REAL LIFE AND COUNTRY LIVING
Sometimes, when it is too hot outside, or the garden chores seem onerous, I seek escape. My friends and family know that I am addicted to garden magazines and shelter magazines with garden sections. When I seek escape, I turn to my magazine pile and for a few minutes I can live between the glossy covers, basking in the perfect gardens, the exquisite plants and the happy people who tend them. As a writer I know the reality–the perfect gardens are often the result of Herculean labor before the photo shoot and the exquisite plant portraits attest to hours of hard work by a professional photographer who might have taken one hundred images to get a single perfect shot. The happy people may actually be happy, but will never get rich working with plants.
Still, I adore the fantasy. For a first class escapist wallow, I generally turn to the English magazines. Of course I love classic American garden magazines like Horticulture. I am amazed by the photography in Martha Stewart Living, but the spreads–whether on gardens, parties or decorating–intimidate me. Martha, after all, entertains David Rockefeller. I give plant tips to the plumber. Therein lies the difference and the problem.
What would life be like if I lived between the covers of the British edition of Country Living? For starters, I would live in a cottage, converted rectory or former stable somewhere in the British Isles. Having left behind the rigors of city life, my husband and I would have invested our nest egg in a small farm or a country business. Depending on our choice of business, we would spend our days running our bakery, weaving willow baskets or supervising the flock of goats whose milk supplied our boutique dairy. We would also have a large kitchen garden, a cottage garden full of flowers and a flock of chickens. In our spare time we would consider whether to add a couple of pigs or maintain a beehive. Our Wellington boots would only come off at bedtime, except on those rare days when we would have to smarten ourselves up for one of the soft-focus country weddings to which we would be invited.
The cottage garden would look like an Impressionist painting. An old-fashioned climbing rose, like the yellow-flowered Albéric Barbier, would clamber up the stone wall of our house, right by the back door. Our garden would be lush with other heirloom roses, not to mention peonies, iris and bountiful drifts of perennials and annuals. Hardy geranium would sprout from the cracks in the old stone wall that comes with all properties shown in Country Living.
Our vegetable garden, which would be called a kitchen garden or potager, depending on our address and income level, would rival the colossus maintained by English garden maven Sarah Raven. Laid out in neat squares, it would be divided by equally neat brick walkways composed of bricks scavenged from a demolished eighteenth century outbuilding. Each bed would be bordered by marigolds to keep out predatory insects. In addition to vegetables, we would have fruit trees, probably of the espaliered type, pruned and tied to perfection. Soft fruits, like raspberries, would have a bed of their own.
Our vegetable garden would undoubtedly be in the former horse paddock, which would mean that it had been thoroughly manured for centuries. We would grow lots of different vegetables including courgettes, otherwise known as zucchini, and aubergines, aka eggplant. Country Living gardeners also seem to grow beets, Swiss chard and lots of different potato varieties.
When not running our business, tending our animals or maintaining our gardens, we–or I should say I–would cook all those fruits, vegetables and meats that we raised ourselves. I would make things like “raspberry vinegar cordial” and “courgette salad with mushrooms.” Our friends, including the vicar, the neighboring micro-brewery owner and the nice couple who have revitalized our traditional village shop, would come over for dinner parties, during which we would gossip about the local dog show and enjoy substantive discussions about carbon footprints, the diminishing hedgehog population and the dangers of genetically modified crops. Of course, out in the barn our goats would be producing a certain amount of methane gas, adversely affecting our carbon footprint, but some things cannot be helped.
Whenever I emerge from between the covers of the British edition of Country Living, I feel as if I have just come back from a pleasant trip to an idealized version of Great Britain. I am ready to tackle my workload, secure in the knowledge that none of it involves milking goats or trying to find someone to re-thatch the roof of my cottage. I know that scooping the cat box every day in New Jersey is undoubtedly less arduous than shoveling goat manure onto the compost pile in the UK. Still, as I take one more glance at the cover of Country Living, I think that life in the suburban, northeastern United States might be better if each of us had a nice glass of elderflower cordial every day.