{"id":159,"date":"2009-07-20T06:06:58","date_gmt":"2009-07-20T14:06:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/garden\/?p=159"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:32:59","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:32:59","slug":"garden-finance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/garden-finance\/","title":{"rendered":"Garden Finance"},"content":{"rendered":"

GARDEN FINANCE
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\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Today I am going to the garden center to buy two spools of twine.\u00a0 I will be purposeful and single-minded, immune to the charms of blooming plants and sexy gardening equipment.\u00a0 No matter what happens, I will not<\/em> come home with a blue-flowered agapanthus, a new rosebush and a couple of flats of annuals that I was forced to buy because they were marked down so much. \u00a0That was last time.\u00a0 This time will be different.\u00a0 This time I will at least make sure to remember the twine.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Some well-disciplined gardeners will feel superior when they read this, but I know I am not alone in my acquisitive tendencies.\u00a0 At least half the gardeners I know admit to having plants that originated as unintended consequences of routine trips to the garden center.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Maybe that is why I feel so much empathy for the late English garden writer Beverley Nichols.\u00a0 In his book, Down the Garden Path<\/em>, Nichols describes going to his favorite garden accoutrements dealer for a simple sundial.\u00a0 Several hours later he was the proud owner of eighty yards of stone balustrade, salvaged from a defunct estate.\u00a0 It all seemed perfectly reasonable to him at the time, though I don’t recall any further mention of the sundial.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The balustrade ultimately led to a few perfect stone columns and additional terracing in the garden plus new plants to go along with the architectural pieces.\u00a0 Nichols, being a well-bred Englishman, never gets down to discussing pounds and pence, but makes it clear that the cost was substantial.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the balustrade was far from being his only garden-related indulgence and he was similarly extravagant in fitting out his house.\u00a0 In time this led to increases in what the English so euphemistically call “the overdraft”\u009d.\u00a0 The increasing overdraft, combined with high taxes, led Nichols, after ten years in residence, to sell his estate, “Merry Hall”\u009d–balustrade and all.\u00a0 The buyer, if he or she had any sense of aesthetics, had to have been enchanted by the perfectly designed garden.\u00a0 Nichols went on to buy a semi-detached cottage and set about creating a whole new horticultural paradise.\u00a0 I suspect that the only thing that kept the overdraft under control was the smaller size of the lot.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Spending exorbitant sums on plants and planting schemes is a great tradition.\u00a0 French King Louis XIV spared no expense on the gardens at Versailles.\u00a0 After the French Revolution, the Empress Josephine stocked her country home, Malmaison, with thousands of the choicest and most exotic plant specimens available, regardless of cost. \u00a0She accented her private botanical garden with water features, follies and greenhouses, a habit that reportedly left her in debt most of the time.\u00a0 Historians relate that Napoleon would chide her about the high cost of her plant mania, reducing her to tears.\u00a0 The dust-ups ended quickly, however, and the acquisitions continued. \u00a0Fortunately Josephine was able to keep Malmaison after her divorce from Napoleon and lived there until her death.\u00a0 A liberal pension helped ensure that the greenhouses stayed warm and the flowers were well tended.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ellen Willmott (1858-1934) inherited a large fortune, but over the course of a long life in horticulture, she managed to bankrupt herself.\u00a0 Like Josephine, Miss Willmott subsidized plant hunters and commissioned books.\u00a0 Willmott’s was The Genus Rosa<\/em>, published in 1907.\u00a0 It was, in its time, the definitive work on the subject.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Miss Willmott had an estate in England, plus homes in Italy and France, all stocked with gardens and gardeners.\u00a0 At one time, she reportedly had at least one hundred gardeners in her employ.\u00a0 Even in the days before health benefits and withholding taxes, this must have been a hefty payroll.\u00a0 Her English estate was home to over 100,000 different plant species and cultivars.\u00a0 Sad to say, the property, Warley Place, was sold right after her death to pay off Miss Willmott’s debts.\u00a0 Today there is nothing left of the magnificent garden.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Some people might find the experiences of Nichols, Josephine and Willmott depressing.\u00a0 Not I.\u00a0 Studying such extreme examples of garden mania makes me realize just how restrained my plant purchases really are–even give n the fact that I was not blessed with a large fortune to fritter away on gardenalia.\u00a0 I often remind myself that Ellen Willmott and Beverley Nichols were single and could indulge their hobbies without having to answer to anyone but their bankers.\u00a0 Josephine had the same freedom after her divorce from Napoleon.\u00a0 I, on the other hand, have a husband, and he needs some amount of spare change to finance his coin collecting habit.\u00a0 I moderate my expenditures to accommodate his, which is probably why our relationship–and my garden–have lasted longer than Napoleon and Josephine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

GARDEN FINANCE \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Today I am going to the garden center to buy two spools of twine.\u00a0 I will be purposeful and single-minded, immune to the charms of blooming plants and sexy gardening equipment.\u00a0 No matter what happens, I will not come home with a blue-flowered agapanthus, a new rosebush and a couple of flats … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1626,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions\/1626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}