“Good sense has little to do with gardening.”—Henry Mitchell
The Solstice approaches and with it, we will gain about one minute of additional daylight per day. I am convinced that even that extra 60 seconds will make a difference in the quality of life.
Of course, dark days and snowstorms will still happen. In fact, in this part of the world, we tend to get more of them after the first of the year than before. Those dark snowy days call for a good dose of Henry Mitchell.
Mitchell—1922-1993—was one of the best, garden writers that America has produced since the first colonists landed here. He was a journeyman newspaperman for his entire career, culminating in a job at the Washington Post from 1970 through 1993. He wrote about many things, but his weekly column, “Earthman”, about his Washington, D.C. garden and horticulture in general, was his claim to fame. He was loathe to gather columns into book form, but was finally persuaded to do so by his wife and others. Eventually three books of columns were published: The Essential Earthman, One Man’s Garden, and Henry Mitchell on Gardening.
Mitchell was both a great gardener and an inspiring prose stylist. Almost every column contained something notable, quotable or grammatically delightful. A great example is his description of the Thompson and Morgan seed catalog—“one of the world’s great compendiums of fantasy.” His columns, which dealt with everything from roses to 17-year locusts, had a little of the “how” of gardening, and an awful lot of the “why” of gardening. This is especially relevant now. After all, anyone can go on the internet and find out how to grow a tomato. Henry Mitchell delves into why you might want to.
Mitchell’s scholarship was impressive, but he was never pedantic. In a single column, he could quote Marcus Aurelius while discussing his various dogs’ penchants for digging up plants.
He was perpetually developing ideas about garden improvements—water features, pillars, changes of level, and horse troughs full of water lilies. Many of those ideas clearly came to fruition, though not generally in the original timeframe. Like all gardeners, he complained about maintenance chores, especially onerous ones like cleaning out that water lily trough. In the midst of those complaints, though, he also admitted that he didn’t trust anyone else to take on those tasks.
The columns captured in the books are arranged seasonally, so, if you feel like it, you can start out wherever you find yourself in the gardening year and read one column per week, as you would have enjoyed the original “Earthman” columns. I have no patience with that because Henry Mitchell is addictive. When I originally read the three books, I ploughed through in short order, reading them before bedtime to give me gardening inspiration and delightful dreams about masses of white roses or the lasting beauty of perennial weeds. Right now, I am repeating that process as part of my COVID coping strategy.
Like all gardening writers, Henry Mitchell wrote about vegetables and shrubs and occasionally, trees, but his greatest love was flowers. Sophisticated and pseudo-sophisticated gardeners sometimes pooh-pooh flowers because of their ephemeral nature. Mitchell was an unabashed romantic, rhapsodizing about iris, roses, camellias and daffodils. His garden, which could not possibly have been as small as he claimed, was home to an impressive collection of climbers, ramblers and shrub roses. He embraced once-blooming varieties for their sheer beauty, only occasionally admitting that any rose had thorns.
The mysteries and ironies of gardening, which plague us all, did not elude Henry Mitchell. When I read a line like, “Every spring a few ‘Pickwick’—crocuses—show up, not necessarily where I remember planting them,” I think of the squirrel landscaping that happens every year in my garden. The author has the ability to turn garden conundrums into poetry and/or belly laughs, sometimes simultaneously.
I think he sums it up well when he says, “…the gardener’s life is not a perfect hyacinth bed, but a life of unexpected failures and sorrow, somewhat redeemed by unexpected and utterly accidental triumphs. Not that I have any to report today.”
So if you need a last minute gift for a gardening friend, or yourself, invest in one or all of Henry Mitchell’s books. I promise that they will help you get through January.