Catie Marron - Becoming a Gardener: What Reading and Digging Taught Me About Living

CATIE MARRONs career has encompassed investment banking, magazine journalism, public service, and book publishing. She is the creator and editor of two anthologies published by HarperCollins, which explore the value and significance of urban public spaces: City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World (2016) and City Parks: Public Places, Private Thoughts (2013).

She is a trustee and chair emeritus of the New York Public Library, where she was chairman of the board from 2004 to 2011. Marron is also a trustee of Friends of the High Line, where she was also board chair, and a trustee of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Marron began her first career in investment banking at Morgan Stanley and then at Lehman Brothers. She then became senior features editor at Vogue and later a contributing editor for twenty years. While writing her books, Marron launched Good Companies, a curated, online guide to companies that strive to do good while also making a profit. This venture was shaped in part by the success of Treasure and Bond, a pop-up store that she cofounded with Nordstrom and Anna Wintour in 2011. All store profits went to charities benefiting New York City children.

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I asked a schoolboy, in the sweet summertide, what he thought a garden was for? and he said, Strawberries. His younger sister suggested Croquet, and the elder Garden-parties. The brother from Oxford... Lawn Tennis and Cigarettes.... I repeated my question to a middle-aged nymph... and she replied... For the soul, sir, for the soul of the poet! For exaltations... above the miserable dulness [sic] of common life into the splendid regions of imagination and romance.

SAMUEL REYNOLDS HOLE

What is a garden for?

Everyone answers this question differently. Some people say it doesnt matter what theyre for, nor do they need to be understood; they simply need to be experienced and enjoyed. Either way, gardens have mattered deeply in peoples lives ever since Eve ate the apple from the tree.

More than two thousand years ago, the Roman scholar Cicero declared, If you have a garden and a library, you have all you need. Ive pondered this idea since I first heard it. You cant take what he said literally, of course, but once our basic needs are met, wouldnt this do it?

For centuries, gardens and books have fulfilled our need to enrich both our minds and souls. They give our imaginations a chance to roam and create our own private worlds. They let us escape time, entertain us, and offer pleasure and beauty. Certainly a garden is a glorious place to read.

Over the years, Ive built a small library of gardening books, which give me great pleasure. Ive read many, but some seemed beyond my grasp as they require a basic knowledge of gardening. For years, I nurtured the idea of creating a garden, a space of my own where I could work in the dirt, be involved with nature, and magically produce the flowering plants of my imagination. Timing, as the saying goes, is everything, and suddenly, in early 2019, I had my chance.

Our family had recently bought a new house in Connecticut, less than an hours drive from our lifelong New York City home. When we came upon the house by serendipity, we fell in love with its rolling land, the pastoral feeling of the area, and the secluded lake at the propertys edge. Wed often dreamed of having a home big enough for the four of us and future generations of our family. This house fit the bill. It was well designed and, with some needed renovations, paint, and our furniture, it came to look like us. Yet I couldnt shake the sense that I didnt belong there, that I was living in someone elses house. I tried everything to feel comfortable. I even burned sage and applied the principles of feng shuito no avail.

About a year later, a thought occurred to me: To feel rooted, I had to put down roots. Literally. As the old proverb goes: Necessity is the mother of invention. To turn our house into a home, Id root myself to the land, which is what drew me to the spot in the first place. Once again, I found myself thinking of gardens. It certainly seemed as good a time as any to attempt to become a gardener. And, so, what began as a desire to feel rooted in a new home with my children and Don, my husband of thirty years, became something else entirely.

I decided to give myself eighteen months, thinking this would allow me enough time to design the garden and watch a full years plant cycle. Little did I know how much the world would change in that time, both globally and for me personally. In the beginning, I thought all I needed was gardening advicebasic information on how to lay out a garden and what plants to grow. As it happened, I needed and discovered so much more.

I turned to my library of gardening books for help. Looking at them, I realized that my favorites were written by fiction and nonfiction writers who also happened to be gardeners. As a metaphor, gardening is, in Eudora Weltys words, akin to writing stories. Its elemental. Perhaps because it connects us with what Penelope Lively thinks is our primeval need: the urge to be outside. The garden is rich with life lessonsample ground for any writer to explore.

I read book after book, hoping to uncover some well-hidden secret on how to become a gardener, but also for an answer to the question of what a garden is for. In short order, I read that gardens give enduring happiness, offer hope, teach patience and tranquility, and provide sanctuary and beauty. Beverley Nichols writes that a garden is a place for shaping a little world of your own according to your hearts desire. According to Anna Pavord, gardening slows you down, masks worries, puts them in proportion. A garden teaches you to be observant and how to look at things. You become less inclined to leap to quick conclusions or to jump on the latest bandwagon. A garden hones your senses. Monty Don thinks that gardens heal. He writes, When you are sad, a garden comforts. When you are humiliated or defeated, a garden consoles. When you are lonely, it offers companionship that is true and lasting. When you are weary, your garden will soothe and refresh you. It seems that a garden offers a balm for every situation.