Read by Matilda Longbottom

In a glass case in Hatfield House, England, is a pair of garden gloves worn by Queen Elizabeth I. The gloves are made of cream-yellow leather; the wrists are finished with embroidered gauntlets, and the knuckles are set with tiny mirrors, which must have made the queen sparkle in the sun as she strolled among her hedges. They share the glass case with the queen’s garden hat (Elizabeth, a redhead, was prone to freckles.) and a pair of silk stockings, said to be the first of their kind ever worn in England. It’s an elegant picture, the queen in garden gear: gloves glittering, stockings swishing, skirts—wardrobe inventories mention “crymsen satten” and “Black velvet cutt all over”—sweeping the gravel paths, with      perhaps Sir Walter Raleigh trotting alongside, cape over his arm, on the lookout for puddles.

The queen, of course, did not actually garden in her garden gloves. Elizabethan gloves were symbols of power and prestige. Gloves, ostentatiously sported by the pampered, the rich, and the famous, were the 16th century’s equivalent of the Rolex, the yachting jacket, the designer gown, the diamond-studded spike-heeled shoe. Glove-wearers were known by their outfits as VIPs, people too lofty to dig, delve, hoist, haul, or otherwise get their hands grubby. Gloves carried such a weight of aristocratic authority that the hoi polloi were forbidden to wear hand coverings with fingers. Gardeners, circa 1600, when confronted with thistles, wore mittens.

Last Summer at the library book sale, I acquired (along with The Pickwick Papers and a nice book about beekeeping) a copy of Emily Post’s Etiquette, published in 1925. Etiquette—though Emily tried to cover up a bit in the introduction—is clearly aimed at the filthy rich and, as such, has provided our family with endless hours of glee. We have, in fact, read a great deal of it out loud to each other, dwelling lovingly on the vulgarity of wearing a tail-coat on shipboard, the proper design for footmen’s livery, the age at which children should receive their own calling cards, and the apt composition of a telegram of condolence. (Emily’s example—”Poor old Steve. What a peach he was!”—nearly caused my husband to collapse in a shameless fit of hilarity.) Emily devotes many pages to gloves—white gloves for the opera, black gloves for mourning, long gloves for dinner parties (which must be removed while eating and balanced along with one’s fan on one’s satin-covered kneecaps), and no gloves for butlers, cooks, or kitchen maids, which is telling, given the hierarchical character of gloves. There are also a great many complications as to when to take off gloves and when to leave on, which varies with gender, age, status, and whether or not you’re in a ballroom. Presumably, it’s all a holdover from the Elizabethan period and reflects the unwillingness of the elite to have hands-on physical contact with the rest of us.

An unwillingness for hands-on physical contact, of course, is what functional garden gloves are all about and to a certain extent, this makes perfect sense given the awful nature of things that are sometimes found in and around gardens. Plants, with canny Darwinian determination, resist being pulled up, often with the help of a battery of body-piercing or otherwise offensive armaments, such as stickers, bristles, prickers, thorns the size of ten-penny nails, or pods that ooze gooey stuff. To grasp these with the bare hand is purest folly. The first gloves were commonsensical protective devices. The oldest known—fragments of ancient leather mitts—date back to the bramble-ridden Iron Age. All serious gardeners, according to my shelf of intimidating gardening books, must have a good pair of garden gloves.

From the books, however, it’s not quite obvious just why. The accompanying illustrations never show slashed and bedraggled gardeners wearing gloves while battling barbed-wire-like blackberry thickets. They show preternaturally clean and tidy gardeners wearing gloves while planting things. “Why?” I mutter suspiciously, still mulling over that guilt-inducing phrase about “serious gardeners.” This is backwards. Planting is no place for gloves. You need bare fingers. Half the fun is feel.

Gardens are sensory constructs. There’s sight, smell, and sound—color and fragrance, bees and breezes, the trickle of water; there’s taste—that first juicy cherry tomato; and there’s touch—the textures of leaves and stems, the smooth shells of pumpkins, the slick pods of peas, the satisfying crumble of dirt. Gardens for the blind are filled with plants particularly appealing to the fingers—lamb’s ears, with fat fuzzy leaves, for example, and the feathery fronds of ferns—but all gardens are made for touch. Gloves are blindfolds for fingers. They get between us and the green, cut us off from the growing world. Whenever I wear them, I think dismally of Antaeus—in Greek legend, the son of Gaia and Poseidon, a giant and an invincible wrestler, who drew his stupendous strength from contact with the earth. He was defeated when Hercules discovered his secret, held him up in the air until he weakened, and then strangled him. In a sense we’re all like Antaeus. We need that physical contact with nature. I think I, too, draw strength from touching the ground.

Elizabethan gloves were gorgeous affairs, perfumed with rosewater and slathered with gold and silver thread, jewels, tassels, and bells. Elizabeth, who is said to have been vain about her white and shapely hands, had dozens of pairs. My garden gloves, in dreadful contrast, are old, canvas, and now a nondescript muddy sort of color, though once they were blue. I don’t wear them much, and in gardening season it’s effortful to keep my fingernails in a state other than disgraceful. In the hierarchy of glove-wearers, I’m clearly somewhere near the bottom, behind the butler, the cook, and the kitchen maid. It’s where you have to be to touch the essence of gardens: damp earth, warm fruit, vines, life like a green heart in our grubby bare hands.

I’ll bet the Elizabethans knew that, too. I’ll bet that every once in a while on sunny mornings in those dew-drenched palace gardens, even Elizabeth doffed her gloves. ❖