Anne Raver - Deep in the Green: An Exploration of Country Pleasures

Copyright1995 by Anne Raver
Illustrations copyright1995 by Sally Mara Sturman

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
New York, in 1995.

All of the articles in this work were originally published in The New York Times, copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by The New York Times Company, and in Newsday, copyright 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991 by Newsday, Inc., and are reprinted here by permission.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Raver, Anne.
Deep in the green : an exploration of country pleasures / Anne Raver.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-82840-8
1. GardeningLong IslandNew York.
2. Country lifeLong IslandNew York.
3. Raver, Anne. I. Title.
SB455.R34 1995
635.0974721dc20 95-15718

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In prose marked by eloquence, humor and generosity of spirit, [Raver] opens her gardenand her heartand invites readers to share her enthusiasms and knowledge. Often hilarious informed and practical. Its her glorious digressions that readers will most relish, her passion for the obsession called gardeningand the opportunity to visit over the back fence with a kindred spirit. She may have dirt under her fingernails, but Anne Raver writes with the pen of an angel.

Publishers Weekly

An agreeable and varied garden of essays. They are nicely written [and] fun to read.

The New York Times Book Review

The book is utterly charming. It teaches one to keep ones eyes open and to observe all the activities of garden life, including all of the little animals. It puts one in good humor a delight.

Brooke Astor

Admirers of Anne Ravers lively and informative garden column will be delighted to find more of the same in her first book of essays.

Eleanor Perenyi, author of Green Thoughts

Anne Raver grew up on a farm in western Maryland. She attended Oberlin College and received a masters degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University. She was the garden columnist for New York Newsday and now writes about gardening for The New York Times. She lives in Brooklyn Heights, New York.

To Kathleen, Ginger and Molly

T he best part about writing about the garden is that its so big. You can write about love, as sphinx moths visit the evening primroses opening up at dusk and bats swoop in to sip nectar from the saguaro cactus. You can write about death as the soldier bug prongs a Mexican bean beetle lunching on a leafor your own fathers failing heart, as the Japanese beetles move in to devour his rosebushes. You can write about beloved pets who ride to Agway with you, and eat half your ice cream cone. And who die, halfway through your own life, so you have to go it alone.

And when you get tired of writing about life and death in the garden, and whether or not the sprinkler that goes swish-swish-swish works better than the one that goes thump-thump-thump, eh-eh-eh, you can travel to greater gardens, like Yellowstone, where I saw the emerald green grass spring up out of the ashes of the fires of 1988, or the Amazon, where I talked to folk healers and farmers who planted by the cycles of the river, and followed botanists through the rain forest as they collected plants in a buggy jungle that not only may hold the cure for AIDS or cancer, but also are the basis of daily medicinefor bronchitis, diarrhea, hemorrhaging after laborfor millions of people. I have gotten up before dawn with drought-stricken farmers in Missouri, and shivered in a duck blind in Nebraska waiting for the cranes to come back to the Platte River in March.

This book isnt so much about gardening as it is about making connectionsto all the plants and creatures that populate the earth. Its about noticing things, from the fish in a neighbors pond lying belly up after some pesticide truck sprayed the trees, to a line of lifeless sycamores on a street that was showered with salt to melt the ice of an endless winter.

Its about the joy of obsession. Of gardeners who speak in loving tones to giant squashes and melons, and demand that their newspapers garden columnist ride from one end of the kingdom to the other to identify some mysterious weed. Its about friendswho drive hundreds of miles to pull weeds and dig up bushes on the old family farm, and joyfully take over the kitchen to bake pies and make pesto and sit around the table drinking wine long after a proper farmer would be in bed.

This is not a book that will tell you how to site your garden, or which of the old roses you dare not live without. It does not unravel the mysteries of science or even the Linnaean binomial system. It tells the story of the earthworm and the sea turtle. Of a goose separated from her goslings on the Long Island Expressway. Of the children of farmers who now live in big citiesas the old fields turn into house lots and golf courses. Its about growing old. Its about losing things you love. Dogs, places, people.

But as any gardener knows, it is about going on. Building new gardens, if the old one has been ravaged by a hurricaneor a housing development. Taking the spirit of a beloved dog or person with you, long after you have buried her, as you take a walk she would have loved, or bake his favorite pie, or set the bright faces of Autumn Beauty sunflowers in a lovely old vase from your mothers house.

I didnt plant my snap peas this year. Im moving to Long Islandto a warmer, sandier soiland someone else will be tilling my old plot in Ipswich, Massachusetts.

Its a beautiful site for a garden, a fifty-foot square in the middle of a wild meadow. It basks in full sunlight on the top of a knoll overlooking the confluence of the Ipswich River and a saltwater creek. At low tide, I can lean on my shovel and watch the clam diggers and the great blue herons; at high tide, the more frivolous boaters, speeding down the channel like Toady and Rat.

Leaving a piece of land is not an easy departure. Each place holds so many experiencessuccesses and failures with plants, bugs and peoplethat a move cant help feeling like some kind of erasure.

My husband and I first hacked at the matted field with borrowed pickaxes, ripping up the sod with our hands and shaking the topsoil from every piece back into the little square we had bounded by twine. He, a suburban kid, thought a small plot was plenty; I, a farmers daughter, wanted half the fieldfor squash, potatoes and corn.

Months before, wed argued over the seed catalogs. Why couldnt I be satisfied with a tidy little list, he grumbled. That was just like me, always wanting too much. Why couldnt I plant corn if I wanted, I complained. That was just like him, always trying to control me. You want to do everything