Book Review: Embroidered Ground

BOOK REVIEW–EMBROIDERED GROUND

            If I were to name my property–as many Brits and some Americans do–I would probably call it something like “Untrimmed Hedges” or “Perennial Chaos,” in honor of the garden’s defining features.  However, I have never really felt the urge to bestow a name on my little slice of suburbia.  Author and gardener Page Dickey gave in to that urge years ago when she named her Salem, New York house and property “Duck Hill.”  She first wrote about her extensive gardens in her 1991 book, Duck Hill Journal: A Year in a Country Garden.  The book was a big hit and Dickey has gone on to write six more, including her most recent, Embroidered Ground.
            Page Dickey’s books, most of which have lovely illustrations, are the work of a gifted writer and gardener, but ever since that first book, I have felt that she was easier to admire than to like.  The gardens at Duck Hill always sounded wonderful, but it was also quite clear that they were fertilized with quantities of well aged money and maintained to a standard of perfection unattainable for most people.  Call it professional and personal jealousy, but from my vantage point, perpetually dwarfed by the rampant privet and cowed by the crabgrass, I found it hard to relate to Page Dickey. 
            All that has changed with Embroidered Ground, which is smaller than some of Dickey’s earlier efforts and illustrated only with line drawings.  Time and circumstances have changed Dickey and the tone of the book is occasionally elegiac.  Since first writing about Duck Hill, she has experienced great success, expanding the gardens and making a notable career as a garden writer and lecturer.  She has made many friends among the horticultural elite.  On the other hand, she has also seen her family grow up and her first marriage end.  There are hints that money considerations have affected her life and garden.  While still clearly better off than most people, Dickey now has to do what we all do–taming grand ideas to match available resources and making concessions to age and to some amount of diminished vigor.  She admits that the outlines of her garden have softened and many of her attitudes have done so as well.  The Page Dickey of Embroidered Ground seems to have grown more likeable and approachable. 
            This is at least partly due to the advent of Bosco, her second husband, a widowed Hungarian-born garden lover who livens up the pages of the book whenever he appears.  Dickey admits that during her first marriage, the garden was her domain.  When Bosco came into the picture, she was forced to share the gardens with someone whose philosophy was radically different.  Where Dickey is all about planning and precision, Bosco is about serendipity–impulse plant buying, lots of color, abundance everywhere and a bit of artful chaos.  Dickey makes it clear that both she and Bosco had to compromise to make garden and married life successful.  As the result the gardens have changed and expanded.  Bosco spends some of the daylight hours in his own retreat on the property, away from the main house, but the two seem to live and garden in harmony
            Parts of the book read like stand-alone articles or essays and were probably originally written for various home and garden periodicals.  These include chapters on “multiseasonal plants” and fragrant shrubs.  As always with Dickey, the advice is sound and the plant selections useful and interesting.  One of the best sections, “Prescriptions for the Aging Gardener,” deals with ways of adapting a large, mature garden to meet the needs and abilities of a gardener who is in the late summer or autumn of life.  Last year, Connecticut garden writer Sydney Eddison covered this particular piece of horticultural and literary ground in her wonderful book, Gardening for a Lifetime: How to Garden Wiser as You Grow Older.  Dickey summarizes many of the same sound strategies used by Eddison–replacing demanding perennials with less demanding flowering shrubs and simplifying planting schemes that have become overblown.  I get impatient with Dickey when she talks about being “a bit bored with perennial gardens,” or describes pulling out roses in favor of plants deemed to require less maintenance.  These ideas may or may not relate to sensible garden changes, but they are extremely fashionable right now, and Dickey always has a finger on the pulse of horticultural fashion.  Another example of this is that she follows in the modish garden footsteps of Martha Stewart and keeps chickens, a practice that appears somewhat at odds with Dickey’s desire to simplify things at Duck Hill.  It seems strange to me that mucking out chicken droppings is considered less onerous than maintaining roses, but then, fashion is not always rational.
            The real gems hidden in this very readable book are the vignettes featuring Bosco and the last section, “Final Threads.”  In the latter, Dickey admits that her gardens remain beautiful and satisfying, even as the realities of age and the compromises arising from a new relationship have made it less perfect.  In the end, she even admits to foreseeing the day when she and Bosco will leave the great enterprise that is Duck Hill and create a simpler life and landscape elsewhere.  I am sure that Page Dickey will write a book about that endeavor and it will be even more eloquent than the best parts of Embroidered Ground.