The Ghost in the Garden

The most that can be said for the month of February is that a few sunny days allow for some winter pruning.  Otherwise all is quiet.  Gardening friends have disappeared indoors or, if they can afford it, have escaped February altogether and left for warmer weather.  During one particularly gloomy February when I had become tired of the sound of my own voice, Henry Mitchell appeared – or should I more correctly say the ghost of Henry Mitchell appeared.  

Every garden has its ghost.  It might be the critical specter of a previous owner, or a lost loved one who once stood at your shoulder commenting with enthusiasm or bewilderment.  In my case the ghost is a writer I’d never met. Henry Mitchell.  When he was alive I hoped he would visit my garden, the same way I hoped one evening I would walk into a wonderful party and Fred Astaire would ask me to dance. 

Henry Mitchell lived down the street a block or two from my house in Washington, DC’s Georgetown neighborhood.  He wrote a weekly column for the Washington Post and was a master of the small garden.  His “Earthman” columns appeared on Sundays, and those of us with tiny gardens tried to emulate him.  Mine was the size of a postage stamp, paved in lumpy brick, with narrow borders surrounded by the fences, garages and garden walls of neighbors.  I “assembled” rather than gardened.

Pot plants were purchased anew each season with as many packed in as the tiny garden could hold.  I didn’t have a car so I would taxi to the closest nursery, Johnson’s on Wisconsin Avenue, load up the cab and run home – all in under an hour.  Diamond Cab was available by the hour, and it only took two runs to complete the garden for the season.

Mitchell wrote about his own garden, but also made sure you didn’t miss what was going on in the by-ways; he wrote about the alleys of Georgetown with as much affection as he had for his own garden.  The alleys ran between two rows of houses, and were home to both garages and trash. Garages were rare in Georgetown and alleys were few, but Mitchell found them festooned with hollyhocks in the summer and sweet autumn clematis in the fall.  It was treated as a weed, but for Mitchell it was a plant without fault, blooming with the last gasp of warm weather when everything else was spent.  

“Catherine,” he whispers, “where is your clematis?  You have these naked border fences and telephone lines.  Plant it.  Pay no attention to the invasive plant police.”

Mitchell’s garden was only 40 by 100 feet – one-sixth of an acre – but packed with plants.  Even if you were a regular reader of his weekly column it was easy to miss the astonishing number of plants he managed to shoehorn into his modest garden.  It wasn’t until the columns were collected in The Essential Earthman that I added the numbers and began to wonder how he did it.  

Handicapped by the presence of four forest trees, he nonetheless managed to greet spring with an assortment of crocus, snowdrops, a double plum, hyacinths, bleeding heart, ceanonthus, wild cyclamen and cyclamineus hybrids.  There were 21 different named daffodils.  He was also a great admirer of peonies, and managed to squeeze in ten.  As you picture this, keep in mind that peonies require three feet each, effectively using up 30 feet.   

  

He included several iris – danfordiae, reticulate, histrioides and tectorum. There were rhododendrons and azaleas, grapes, mockorange and viburnum, stachys, forget-me-nots and jasmines  (both winter and Carolina), numberless roses and chrysanthemums, white and yellow primroses, coral bells, Shasta daisies and, of course, around 100 different daylilies.  

As all passionate gardeners do, he had his biases.  He harbored an intense dislike of zinnias, marigolds, petunias, and bedding begonias. 

“Catherine,” he whispers, “I’m so happy you have inherited my biases, I could forgive you the zinnias, but fortunately you don’t have enough sun.”

To give bulk and height to his garden he planted some tall yews and junipers, and provided rounded forms with Russian sage, arborvitae and false cypress.  One of Mitchell’s rules was that small gardens require of a plant not only good-looking flowers but good-looking foliage and orderly habits, and so space and attention were given to hostas, yuccas, purple smoke bush and rudbeckia.

He seems to have had a large number of tubs and barrels, unless he was writing about the same barrels in different years.  One tub had three or four water lilies, left to fend for themselves over the winter. In a half-whiskey barrel he planted a twisted willow with pansies beneath, or forget-me-nots and one of the more beautiful sedges.  Another barrel would hold lavender, rosemary and portulaca.  Or maybe it was the same barrel recycled for the seasons. 

“Catherine,” he whispers, “I like your idea of using the trash yard as a piazetta for tropical and tender plants, but you will have to drag them all indoors for the winter.”

Mitchell provided a wealth of wise but pragmatic advice: don’t let the glories of late spring (the irises, peonies, roses, poppies, forget-me-nots and violas) occupy more than 63 percent of your space.  Or 76 percent.  Or 94 percent.  He was candid about highlighting the disasters that await all gardeners: the storms that lay waste to peonies in full bloom, the late frost that withers the magnolia buds, the dog that settles on the most tender of your emerging plants.     

Years after his death in 1993, I sat next to a gentleman at a dinner party who had lived in Washington and knew Mitchell well.  “Did he really have all those plants in his 40-by-100-foot garden?” I asked.  “And more,” the gentleman replied, “and more.”

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