simple and brisk, with a spread dedicated to each subchapter summing up just how wretched things were in any one specific dimension of ordinary American life, illustrated with photographs, etchings, and newspaper quotes from the time. These horrors build and build, illuminating a country with city streets full of shit, air full of smoke, shoddy housing, public beaches with bloated animal corpses, milk adulterated with chalk, children beaten by schoolteachers and maimed at factories, workers driven to despair, corrupt officials at every level of government, and the cruelties of so-called justice, enacted through inhumane punishments and lynching. While many of the problems Bettmann discusses are still with us in altered forms, his point holds: Overall, things are so much better—startlingly, shockingly better. I found myself thinking that if I could jump back to 1900 and talk to someone then, they might well have no hope that anything would ever change. And yet, so many seemingly impossible things came to pass because people did try, and kept trying.
For anyone tempted by the notion that the past was somehow better, in any way, shape, or form, it is a clarifying read.
Rumer Godden, AN EPISODE OF SPARROWS. I had read exactly two other books by Godden—a charming slight one about a mouse and a dollhouse and a peculiar, memorable one about three sisters pinioned like specimen butterflies by the social stratifications of British colonial culture. Neither one prepared me for this. Octopuses have three hearts and hagfish have four; I am not sure how many this story has—at least two, but maybe five. One is Lovejoy Mason, a little girl growing up between the cracks of society, suddenly and furiously possessed by the impulse to create a garden in her ratty, post-Blitz London neighborhood. But there is Olivia, middle-aged and muddled, smothered by the efficient morality and complacent prosperity of her sister, Angela, but reaching for some way to make her life make sense. There is Sparkey, small and runny-nosed and bony-legged, and Tip, who can’t help himself from helping. There is Vincent and his empty restaurant, and his wife, Mrs. Crombie, trying to make it work. There is a miniature rosebush. And then there are the plates. I don’t think I’ve ever come across another scene in literature where a plate made me cry.
It’s a beautiful, subtle, richly observed story about the possibility and impossibility of change and compromise and love.
"I sometimes think," said Olivia, "from watching, of course, because I am not experienced, I think experience can be a—block." Again it was clumsy, but she knew what she meant.
"And why?" asked Angela, amused.
"Because if you think you know, you don't ask questions," said Olivia slowly, "or if you do ask, you don't listen to the answers." Olivia had observed this often. "Everyone, everything, each thing, is different, so that it isn't safe to know. You—you have to grope."
Pencils that smell like evergreens, or Moro Dabron's Vita perfume, meant to conjure "the Elizabethan tower of Sissinghurst Castle in the 1930s, where writer and poet Vita Sackville-West spent a great deal of her time writing surrounded by old books, period wood, fresh flowers and cuttings from the magnificent gardens which the room overlooked ..."
One more indulgence: These funny gift guides are an annual delight to compile for all of you anonymous folks out there. I don't make any money from them—no affiliate links, no placements, nada! I'm an online renegade!—but if they have brought you joy or amusement, please consider making a donation to Doctors Without Borders. I'm donating what I can, too, and holding the people of Palestine, Ukraine, and Sudan in my heart. Thank you.
Natural pigments in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.
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Georgiana Houghton, The Eye of the Lord (reverse), 1864. Collection of the Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia.
*
The grievance I find in the Cours de la Fidélité is the barbarous manner in which the authorities have cut these vigorous plane trees and clipped them to the quick. In fact they really resemble with their dwarfed, rounded and flattened heads the most vulgar plants of the vegetable garden ... But the wish of M. the mayor is despotic, and all the trees belonging to the municipality are ruthlessly pruned twice a year. ... An old Surgeon-Major of Napoleon's Italian Army, who was living in retirement at Verrières, and who had been in his time described by M. the mayor as both a Jacobin and a Bonapartiste, dared to complain to the mayor one day of the periodical mutilation of these fine trees.
"I like the shade," answered M. de Rênal, with just a tinge of that hauteur which becomes a mayor when he is talking to a surgeon, who is a member of the Legion of Honour. "I like the shade, I have my trees clipped in order to give shade, and I cannot conceive that a tree can have any other purpose, provided of course it is not bringing in any profit, like the useful walnut tree."
This is the great word which is all decisive at Verrières. ... Bringing in profit is the consideration which decides everything in this little town which you thought so pretty.
When we dig roots, we make little holes. When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don’t ruin things. We shake down acorns and pine nuts. We don’t chop down the trees. We only use dead wood. But the white people plow up the ground, pull up the trees, kill everything. The tree says, “Don’t. I am sore. Don’t hurt me.” But they chop it down and cut it up. The spirit of the land hates them. They blast out trees and stir it up to its depths. They saw up the trees. That hurts them. The Indians never hurt anything, but the white people destroy all. They blast rocks and scatter them on the earth. The rock says, “Don’t! You are hurting me.” But the white people pay no attention. When the Indians use rocks, they take little round ones for their cooking. The white people dig deep long tunnels. They make roads. They dig as much as they wish. They don’t care how much the ground cries out. How can the spirit of the earth like the white man?
Kate Luckie, "The Water Will Come." Excerpted in Lapham's Quarterly, "Climate" issue, Fall 2019.
The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present; it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life; it is a still-quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
We know that without the sense of temporality embedded within memory, there would be no unitary self, and many emotions dependent on representing what is not immediately present to the mind would not exist—hope, anxiety, regret, pride, sadness, joy, love, guilt. Yet change is embedded within the very current of a unitary, subjective life. We have that “core self” that we feel to be so strong, for instance, in a loved one with dementia. We build an identity through time that is also outside us: things age, and we age in time, all things relative to each other. Being is being in time, in each others’ time.
Noga Arikha, from The Ceiling Outside: The Science and Experience of the Disrupted Mind, excerpted in Book Post.
*
I was gradually forgetting my story. At first, I shrugged, telling myself that it would be no great loss, since nothing had happened to me, but soon I was shocked by that thought. After all, if I was a human being, my story was as important as that of King Lear or of Prince Hamlet that William Shakespeare had taken the trouble to relate in detail.
The book suggests, repeatedly and in many ways, that perhaps our most essential quality is a void, an incompleteness—that what we need in order to be fully human is to sense something beyond our reach, a future, some possibility, something to be desired or learned or made or done or loved. And that it’s this sense of the something more that kindles imagination, longing, acts of mind—the experiences that enable us to feel human and make life worth living.
Deborah Eisenberg, "Condemned to Life," a review of Jacqueline Harpman's I Who Have Never Known Men in The New York Review of Books, 7/21/2022.
Microchimerism refers to the exchange of fetal and maternal cells in the womb. The term comes from the Chimera of Greek myth, a monster made up of the parts of various animals. The fetus’s cells are able to pass into the mother’s body through the bloodstream, but the maternal cells can also enter the fetal body through the placenta. And, although this is less likely, a grandmother’s cells may also enter her grandchild’s body. As fetal cells are capable of adapting to the maternal tissue—like foreigners learning a new language—they insert themselves in various organs to become part of the mother’s body. We are made of others.
Jazmina Barrera, translated by Christina McSweeney. From Linia Negra, excerpted in Book Post.
With the theoretical physicist Przemek Witaszczyk I developed an algorithm to identify specific plant species that insects would find most attractive. The resulting garden, made up of 7,000 plants, might look random to the human eye, but it’s very tasteful if you happen to be a bee.
Daisy Ginsberg, talking in The Gentlewoman newsletter about creating the Pollinator Pathmaker, "a 55-meter living sculpture for pollinators."
What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.
V. Woolf
Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.
Italo Calvino
Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.
