HARD TIMES GARDEN
In the past few months I have read scores of articles in gardening and shelter media about gardening in “these times”. With banks collapsing, mass layoffs taking place and the stock market headed steadily downward, the green-fingered pundits have been just as busy as the political and financial experts.
Every garden magazine has focused on vegetable gardening, which has roared back from its decades-long decline to take center stage. The environmentalists, the locavores and the penny pinchers have come together to revive the backyard vegetable plot, which they are fertilizing with vast quantities of real and electronic ink.
On the ornamental front, the emphasis is on drought tolerant planting, easy care plants and “green” gardening techniques. All of this is good, though I think that sometimes the abundance of earnestness takes the fun out of reveling in the photos of gorgeous plants and impressive layouts.
Inspired by the pages and pages of Swiss chard, beets and heirloom tomatoes, I started to wonder what gardeners thought and garden writers wrote about in earlier hard times. While the pundits seem to agree that we are not in a depression, I turned to some Great Depression-era garden writing for reference. One of the best samplings of early twentieth century garden writing is The Once and Future Gardener, edited and with an introduction by Virginia Tuttle Clayton (David R. Godine, 2000). I paged through the book, looking for pieces written between 1930 and 1937, when the country was feeling the full brunt of the economic crisis, and found a total of twelve articles published during that time period. Some appeared in publications still familiar today, like House Beautiful, while others turned up in long-vanished magazines such as Woman’s Home Companion.
Ms. Clayton’s focus was on ornamental gardening, so ink spilled about Depression-era vegetable gardening was missing from the book. Of the twelve articles, eleven made very little reference to the economy. Grace Tabor, in her November 1932 article for Woman’s Home Companion, describes an increasing need to focus on landscape effects that can be achieved with a minimum of effort and expense, but the main emphasis is on suiting plants to their surroundings.
The twelfth article was a gem: “A Tussie-Mussie for These Times” by Richardson Wright, published in the October 1931 issue of House and Garden. Wright was the magazine’s longtime editor and the piece was written as an editorial. The theme is the idea of the “tussie-mussie”, or nosegay, which in the sixteenth and subsequent centuries was a small bouquet of fragrant flowers meant to be held in the hand and possibly sniffed to block out bad odors. Wright uses the idea of the tussie-mussie metaphorically to mean a bouquet of reflections on a specific subject. In this case, the subject is the Depression. Touring his own garden, he resolves to enjoy the plants that he already has, rather than buying an ever-changing array of new specimens. In a line that could have come from yesterday’s newspaper, he speaks of “the rush of material prosperity” of the 1920’s, which made people discontented with their lives and possessions. As they acquired more new and expensive possessions, says Wright, they abandoned taste and discernment in favor of pure excess. He ends with the hope that hard times will force people to return to a slower pace, dedication to buying fewer, better quality goods and a renewed focus on appreciating and savoring gardens, art, music, furniture and architecture. The result of slowing down and savoring the best of everything will be, according to Wright, a new kind of philosophical tussie mussie that will bring real pleasure to the gatherer.
The articles from the thirties show that there were at least some garden writers–and their readers–who still worried about traditional problems like ways of covering a slope, using tall plants and creating a suitable garden for a period house. The purpose of the garden and shelter magazines, after all, was to divert and entertain with a little instruction thrown in. Readers who wanted to know how bad things were could open their daily newspapers and read about the “Depression gardens” that municipalities and agencies were planting to feed the hungry. It is the same way today. As the French say, “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.”–the more things change, the more they remain the same.