plorentz's Full Review: Reginald Arkell - Old Herbaceous: A Novel of the G...
Only 24 hours ago, my partner, our son and I were scurrying around, in and out of the house, making our way eventually to my car, getting it - we need to run to the bread store! - started, getting - oh, we need to stop by the bank too! - seatbelts on, each of us taking turns - do you want windows down or air? - undoing his, running back into the house for something or other - we forgot the camera, I'll be right back! - checking our - do we have sunscreen? - watches, changing the radio - check the backback, should we bring some water, we should bring his journal to show his mom - stations, all for a simple trip to Warner Park for Madison's annual Fourth of July festival, Rhythm and Booms (and a therapist appointment, and a visit with the kid's Mom and Grandma).
Oops, where are my sunglasses, and back out of the car I ran, through the garage, into the kitchen, scanning the cluttered dining room table, that quietly suffering collector of all our daily detritus, when I looked up and noticed that out on our deck, we were facing a petunia emergency. The brightly colored vining petunias in the long planter, a veritable flood of color for the last - can it be? - two months, the centerpiece of what may in fact be the most successful garden James and I have ever had, and here they were looking wilted and weak, their once (and not-so-long-ago) vigorous leaves looking as lively as a pot of over-boiled brussels sprouts. Fetching my sunglasses from their hiding place, I ran back out to the car - I'll be right back - running back through the garage - what are you doing, Paul? - looking back at the car hoping, hoping, hoping James wasn't going to get out to investigate, fetching my watering can from the floor, rushing through the door leading to the backyard, filling the green, plastic can up from the spigot, I rushed up onto the deck with an emergency room surgeon's urgency, and - god, I hope they don't croak - started watering the - oh, jeez, I really need to get out here and dead-head these babies - petunias, then noticed that the verbenas were looking - but they can tolerate this more, and James and Stew are waiting - a little dry, and while the geraniums and asparagus ferns were looking boisterous and lovely - but if I'm going to water one, I might as well water them all - I was in no mood to take chances on this garden which, to date, had survived heat and drought and rabbits. No, it must all be watered now. There will be no other chance today, and by tomorrow they may all be as crunchy and brown as a sea of Kashi cereal.
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"Gardening was a whole-time job," British poet and playwright Reginald Arkell states with the stiff-backed authority of the elderly in his charming book Old Herbaceous - more biographical character portrait than story - "like the cows or the sheep; Cows had to be milked, whatever happened." Originally published in 1951, just ahead of the author's 80th birthday, this "Novel of the Garden" as it is unassumingly sub-titled, has recently been resurrected by the folks at The Modern Library as part of their Gardening Series curated by Michael Pollan.
I picked it up while James and I were hanging out at the library, biding our time while Stew visited with his mother; I read it over the next few hours hunched under an oak tree on our haphazardly placed blankets, soon to be loaded down with the various spoils of mid-way game victories including several square mirror pictures, a plastic sword and sheath, and a Zip-locked goldfish; amidst a crowd of strangers, and the sounds of a traveling brass band, a drum-and-bugle corps, competing radio stations on competing boomboxes, and the occasional, ceremonial firing of cannons; the smell of corn dogs, distant cigarettes, and beer tents; a swirl - oh my gosh, James, look, Paul's almost read the whole thing - of quintessentially American revelry and movement - yeah, maybe when he's finished, he'll actually talk to us - all around me. In the story of a gardener who would eventually come to be called Old Herbaceous, I'd found an afternoon idyll, a center of tranquility.
Much like James Hilton's Good-Bye Mr. Chips before it, Old Herbaceous is as much about the passage of time and that old British institution of the changing of the guards as it is about its titular character. When we meet Old Herbaceous, he's an old man tucked away in a cottage on the former estate of one Charlotte Charteris, no longer the respected Head Gardener he once had been, now regarded as, at best, a charming antiquity by the estate's new owners, or a dusty old reference book; or simply a nuisance - an "old tree stump", in Arkell's words, a last remnant of a past age, an essentially Victorian life withering away under a fiercely Edwardian social mandate.
The ensuing story of the old gardener's life - from the moment he, as an infant, is abandoned at the doorstep of a local midwife and christened Herbert Pinnegar, to his almost accidental rise to respectable position - is told in a series of equally comic and poignant, chronological reminiscences, each story centered on some small vivid detail - a stolen orchid and a betrayal at the hands of a selfish girl, a bowl of early strawberries, an orchestra of weedy yellow verbascum - representing some pivotal moment in the life of the old bachelor. Arkell edges each little flower-bed of memory with the blur of age, and relates each tale in an appropriately labor-class colloquial with a dash of the sort of dry humor long-since-relegated to the classrooms of crotchety English professors.
There's a fable of sorts tucked in between the dainty blue forget-me-nots and the meticulously ordered tulips of the story - that old saying about reaping what you sow - but mostly the book feels like a garden in itself, something to be gazed upon and enjoyed - do you want another lemonade - on an unhurried afternoon; as delicate - did you happen to see where the porta-potties were - and fleeting as the flowers on a clump of spiderwort, but with an underlying - actually, I think I'm going to find a corn dog stand - acknowlegement of the woefully un-deadheaded vining petunias on our back decks and the rabbits that daily threaten the pretty clusters of coreopsis in our front yards.
Maybe not as dazzling as the Midwest's premier fireworks display, accompanied by the Madison Symphony Orchestra playing popular classics, and the - love in any language - treacly caterwauling - fluently spoken here - of contemporary Christian songstress Sandi Patty; Old Herbaceous should nevertheless find a happy little garden cottage in the hands (and, yes, hearts) of the kind of reader who can isolate themselves under an oak tree surrounded by a crowd of strangers at a Fourth of July celebration.
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