Word: reads
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Maybe it is the change of season, or something in the social climate, but suddenly it seems as though all around the country people are going to any length to find their garden: to read about it, visit it and, if at all possible, create it. Mailboxes bulge with gardening catalogs, groceries grow on windowsills, cranes hoist trees onto city rooftops. From coast to coast, nursery owners say their business has doubled. Even baby boomers who did not have the remotest interest in the subject two years ago now rattle off the Latin names of their plants and comb suburban...
...sooner or later, if they keep at it, the new gardeners discover what the others have known all along: the satisfactions have little to do with anything they can read, buy or brag about. "A garden is for its owner's pleasure," advised that wise, earthy doyenne of English gardening, Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932), "and whatever the degree or form of that pleasure, if only it be sincere, it is right and reasonable, and adds to human happiness in one of the purest and best of ways...
Perhaps with that thought in mind, residents of Manhattan's lethal "alphabet city" have transformed a rubble-strewn lot into a community garden, with poetry readings and potluck dinners and tiny plots for 107 local gardeners. Some grow food or medicinal herbs: one woman grows a lawn, just so she can come out on Sunday mornings with her deck chair to read the newspaper. "I've lived here 20 years, and we never used to talk to people on the street," says Sandra Kleinman, now in her fourth year of nursing Egyptian onions and Japanese mustard greens. "I've never...
...compost heap. Everything must be saved for that site: last year's annuals, the top of the lawn, wayward bits of hedge, all the archaeology of the planting season. Then the catalogs begin to multiply; one nursery carries more than 1,000 varieties of geraniums; another's pages read like a gothic romance. Since all addictions have organizations, the invitations start arriving to join the clubs. There are hundreds of groups for roses alone, not to mention the American Bamboo Society and the Cactus and Succulent Society. There are some 800 books on gardening currently in print and six major...
...corks, on a gross, value-free cataract of media imagery. The waves of magazines undulate with a glutinous, twining rhythm, and their movement seems irresistible: they are going to take over the gallery first, and then the world. Only the zebra seems above it all; but then, it cannot read...