Simonds - A New Leaf

Breakfast at the Exit Cafe: Travels in America (co-author)

The Holding

The Lion in the Room Next Door

The Convict Lover

ANTHOLOGIES:

Night: A Literary Companion

Gardens: A Literary Companion

Copyright 2011 Merilyn Simonds

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisheror in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agencyis an infringement of the copyright law.

Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Simonds, Merilyn, 1949
A new leaf / Merilyn Simonds.

Issued also in electronic format.
eISBN: 978-0-385-67046-3

1. Simonds, Merilyn, 1949-. 2. GardenersOntario, Eastern.
3. Gardening. 4. Gardens. I. Title.

SB455.S54 2011 635 C2010-905496-2

Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,
a division of Random House of Canada Limited

Visit Random House of Canada Limiteds website: www.randomhouse.ca

v3.1

For Astrid & Estelle

I AM NOT WHAT SOME WOULD CALL a serious gardener. I dont know the Latin names of plants, except those that sound subversive or whimsical or mysterious. Phlox subulata. Euphorbia corollata. Nepeta nervosa. I try to design my gardens by the bookthree of this, seven of that, never four or sixbut in the end, I do what looks good to me, because lets face it, no bus tour will ever traipse across my white-clover lawn. I will never show my delphiniums at the fair.

My Beloved laughs when I say Im a lazy gardener. Its true that Im out the door at dawn and he has to drag me back inside when the sun goes down. But I dont plant my carrots in rows or deadhead my dahlias, and I never (almost never) turn the soil. I rarely water. Only the babies in my garden beds are coddled.

I have land, more than enough land, but not much money and less time. I dont want to work any harder than I have to.

Pleasure is the only rule. The exuberant sweep of colour, the sweet scents and sharp tastes, the upthrust trailing shapes, the accidental pairings that make me laugh or weep with their unlikely beautywere bound together, my garden and me, in an ecstasy of growth.

F OR MOST OF MY LIFE , Ive grown the food my family eats and the flowers that bring beauty to our table. Ive often thought, as the world in which I live grew affluent and the drift toward urbanization became a tsunami, that the skills I have accumulated would wither with me. No one needed to know how to cure garlic or when to harvest beans or the best time of year to prune an apple tree, how to make jam without adding pectin or cook a compost pile. Certainly no one was interested in how to make a chicken come when its called or which flowers can be eaten, which will cure, and which can kill. Once, this was essential knowledge. Not anymore, I thought.

But the wheel has turned and here we are again, wanting slow food, uncontaminated and organically grown local food, food that we can trace to its home soil. Flowers without that bitter florist scent. Blooms we can eat and drink and float in the tub and savour every minute of their brief lives, and ours.

And something else, too. We hardly know how to express it, its such a deep and diffuse yearning, like an ache with no clear cause, though we know when it is soothed. The same urge made our childish selves splash in puddles and fashion caves in the woodsan urge that is satisfied by peeling back the grass and laying a hand on the warm and living earth.

This book is the story of my gardens at The Leaf. At the turn of the millennium, my Beloved and I bought a two-hundred-year-old stone house situated in what was left of an old orchard after the Great Ice Storm of 98. We opened the soil for vegetable beds, fruit beds, tea beds, herb beds, perennial beds, a Woodland Garden, a garden of ephemerals, another for native plants, and a Hortus Familia where I grow species that honour our mothers and fathers and where we bury our pets. In all, twenty-six beds. An alphabet of plants. Thats it, I told my Beloved. When I feel the urge for another, Ill write about it instead.

On March 21, 2009, the first day of spring, I launched frugalistagardener.com, a website where every week I post an essay prompted by my gardens. These are not instructional pieces, although a discerning reader might pick up hints on pre-sprouting beans and splitting hostas. Reading them is more like spending an hour wandering the garden paths with me, kneeling in the beds, crushing a slug, pushing a hand into the soil, marvelling at what is there.

What people respond to on the website, and in this book, too, I hope, apart from the joy we share in the presence of things botanical, are the stories, the characters: the Rosarian next door, who calmly teaches; the Frisian, who comes once a week to weed; the Garden Guru, who guides the evolution of the beds; my Beloved, who muses laconically on all that we do.

These short personal essays are intimate, meditative, and humorous, filled with wonder and a questioning eye. They evolve through the course of a gardening year, moving backward and forward in time, from the making of this garden to that of every garden Ive ever worked, meandering into some of the great gardens of the world, coming back always to the soil within reach, to the pleasures and frustrations that force me to grow in my garden, too. For who can watch the brief cycle of a pea without contemplating ones own life trajectory?

Through it all is woven the motto that guides my hand: never work harder than you have to; live as gloriously as you can.