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| Saretta Barnet |
My dear friend Saretta Barnet died just before spring. We had been friends since 1963 and shared a
great deal during our years together – holidays, birthdays, weddings, funerals,
new babies, power outages, storms, pranks, museum and gallery visits -- but
they are part of a different story. This
is about our gardens, the basis of a friendship from which all else grew.
We lived in Port Washington, Long Island and met because of
our daughters, Liz and Jane, were entering kindergarten together. They still remain
close. A year or so later, Saretta and
her family moved only one house away from ours -- if you took a shortcut
through backyards. We both planted
perennial gardens at the same time; Saretta’s was a long sweeping bed in an
open setting, mine was a 20’ x 40’ rectangle defined on three sides by a screen
porch, a garage, and a lilac hedge.
If you can imagine a time when hardly anyone gardened, it was
then –- the early 1960’s. Besides us,
there were only two other people to talk to in our village: Evelyn Blankman, a second-generation iris
grower who generously divided her stock with us every few years; and Nathaniel
Hess, a rhododendron hybridizer with a modernist garden designed by James Rose,
and who was much too formidable for us to approach.
Saretta and I, full of the English garden books of that time,
and casting ourselves in the image of Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst,
planned and planted from our only two sources:
Martin Veitte’s Nursery on Rte 25A and Falconer’s, our local nursery in
Port Washington. Martin Viette’s plants
were field-grown; we selected our plants when in bloom and they were tagged for
us and dug later for fall or spring planting.
Falconer’s specialized in hanging baskets, a market with so little interest that Mr.
Falconer would winter over our fuschias and plumbagos in his greenhouse.
We grew some of the same plants, but Saretta was more experimental
than I. She loved clematis and roses and
tree peonies and platycodon and rose mallow.
Her bed was wide enough to necessitate a path for weeding, and scattered
with stone markers brought back from European trips. Somewhere there must be
photographs, and if I can ever find them I’ll make sure to post.
Her garden was on a flat, bare two-acre site, and over the years white pines, apple trees and rhododendrons were added to give heft to the property. But it was the perennial border that caught your eye and brought your afternoon walk to a halt. There was an advisor, I can’t remember his name, who would come once or twice a week to keep it all tidy and would bring her plants that he had started from seed in his greenhouse.
In later years Saretta spent more and more time in the city,
and eventually the house was sold. I had
left long before, and we never revisited our old gardens. In her last years she became a bit unmoored
as her memory slipped. But it was only
her memory of the immediate. The past
remained clear, and that’s what we continued to talk about to the last.
