The Optimism in Gardens

“The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied." --Vita Sackville-West

Sissinghurst Gardens

As the news slams in again this week, fury and disaster and my own sense of helplessness rolling over me in waves, I again must turn away and retreat to things that give ease. Garden catalogues are a good place to begin. I ordered a dozen varieties of dahlia bulbs one day this week, and planted some chive seeds in a pot because I miss the dazzlement of their purple heads popping up at the end of the cold winter.

I miss my garden in Colorado. I knew I would—how could I not? I spent ten years building it, moving things around, exploring color and shape and beauty every season. I remember that the enormity was getting hard for me to manage with my cranky back and I needed to downsize or lift up the beds. I also remember that right now, January in Colorado, that garden is frozen solid and won’t be waking up for a couple of months. At least.

Here, the daffodils and narcissus along my front walk are robustly shoving up through the dirt. The primroses are blooming, and the fuschias have new buds. (Fuschias! A perennial!) The geraniums and petunias and pansies are all budding and blooming on plants that are slightly bedraggled by winds but still very much alive.

One of my favorite gardens is Sissinghurst Gardens, created by Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicholson over decades. It’s very close to where my husband grew up, in Cranbook, Kent, and it was his mother’s favorite place on the planet, so it was one of the first places she took me when we visited. We bonded, Gina and I, wordlessly walking through the white garden and the herb beds. It’s planted amid the walls of a ruined estate, so windows arrive and doorways. Vita had a great eye for texture and line, and employed people to help carry out her vision. All these years later, it remains one of the finest gardens anywhere.

Both of them, Harold and Vita, were writers, too. Vita had an office in a tower overlooking the gardens, reached by a circular staircase in a medieval building. The room was lined with bookshelves and an anteroom and her desk still stood there in the clear light coming through the window. She was prickly and jingoistic, but also an absolutely fascinating human being, a woman furious at the loss of her ancestral home (because she was a woman, it went to some cousin, dumping her into the wild world). She was bisexual and prone to passionate love affairs, notably with Virginia Woolf, though in my opinion that is not all all the most interesting story—I prefer the tale of her running away with her friend and lover, Violet, to live in Paris where they defied convention and tried to be happy but were eventually dragged home by their husbands. There’s a certain wistfullness to some of Vita’s later writings in her letters to Harold that suggest it was an affair she didn’t ever quite get over.

She and Harold had a great marriage and their letters have been saved for us, chronicling another time of great trauma—they were young when the first world war swept in and killed so many of their generation; they survived the depression and then the endless bombings of the Blitz, and the entirety of WWII. The circle of them were so worried about Hitler that they kept cyanide tablets in case of invasion.

Through all of it, Vita gardened, and wrote about gardening, and also just wrote—novels and poetry and criticism and many many articles about her garden, offering advice to people who could do at least this one thing: dig in the dirt and plant seeds and move the perennials around. The smell of the dirt heals us, literally. As Barbara Damarosh writes in The Healing Powers of the Earth,

The mind part of the health equation is equally promising. For some years now, researchers have been working on a soil microbe called Mycobacterium vaccae, which triggers mouse brains to produce serotonin and thereby acts as an antidepressant. A study done at the Sage Colleges in Troy, N.Y., showed that mice exposed to it had less anxiety, learned better and ran through mazes faster and more competently. Could gardeners' grubby hands be absorbing homegrown Prozac?

We, too, can find healing by plunging our hands into the dirt, digging and planting new starts or moving old ones. I only did a minimum of gardening this year because it is such a new climate. I flung a few plants out to see what would survive, and now, almost a year in, I have a lot more information. The challenges are not insubstantial—deer and salt winds and a truly spectacular amount of rain through the winter, then nothing in summer.

Still, I’m ready to get back to it, to building a new garden in this new place. I’m going to find someone to turn the shed into a greenhouse because I genuinely, deeply miss the old one. Maybe I’ll try a bougainvillea in a sheltered place on the balcony or perhaps a sturdy wisteria. It would be beautiful pouring over the railings. Maybe it will work, maybe not. I can only try.

In the trying, in the digging and puttering, I turn away from the hard world, the dark truth of blood spilling and greed devouring precious thing, and plant. Plant color. Plant hope. Plant beauty and possibility and the belief in the future.

Now I have to poke around in the garden. Tell me about yours—do you have pots of petunias or acres of vegetables? Are you dreaming over seed catalogues?