Agatha Christie, Sackville-West and Gardens

Garden and Household
bric-a-brac

 I'm listening to Agatha Christie's Postern of Fate, one of my favorite Tommy and Tuppence mysteries. In this novel, the last that Christie wrote, Tommy and Tuppence are retired and have moved to the suburbs as we call them here in the US, and are remodeling and settling into the house and garden.

The story opens with Tuppence trying to organize her collection of books. I can sympathize with her. I've got loads of books and I'm always trying to figure out the best place and way to organize them. Down in the family room I've placed a large dining room hutch purchased at a second hand store which serves as a bookcase. There I have the fiction books. Upstairs the bookcase in "the office" contains the non-fiction and "work" books - science: biology, chemistry, and ecology. The hallway bookcase contains more fiction books, and the some of the kid's books that didn't fit on their bookcases. In my bedroom I have a small shelf devoted to what I consider inspirational books, and the current bedtime reading is stacked on the bedside table.

Tommy and Tuppence have their faithful henchmen Albert with them and an even more aged gardener, "Old Isaac" helping them. In the passage I'm writing about Tuppence and Isaac are burrowing through a box of tulips that have been ordered and planning how to plant them so as to make the best effect. This made my mind immediately jump to the section of Vita Sackville-West's, In Your Garden, that I have currently on the bedside table for gentle reading to settle me down for a good night's rest. She advised her readers on the best varieties of bulbs to purchase, their color, price, and seller.

Hutch filled with vintage
silver and odds and ends

Now I love tulips and their vast variety of size, color, and shape, unfortunately, so do the white-tail deer that inhabit the woods that surround my yard. I tried planting tulips the first Fall we lived here and in the Spring they dutifully came up and were promptly eaten. I was heartbroken. I did my research and discovered that daffodils were poisonous and deer resistant and I decided to invest in them. It turns out that Brecks has a wide variety of daffodils not just your average yellow ones. They have managed to bloom and double over the years. Still wish I could have tulips to brighten my springtime garden, but I buy some to place in the house, safe from Bambi.

Mothers, Daughters, and Sisters

Lockets: one given to me by my
mother and father for my First Communion,
the other by my daughter for Mother's Day.

I love to browse for books. Who doesn't? At the library I like to look at the returns cart before someone re-shelves the books. What books are other people in my community reading? Did they choose wisely? Would I like what they've read? It's how I came across an older title of Elizabeth Berg's: What We Keep.

Ginny, the narrator of the story, is the same age I am - 47. Lately, I've been wondering how did I get to be this old? I certainly don't feel old, but my daughter is now 20 and my son will be 18 by the end of August, they will both be at college this Fall and my husband and I will celebrate our 24th wedding anniversary in November. I've been doing a lot of living over the years and if I take after my grandmother (she turned 100 in June), I have a lot more living to do.

What We Keep is the story of a family's unraveling and the stitching back up of it. Ginny and her sister Sharla are drawn tightly together when their mother leaves the family. Both girls close out their mother when she returns and wishes to re-establish their relationship. Mom comes back a changed person and neither daughter is able to reconcile to this new personality. Thirty-five years later Sharla asks Ginny to go and meet with their mother. Ginny reviews her childhood and her own motherhood. I'll leave the story and its ending for you to enjoy. I couldn't put down the book.

As for me, I have a deep relationship with my mother. I've always been close to my mom, but our shared experience of caring for my dying father drew us even closer. My sister, unfortunately has been living abroad these last four years and is finally returning home in a month's time. It will be the start of a new phase of life for the three of us without dad.

Relationships are constantly changing and growing. Even my own with my daughter as she enters into adulthood and my role as mother changes. I work hard at letting go so that she can become her own independent being. Even my role as daughter and sister has changed over the years, and I know it will continue to change and that is a good thing. One of the hardest things in life is to accept change. We want to cling to the things we are familiar with. We want things to stay the same. It's not healthy for things to stay the same and that is the life lesson that we all have to learn.

The Manor House Garden

One garden room at Hidcote Manor picture taken on my vacation 

Agatha Christie and many of my other favorite authors have written about the weekend house party at someone's manor house and there is always a scene when someone invites someone else out for a stroll in the garden. Once out in the garden there might be the "important talk", a dalliance, or even a murder. It didn't really make much sense to me to go for a walk in the garden because I was picturing my garden, but once I had been to England to see what a real manor house garden looks like it began to make all the more difference to my reading.

Gardening is serious business over there in England. Many of the gardens that I visited are even larger than my entire plot of land (1.67 acres). They employed designers and architects and engaged and maintained a staff. When Hercule Poirot is interviewing the gardener, this character was a full time employee with perhaps a "boy" or two working for him. Here I am, just me beavering away at my attempt at a cottage garden and a small vegetable plot. I've had to take a week off due to the rain and an aching back and the weeds have gone rampant from my neglect.

In researching about famous English gardeners I came across Vita Sackville-West, poet and novelist who funded her gardening passions with the proceeds from her literary career. She and her husband purchased Sissinghurst Castle and transformed the grounds, he did the architectural planning and she the plantings. I used the ever precious inter-library loan system to get a hold of a copy of her In Your Garden a collection of her articles written for The Observer during 1947-1950. Now I understand the inspiration that Katherine Swift had for her gardening column written 50 years later. I guess it is a testament to British gardeners that weekly gardening columns are still popular especially seeing the demise of the printed newspaper editions at least here in the US. I'm guilty of giving up the paper subscription when I found myself recycling stacks of them unread. There is always so much more good reading material than the morning paper.

I'm wandering just like one would along the crazy brick paths of a manor house garden. On January 22, 1950, Sackville-West wrote of her plan to design a garden with a single color scheme. She was envisioning a garden of just white blossoms against a backdrop of green and grey foliage. Of course this garden came to fruition as one for which she is famous.

Memoir - Under Magnolia

My baby picture

Growing up in New England, I had a different experience than that of Frances Mayes as described in her newest memoir Under Magnolia. I'm always a bit fascinated by stories that take place in the South, it seems almost like a foreign country to me, points of reference can be so different. Sometimes I can relate and other times I can't.

Mayes' has a few years on me as well, she was in college when I was born, so my experience of growing up female is much different than hers. I certainly wasn't a tomboy, but my father taught me to fish, mow the lawn, shingle a roof, build a campfire, and that an education was essential and that I most certainly was going off to college to earn my degree. Mom taught me how to keep house, cook (baking wasn't her favorite so when I got adept at it I was the chief dessert maker), sew, knit, do needlepoint, garden, and encouraged me to get that education while I was young. My mother's family couldn't afford to send her to college, but she did earn her degree in her late thirties.

Mayes relates her first experience with visiting a funeral home and I was immediately transported to the funeral parlor (as we called it) in Rhode Island from which all my relatives were buried. There is a smell to funeral homes, some might call it death, but that's not it. There is no smell of decay. It is a smell which I cannot describe. It looks more like death; the woodwork stained dark, the velvet curtains which covered the windows which kept the outside light from making its way in, or the pedestrians from looking in at the bereaved. The embossed wall paper that was popular during the time the place was decorated, made the place depressing. Unfortunately during my childhood so many of my relatives passed away that the funeral parlor was a familiar place. There were few happy occasions for gathering together.

Vacations at the beach were a happy time for Mayes. There is a real sense of freedom at the beach. I too had many happy times at the beach. They were solitary times as my parents worked to maintain the cottages that my father and his friend had bought as investments. After helping out where I could, I was free to go to the beach where I would walk for miles or go for a swim. I scoured the line of pebbles that split the beach from the sandy bottom further out in the water, for shells and sea glass. My territory was marked by a white house with blue shutters at one end and a pink beach house at the other with no others in between. Very few people came down this way, the public beach was well up the road.

One last thing, Mayes, wrote about the suicides that took place in town while she was growing up. She and her family didn't talk much about them, but they did wonder and look at those families differently. I was a member of one of those families that folks look at and talk about. I wonder what they said about us. It's hard to grow up with that pain in your household, for even there we did not talk about those that we loved who chose to leave us behind.