« CCC Spring Garden Classes | Main | A Call for Volunteers - The Arboretum at Flagstaff »
March 29, 2008
The Study of Mankind in Gardens
Master Gardener Column 3/29/08
“The more you study mankind, the more you discover every man is playing a part,” so wrote Richard Mansfield, the great American actor at the turn of the 20th century. Of course, he was echoing Shakespeare’s As You Like It, but with a twist. Shakespeare wrote about the ages of life through which everyone progresses while Mansfield meant the personalities people develop as they cope with life. The “presenting personalities,” as the psychotherapists call them, the dramatis personae, are the masks everyone wears.
As mothers know, children begin with types of personality, what might be called temperaments, qualities of personality, but those temperaments are affected as the child develops. “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” Everyone starts out as a twig but is bent on the way to maturity, often by which way the wind blows. So it is with a garden and its plants. Every plant has a temperament, but depending on its environment it develops a unique style, even in a garden’s microclimates just as in a family’s birth order.
Selecting trees, shrubs, plants, flowers, and vegetables in the spring of the year is akin to choosing the types of people we want around us, a kind of horticultural family, a botanical circle of friends. Sometimes, they are an aide-mémoire, a memorandum of things past, bringing to mind personal relationships out of the past.
More than remembrances, horticultural families are reflections of the gardeners themselves. Just as people are reflected in the friends they choose so they’re reflected in the plants they choose. Neglected yards reveal people who’ve neglected themselves. Ugly yards signify the distortions of repressed rage, like Brutus “with himself at war” forgetting “the shows of love to other men.” A pansy’s happy face more than likely reveals a gardener’s joy with life. Pumpkins often reveal gardeners who enjoy their children.
Favorite trees bring to mind images of colorful change, comfortable shade, and enduring stability. The ponderosa pines recall strong sentinels capable of enduring a harsh climate, solid and enduring, akin to those strong reliables who hold the center when the flanks give way. Sometimes remote, always dependable, they’re felled by a silent killer, the bark beetle, who destroys even the strongest. A dead ponderosa, silent in the forest, is a poignant testimony to the fragility of strength.
How different are the images of the quaking aspen with its vertical limbs and the colorful maple with its great spreading limbs, one pointing, the other sheltering, one golden, the other red. As with of timbre of human voices, each one of these trees has its own voice in the breezes and winds, some whistling, some fluttering, some rustling. All the different voices evoke in us different emotions. In contrast, a treeless plain is forlorn.
Choosing a tree is like choosing a friend, only trees, like dogs, are always happy to see their masters if the masters take care of them. The maple will shade a gardener no matter the gardener’s foul mood. The aspen will always be elegantly slim, a tree reliably attractive with which to grace a yard even though people have gone sour. In short, trees have a sense of continuity.
Daffodils and tulips peter out and leave the gardener with sere, flaccid remains, but after a winter grim “daffodils,” as Shakespeare wrote, “come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of March with beauty.” They require little attention and give the gift of cheer and beauty. For the “cabined, cribbed, confined” of winter, they beckon for strolls on crisp, clean, crystalline days in the spring.
And tomatoes, who would not welcome their cheery, round, red faces, hiding amidst the foliage? Unlike daffodils and elegant bearded irides, tomatoes require lots of attention, are easily offended, and sometimes inexplicably wilt away, but at first bite, as the existentialists would say, they are a moment of truth.
At the heart of gardening there is a sense of beauty and with that a sense of fragility which underlies all beauty. Good friends and good gardens, filled with plants we enjoy, are great companions on the fragile journey.
Dana Prom Smith is a Master Gardener volunteer and coordinating editor of the Master Gardener Column for Coconino County Cooperative Extension. He can be contacted at stpauls@npgcable.com. For more information about the Master Gardener Program, call Hattie Braun, the Master Gardener Program Coordinator, at 774-1868 ext.17 or visit our Web Site: highelevationgardening.arizona.edu.
Posted by maxmaddy at March 29, 2008 8:13 PM