Surveying the autobiography of my soul

SOUL FOOD

I’m a sucker for whodunits. I cut my reading teeth on Nancy Drew,

Hardy Boys and Alfred Hitchcock story anthologies.

When I’m reading fiction now, it’s probably a new page-turner, or

one happily revisited, from Michigan’s Elmore Leonard or Patrick

O’Leary, or Orange County’s own T. Jefferson Parker.

I like a mystery and also a mystery’s unraveling, which could be

what made me so determined to find the author of an authorless quote

I recently came across.

I can’t at all remember where I found them, but I wrote these

seven words down in my notebook, “All gardens are a form of

autobiography,” then I couldn’t forget them. Time and again, I found

myself surveying my yard, trying to read what it said about me.

I have to admit, my garden is a sorry thing even if I’m fond of

it. It’s mostly aging St. Augustine grass, embroidered with various

and stubborn weeds, and the roses, which with the help of my husband,

I keep trying to grow.

There are a few patches of daffodils and irises in mid-winter and,

this year, a scattering of quarter-sized blooms on my Charlie

Brown-style lilac tree.

The things that do best and reward me the most -- a Valencia

orange and mock orange tree -- I can take no credit for. They were

here when I came and flourish in spite of me.

In early spring, both trees bloom together and they fill the night

air, my home and my neighbors’ homes with their delicious fragrance.

And the real orange tree actually gives me real oranges nearly all

year long.

But half, it seems, of what I plant myself simply does not thrive

and dies. The other half, often as not, gets nastily diseased. White

flies. Green worms. Mildew. Rust.

My autobiography? I grew determined to know who wrote that thought

and what he meant by it, so I went hunting and discovered at first,

not my mystery author, but several authors of similar, one nearly

identical, sentiments.

Alfred Austin, English poet and editor of the National Review in

the late 1800s wrote, “Show me your garden and I shall tell you what

you are,” though perhaps he and Francis Bacon each mimicked what is

claimed by some to be a Hebrew proverb: As is the garden such is the

gardener.

Bacon either wrote, or took and added to it, “As is the garden

such is the gardener. A man’s nature runs either to herbs or weeds,”

which left me all the more perplexed. My garden has no herbs at all,

so is my nature weedy?

Perhaps I’ll learn more if I read the book, “Notes from Madoo:

Making a Garden in the Hamptons,” by Robert Dash. He is the man, it

seems, who wrote the words I found. Or maybe his words found me.

The book is lovely to look at and passionately written, a

collection of columns, Dash, an artist, writer and gardener, wrote

for the East Hampton Star. It’s nearly a garden itself, bound between

two covers.

The man clearly gardens circles around me on his 1.98 Hampton

acres. And American Monet, I suppose, crafting his painter’s retreat.

Madoo seems to mean, in Scottish, “my dove.”

His writing, in places, grows flowery. And he gives me real pause

when he writes of Forsythia, which he charges with being “an absolute

ass of a color.” I like the color myself. And I like the bush and its

flower.

Each year during the years I lived in Southern Germany, Forsythia

was, along with the pussy willows, the first of blooms on an

otherwise wintry landscape. It was honored to be St. Barbara’s

flower, its branches carried by hundreds of Christians in town

processions on her feast day.

Another gardener, Sydney Eddison, author of “The Self-Taught

Gardener: Lessons from a Country Garden,” is credited with the words,

“Gardens are a form of autobiography.”

Great gardening minds, it appears, think much alike.

It was some solace to the dismal thought that my weeds might

mirror my nature, to read these words from the pen of Vita

Sackville-West.

“The most noteworthy thing about gardeners,” she wrote, “is that

they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied.

They always look forward to doing something better than they have

ever done before.”

I have never, that I can recall, been accused of being optimistic,

though, on more than one occasion, I can promise you, I’ve been

charged with never being satisfied.

And I always look forward to doing anything at all better than

I’ve ever done it before. Why not gardening?

The first literary sentiments -- if I can call them literary -- I

can recall ever hearing about gardens were those of Dorothy Frances

Gurney’s “God’s Garden.” I suppose everyone has heard them: “One is

nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth.”

Which is why I’m so fond of my garden, I think, whatever it says

about me.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at [email protected].