Simple Life

by Jim DoDSon Fifteen years ago, a grande dame

of English gardening named Mirabel Osler smiled coyly over a goblet of merlot and said something I’ll never forget. “You know, dear,” she declared, “being a gardener is perhaps the closest thing you’ll ever get to playing God. Please don’t let on to the Almighty, however. He thinks He gets to have all the fun.”

T he café in Ludlow, Osler’s Shropshire market town, claimed a Michelin star. But the real star that early spring af ternoon in the flowering Midlands of England was Dame Mirabel herself. Spr y and witt y, the 80 -year-old garden designer had reintroduced the classic English “cottage garden” to the mainstream with her winsome 1988 book, A Gentle Plea for Chaos.

T he intimate tale of how she and her late husband transformed their work ing farm into a botanical paradise where nature was f ree to flourish became a surprise bestseller that f ueled a worldwide renaissance in cottage gardening. It’s actually what inspired me to create my “faux English Southern Garden” on a forest hilltop in Maine.

My visit with Osler was one of several stops I was mak ing across England in the spring as par t of a year-long odyssey through the hor ticulture world while researching a book about human obsession with gardens — including my own. W hen I asked Dame Mirabel why mak ing a garden becomes so all-consuming and appealing, she had a ready answer.

“I think among the most valuable things a garden does for the human soul is make us feel connected to the past and therefore each other,” she said, sipping her wine.

“We’re a l l old sou ls, you k now, p e ople who love pla nt s. E sp e cia l ly t re es.”

She was delighted that I shared her enchantment with trees, mentioning a gorgeous old American beech that stood beside our house in Maine and how it became the centerpiece of my own wild garden.

W hen my children were still quite young, we car ved our initials into the beech — as one must do with its smooth, gray bark — hoping our names and the tree might reside together forever, or at least a couple hundred years. Unfor tunately, our great beech was visibly ailing, which sent me on an odyssey to tr y to save it. T hat quest ultimately became a book called Beautiful Madness.

“I think that’s the alchemy of a beautif ul tree,” Dame Mirabel agreed. “T hey speak to us in a quiet lang uage all their own. T hey watch over the days of our lives and will long outlive us. No wonder that ever yone f rom Plato to the Dr uids of Celtic lore believed divinities resided in groves of trees. Trees are living memor y-keepers.”

Mirabel Osler passed away in 2016, age 91. Not long af ter Beautiful Madness was published in 2006, however, she wrote me a charming note to say how much she enjoyed reading about our visit in Ludlow. Tr ue to form, as my wife, Wendy, and I discovered on that unforgettable spring day, Dame Osler’s final garden was a chaotic masterpiece, a back yard filled with beautif ul small trees and flowering shr ubs arching over a narrow stone pathway.

Not surprisingly, as this long, dark winter of 2021 approached its end, Dame Mirabel was on my mind anew as I began serious work and planning on what will be my four th — and likely final — garden.

Five ye ars ago, Wendy a nd I purcha se d a ha ndsome old bungalow in t he neig hb orho o d where I g rew up, a l low ing me to sp end t he nex t t hre e ye ars t r a nsfor m ing it s f ront a nd side yards into my version of a m in iat ure encha nte d forest — my t r ibute to Da me

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Mir ab el ’s Shropsh ire garden.

I nicknamed the long-neglected back yard dense with overgrown shr ubs and half-dead trees “T he L ost K ingdom.” Reclaiming just half of this space was another odyssey, but more than a year later — and thanks to the assistance of a younger back and a Bobcat — a promising shade garden of ferns, hostas, Japanese maples and a handsome Yashino Japanese cedar now flourishes there. It reminds me of the many Asian-themed botanical gardens I’ve visited.

T hat lef t only a final section of the “L ost K ingdom” to deal with, which I began clearing late last fall, resulting in a nice blank canvas half in shade, half in sun.

Sinc e Chr ist ma s Day, I’ve sp ent hours just lo ok ing at t h is spac e t he way t he aut hor in me st ares at a bla n k wh ite page b efore st ar ting a new b o ok .

Creating a new garden f rom scratch is both addictively f un and maddeningly elusive — a tale as old as Genesis. It’s neither for the faint of hear t nor sk int of wallet.

Gardens, l i ke ch i ldren, mat ure a nd cha nge over t ime. At b est , gardeners a nd parent s must ac c ept t hat we are, in t he end, simply lov ing c aret a kers for t hese l iv ing a nd bre at h ing work s of ar t. A lt houg h t he Go o d L ord may have fi n ishe d His or Her garden in just si x days, I f u l ly ex p e c t my new fi na l proje c t — wh ich, in t r ut h, is relat ively sma l l — to prov ide ye ars of work a nd rev ision b efore my sou l a nd shovel c a n rest.

No complaint there, mind you. As the Secretar y of the Interior (aka, my wife) can attest, her garden-mad husband enjoys few things more than getting strip -of f-before-you-dare-come-into -this-house dir t y in the great outdoors, possibly because his people were Orange and A lamance count y dir t farmers stretching back to the Ar ticles of Confederation. T heir verdure seems to travel at will through his bloodstream like r unaway wisteria.

Af ter weeks of scheming and dreaming, sketching out elaborate bedding plans and chuck ing them, it finally came together when a dear old f riend f rom Southern Pines named Ma x, renowned for his spectacular camellia gardens, gave me five of his original seedlings for the new garden. I planted them on the borders and remembered something Dame Mirabel said about old souls and trees being memor y-keepers.

Surrounded by Ma x’s grandiflora camellias, this garden will be a tribute to the trees and people I associate them with.

A pair of pink flowering dog woods already anchor a shady corner of the garden where a peony border will pay tribute to the plant-mad woman who taught me to love getting dir t y in a garden, my mom.

Nearby w ill be a pair of flower ing crab apple trees like the pair that bloomed ever y spr ing in Maine, sur rounded by a tr io of Japanese maples that I’ve g row n f rom sprouts, linked by a w inding path of stone.

A fine little American beech already stands at the hear t of this raw new garden, a gif t f rom f riends that recalls the old beech tree that sent me around the world.

For now, this is a good star t. T here will be more to come. For a garden is never really finished, and I’ve only just beg un. OH