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Jane Shellenberger
Dec 3

December 2024 E-Magazine

DECEMBER 2024 E-MAGAZINE


The Garden Against Time


I’ve been reading The Garden Against Time: In search of a common paradise by Olivia Laing. The publisher sent me an advance copy about a year ago and I dove in - deeply - because I found the writing extraordinary and the concepts so evocative and thought-provoking. About halfway through I needed to turn my full attention to other things so I put it aside.


Uncharacteristically, I used sticky notes to mark a number of pages and passages that I wanted to explore further so when I returned to the book recently, I had an easy re-entry. I’m still not finished so this isn’t a review or even an overview, but it’s such an interesting and timely gardening book that I thought I’d share it sooner rather than later. I hear it’s already making the rounds of volunteers at Denver Botanic Gardens.


In 2020, during the pandemic, Laing began to restore an overgrown, walled garden of ususual plants in Suffolk, England. She and her husband bought the house for the garden. Along with a rich and detailed account of the process and the plants, the book is part garden history, part personal history, and part exploration of Paradise and “the pleasures and possibilities of gardens” including questions like, “Who gets to live in paradise and how can we share what’s left of it?” Here’s an excerpt to whet your appetite.


Many people have lost a paradise, and even if they haven’t the story of the lost paradise continues to resonate because nearly all of us have lost or relinquished or else forgotten the paradise of a child’s perception, when the world is so new and generous in its astonishments, let alone the sweet, fruitful paradise of first love, when the body itself becomes the garden. Perhaps this is why literature is so crammed with secular versions of the Eden story: gardens that open unexpectedly and are then locked, a paradise that is stumbled upon and can never be found again… These were the kind of thoughts that moved through my head as I worked, drifts of memories and ideas that were at once tethered and stimulated by the work my hands and eyes were doing. It was another kind of paradise altogether to be working physically, hours every day, at something so immersive and all-encompassing. Each morning after breakfast I gathered up my tools: red secateurs, hand fork, red plastic bucket,sometimes a wheelbarrow or fork or pruning saw, often a rubble sack. I went to wherever caught my eye, and worked over it, just as an editor rakes over a text, looking for what doesn’t belong; what impedes the view or breaks the flow. Often I didn’t stop until the light faded.

 

For many years I’ve been part of a group that orders mostly vegetable seeds from Fedco, a worker/consumer-owned cooperative specializing in gardening, farming and orcharding supplies in Clinton, ME. We get a great group discount and their extensive catalog is full of helpful information. (However, I’ve heard recent complaints that their tomato seed varieties are not always correct.)


In this month’s Gardening Q & A, Keith Funk’s first topic concerns online seed suppliers for rare & unusual, hard-to-find seeds and plants, not available from local retailers. 

I’ve added my own list below, gathered from my own and others’ experience. Some of these are small operations & clearly labors of love so investigate and shop early. 

Thanks to Bob Nold, Diana Capen, Eve Reshetnik Brawner, and several of the Boulder Culinary Gardeners for their suggestions.


ONLINE, HARD-TO-FIND SEED SOURCES


Happy Holidays!


Jane

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