Springtime Is a Woman
Our gardens! It's no coincidence that March is both Women's History Month and the beginning of Spring
NOTE: I’m re-posting this post from a previous spring, because after this bitter cold winter in America's soul, it finally feels like time to wrap up my stunned disbelief and store it along with my winter coat. It feels like time to arm myself once again with seed catalogs and rakes and spades, and, especially, the vision of how beautiful this world can be. Dear reader, you might feel the same. Enjoy!
In 1986 Arthur Schlesinger published The Cycles of American History about our national pattern of ebb and flow. He said,
Let us define the cycle as a continuing shift in national involvement, between public purpose and private interest.
The public phase that’s going on now is exhausting, if you’re on the side that’s fighting to protect democracy. It turns out that while most of us were taking our rights for granted during the private phase, extremists were eating away at our roots.
But now, suddenly, a cycle of nature captures our spirit, and it’s spring! Gardens are everywhere, from a windowsill to a large back yard. Anyone can plant and water a seed. Democracy is in the air again.
First I took a walk.
Then I went to the library, because I wanted to learn what other women have said about gardens. Here is some of what I found.
What do people want in their garden? Men want big views and lots and lots of grass. And if they can afford it, they want visibly fine craftsmanship and fine objects. …
By contrast, women often seek privacy and protection in a garden. They are less interested in seeing out of the garden, or in people seeing into theirs. They appreciate smaller spaces for their intimacy.
- Nancy Power
I would add that we also want beauty, a generous spirit, and the space for healing and growth.
Every morning I wake to a surprise in the garden. Overnight, new visual gems have opened, sometimes in hordes. And, if, heaven forbid, I go away for a few days, I might return to wisteria’s grapelike purple-and-lavender clusters dangling in the redbud. Feathery tulips are still going strong.
-Diane Ackerman
No life is so charming as a country one in England, and no flowers are sweeter or more lovely than the primroses, cowslips, bluebells, and violets that grow in abundance all around me here.
- Marianne North
Ever since I could remember, flowers have been like dear friends to me, comforters, inspirers, powers to uplift and to cheer. I was a lonely child, living on the lighthouse island ... Every blade of grass that sprang out of the ground, every humblest weed, was precious in my sight. …
Day after day it is so pleasant working in the bright cool spring air, for as yet the New England spring is alert and brisk in temperature and shows very little softening in its moods. But by the seventh day of the month, as I stand pruning the Rosebushes, there is a flutter of glad wings, and lo! the first house martins!
- Celia Thaxter
Good gardening requires patience and dogged determination. There must be many failures and losses, but by always pushing on, there will also be the reward of success.
- Gertrude Jekyll
About a particular failure, Gertrude also wrote that
Care should be taken about the proper placing of a sundial. It is not unusual to see an old shaft and dial looking forlorn and as if it had lost its way.
The birds sing nearly all night. It’s lovely just now, the hawthorns so sweet. The garden is very gay; white bell flowers amongst the weeds, and the house covered with roses. It’s all very overgrown. I can’t get at it, with the wet.
- Beatrix Potter
When you garden, you see the world with gardening eyes. You notice what is growing where, you appreciate and assess, and you wonder about what is unfamiliar.
Part of you lives in garden time. You remember how this or that fared last year, and you have plans and hopes for the next. You are not stuck in the here and now. To garden is a defiance of time.
- Penelope Lively
World War II was barely over when the editor of House Beautiful said,
The challenge of our time is individualism versus totalitarianism, democracy or dictatorship.
- Elizabeth Gordon, 1953
And the magazine’s garden editor wrote,
We Americans consider privacy one of the cherished privileges we fought a war to preserve. If your neighbors can observe what you are serving on your terrace, your home is not really your castle.
But decades before this, Ellen Biddle Shipman had already said,
Privacy is the most essential attribute of any garden, whatever type or period.
I often visited the Anne Spencer House & Garden, thinking, ‘There lived someone who feels as I do - a Black woman - lived and wrote and tended a glorious garden, years before I arrived.’
During the Civil War, Confederate troops camped and recruited where the Spencer house now stands. After the war, Edward Spencer’s family bought the land and built an assembly hall for newly freed Black folks to gather safely. The garden they created offered not only solitude and reflection, but also companionship and community.
Today, Edward and Anne’s garden remains an oasis in an inhospitable land.
- Camille T. Dungy, 2023
Most of us move through the world unaware that the dandelions in sidewalk cracks or the red clover on highway medians are keys to thriving in this totally bonkers world.
Plants are not only simply food, fuel, or even unwelcome garden weeds: they are our healers. There is nothing I desire to understand more deeply than the plants that make it possible for me to breathe. I mean, not much else is happening if I quit breathing.
- Christine Buckley
I am the breeze that nurtures all things green. I encourage blossoms to flourish with ripening fruits.
I am led by the spirit to feed the purest streams. I am the rain coming from the dew that causes the grasses to laugh with the joy of life.
I am the yearning for good.
- Hildegard of Bingen
I’ll return the library books, but I’m going to hold onto Gertrude Jekyll’s dogged determination. I’m ready now for the next round of news, and for whatever I can do about it.
Much as I wish, it’s not time yet for a private garden.
As always, Deda, thank your for a delightful Postcard. Your timing is perfect.
We definitely need more gardens of flowers, whether they are tended ones, or roadside mixtures of whatever. There are so many benefits! In one of his early books, Michael Pollan pointed out that in our attempt to mimic the lovely gardens of England, we copied the extended spaces of green grass, and we have created carpets of it throughout our country--to our detriment, and that of our fellow species on the planet--as we have added unnatural fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and the pollution from gas-powered mowers. Less grass! More gardens!