Read by Matilda Longbottom

I read my first garden book surreptitiously, at the age of nine, at Girl Scout camp. Girl Scout camp, from my point of view, was not the happy and team-spirited experience portrayed on the chocolate-mint cookie boxes.

The food was the sort of stuff infantry persons get in basic training; the lake was full of slimy weeds as big around as your ankle; frisbee-sized spiders lurked in the latrines; and we were all continually rounded up and made to sing songs about togetherness, which got wearisome.

I soon discovered, however, that by signing up simultaneously for Remedial Swimming and Lanyard Weaving, and appearing at neither, I could escape temporarily from togetherness and have part of each afternoon all to myself. I spent this halcyon time alternately writing anguished postcards to my parents (which they ignored) and reading everything readable in the Camp Library. Which wasn’t much: The Camp Library occupied a shelf in the corner of the dining hall to the left of the upright piano, and consisted of five mildewed copies of the Girl Scout Handbook, a Methodist hymnal, the complete Happy Hollisters series (gift of an Old Scout), and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, says my encyclopedia, was born in Manchester, England, in 1849, and moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, as a teenager. There she began to write novels, starting with a tearjerker about life in the coal mines, titled That Lass o’ Lowrie’ s. Her biggest success was Little Lord Fauntleroy, published in 1886, which was all about an American boy-unhappily named Cedric-who became the heir to an English dukedom.

(I read it. My grandmother had it in the parlor bookcase.) Cedric, ominously rumored to be modelled upon Ms. Burnett’s own son, Vivian, was an appalling child, given to Cavalier curls, velvet knickers, and apple-polishing. He left me cold.

The Secret Garden, on the other hand, was a winner. The heroine, an orphan named Mary, was skinny, solitary, homesick, and contrary, just like me, though gloomy Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire-where most of the action took place-sounded positively pleasurable compared to Girl Scout camp. Mary sur­mounted all her difficulties by discovering-and eventually reviving the Secret Garden, a walled rose garden, locked and abandoned under mysterious circumstances for some ten years. “I think it has been left alone so long-” mused Mary, in an optimistic moment, “that it has grown all into a lovely tangle. I think the roses have climbed and climbed and climbed until they hang from the branches and walls and creep over the ground­ almost like a strange gray mist. Some of them have died but many are alive and when the summer comes there will be curtains and fountains of roses. I think the ground is full of daffodils and snow­drops and lilies and irises working their way out of the dark. Now spring has be­gun-perhaps-perhaps”

Perhaps was right on: The garden blossomed, Mary fattened up, the hypochondriac son of the Manor-bed­ridden and given to shriek­ing tantrums-got up and got well, and everybody lived happily ever after.

I read the book twice, came home from camp speaking a bastard Yorkshire dialect, and promptly planted a vast plot of zinnias in the back yard, which did pretty well. I was hooked.

Nowadays, with a vast number of garden books under my belt, I continue to harbor a sneaking liking for The Secret Garden, though to the cold eye of adulthood it’s a little soppy in parts. It’s

still in print, though generally listed as appropriate for children aged 10 to 13, which means that-should you wish to purchase a copy-you have to pretend to the bookstore clerk that you have adolescent nieces or nephews. The Secret Garden falls solidly into the category of impractical or Totally Irrelevant Garden Books, a genre seemingly published in smaller and

smaller numbers these days-and often only available, if at all, in musty back corners of used-book shops.

Its opposite number-the Practical Garden Book-is available in intimidating quantity and now reigns supreme. The practical garden book is the cookbook of the gardening world: a book with a purpose, dealing briskly with the harsh realities of life out there at the business end of a spade. Practical garden books are the chosen reading matter of industrious and serious-minded gardeners-a class of persons which looms large over me in guilty moments, when yellow cucumbers the size of baseball bats skulk accusingly in our pickle patch and weeds choke the asparagus. These are the gardeners who faithfully follow instructions even when it involves digging a two-foot ­deep trench, the gardeners who plant at the proper time of year, and not in whatever month it happens to be when they finally remember that bag of bulbs in the tool shed. They mercilessly thin crowded seedlings, which is something weaker-minded persons are invariably squeamish about; they lay out their gardens ac­cording to logical plan, and not in the higgledy-piggledy arrangement that results from allowing children to hand you the seed packets. They weed daily. They prune things. They read about mulch, fertilizer, compost, and pest control, and I suspect they take notes.

I envy this, because-to my everlasting shame-I am not an industrious and serious-minded gardener. In our garden, seed rows wander crookedly, with marigolds stuck in funny places­ like exclamation points-by the children, who are fond of marigolds; we can never find the tomato stakes when we need them; and we fall heavily for splashy advertising, which seduces us into planting blue broccoli, ping-pong-ball-sized pumpkins, and gargantuan, gargoyle-like gourds of the sort seen on late-night horror shows, eating Chicago. By the time these sprout, we’ve inevitably lost interest and wish we’d put in more Japanese eggplants. Picking bugs off the potato plants is something every­body avoids, and weeding is talked about more frequently than done, which is how I get time to read, Given all this, a little garden reading-of the improving and educational sort-certainly seems in order.

Unfortunately, the perverse thing about my garden reading-becoming more apparent yearly-is that the more useful and necessary the book, and the more appropriate to our given gardening situation, the less inclined I am to read it. I suspect this is due to some large and dreadful character flaw, the same lack of moral fiber that shows up as preference for Cherry Garcia ice cream over wheat germ, an avoidance of the exercise bicycle, and a tendency to lose all pieces of paper bearing the legend “Save For Your Tax Records.” I read about medieval gardens, monastic gardens, Renaissance gardens, Henry the eighth bowling green, and the Empress Josephine’s roses.

I find descriptions of ancient Chinese gardens-with their water-lily pond and blue–painted summerhouses-enchanting; and descriptions of Victorian gardens-with their artificial ruins and their artistically placed dead trees-hysterical. I become absorbed in George Washington’s accounts of his mangel­wurzels, and in Thomas Jefferson’s struggles to establish olive trees. All these gardens, you notice, are safely removed by time and distance from my own scruffy-looking backyard.

I read Francis Bacon. Francis Bacon was born in London in 1561 and died, of pneumonia, in 1626, following an out-of-doors attempt to preserve a chicken by stuffing it with snow. He was a prolific writer-it was said of him that “No man ever spoke so neatly”-and some people think that he was really William Shakespeare. The cream of his literary works (unless, of course, he really was William Shakespeare) were his Essays, the forty-sixth of which is titled “On Gardening.” “On Gardening” describes the ideal sixteenth-century gar­den, a garden quite stunningly unlike ours-a spread of some 30 acres, with the main plot “Encompassed, on all four Sides, with a Stately Arched Hedge.”

Over each Arch, writes Bacon, should be erected little brick turrets, each containing a cage of birds, and between the Arches should be hung “Broad Plates of Round Coloured Glass, gilt, for the Sun to Play upon.”

Within this glittering barricade, Bacon recommended the planting of Yellow Daffodils and Daisies, French honey-suckle, Blush Pinkes, Double white Violets, Hol­lyhocks, and Clove Gillyflowers-but warned the gardener off the digging of “pooles,” which “make the garden unwholsome and full of Flies and Frogs.”

Fountains are okay, however, provided the water is in Perpetual Motion. Great stuff. Also, for us, largely impossible.

I also read Thomas Tusser who, in his Five Hundred Point es of Good Husbandrie (1573), cautions gardeners against the keeping of peacocks (they scratch up the seedlings) and John Parkinson who, in 1623, scorned the practice (“grosse and base”) of bordering flowerbeds with the jawbones of sheep.

The “Offences of Moles,” I read, can be neatly dealt with by obtaining a trained weasel; and serpents, should you suffer from such, can be eliminated by “making a smoke with olde shoes burned.”

Louis XIV, I read to my husband-who feels we may have overstepped ourselves last year in the matter of bulbs-had 87,000 tulips planted in the Dauphin’s garden at Versailles, along with 83,000 narcissus, 800 tuberoses, and 400 lilies.

All of this is comfortably inapplicable to our garden, a hedge-less fraction of an acre, virtuously devoid of peacocks or sheep’s jawbone though the children, eager to obtain a trained weasel, are keeping their eyes open for the offences of moles.

Similarly distant from the problems of our veggie patch is an­other of my impractical favorites, a book much admired by nineteenth-century gardening ladies, called Elizabeth and her Ger­man Garden.

In it, Elizabeth; a countes with a yen for the simple life-describes the making of the garden on her estate in northern Germany.

I came across an American edition of Elizabeth in a used bookstore in Pennsylvania some years ago: a chunky little book, white stamped with gold, inscribed on the flyleaf “Carroll from Louise, Christmas 0 to 5.” (It cost me $2.75.)

Elizabeth’s garden was planted sometime before the turn of the century, on the grounds of the immense family mansion-a convent back before the Thirty Year’s War, Elizabeth informs us.

Located some three hours (by horse and sleigh) from the Baltic Sea.

Elizabeth, of course, did not plant her endless borders and eleven flower beds with her own little green thumbs, having gardeners to per­form such services for her: She writes pa­thetically, “In the first ecstasy of having a garden all my own, and in my burning impatience to make the waste places blossom. 11 like a rose, I did one warm Sunday in last year’s April, during the servants’ din­ner hour, doubly secure from the gardener by the day and the dinner, slink out with a spade and a rake and feverishly dig a little piece of ground and sow surreptitious ipomaea, and run back very hot and guilty into the house and get into a chair and behind a book and look languid just in time to save my reputation.”

Elizabeth, admittedly, can become a trifle tiresome-with her gardeners, her title house guests, her children’s governess, her annoyingly chauvinistic husband, and her trays of tea and roasted pigeon carried out beneath the lilac trees. But her enthusiasm for tea roses, Madonna lilies, and sweet peas, and her disappoint­ment when all the hollyhocks turned out in awful colors, are endearing. Not however, to everybody-I loaned the book a while back to a gardening friend, generally a dedicated reader of books of practical gardening advice, in hopes of luring her from the straight and narrow. She handed it back two days later, saying she had no patience with the habits of aristocrats.

Which to my mind is the crux of the matter: The aristocratic Elizabeth, planting (by proxy) her rose garden, has nothing of moment to tell me, which is a relief. It’s the sort of book you read happily in the hammock, without feeling compelled to leap up and do things afterwards. Ancient gardens, aristocratic gardens, foreign gardens, are all compulsion-free. Accounts of Italian topiary, for example, never give me the nervous feeling that I should be out clipping the yew alley; descriptions of Japanese rock gardens never set me worrying about the state of the bonsai trees. Practical garden books, on the other hand, get right down to brass tacks, pointing out in precise and tactless detail just what you have left undone that you ought-weeks ago-to have done, and vice versa. Descriptions of the perfect vegetable garden (especially if accompanied by photographs) invite shaming comparisons. The practical garden book is not a restful read. It eats at the conscience. It incites one immediately to weed.

I have not, however, completely closed my mind to the lure of practical modern literature. I can, I find, read such books with absolute serenity in the dead of winter, when our garden-what remains of it-is frozen solid and three feet under; I also do well in the very early preplanting days of spring, when ambitions, like sap, run high.

And, of course, should I ever prove, through countless generations of dubious ancestors, to be the heiress to a manor on the moors, surrounded by walled and secret rose gardens-in such case, I foresee turning over a whole new literary leaf.

There, while dining on roast pigeon under my lilac trees and watching the Sun Play upon the Broad Plates of Round Colored Glasse in my hedges, I plan to read-industriously and practi­cally about mulch, fertilizer, compost, and pest control.