Liza Gyllenhaal — a writer in the garden

It’s snowing in the Berkshires this afternoon.  And the temperature has been falling through the twenties. Yet again. Like most people who choose to live in a part of the country that enjoys four seasons, I’m usually able to let the snow just slide off my back. But, for whatever reason, I’ve taken this  bitter winter personally. And I don’t think I’m alone.  The whole country has been under a kind of weather siege. Ice paralyzing Atlanta.  The Midwest buried in drifts. The suburbs running out of salt and snow days. Potholes forming. Tempers fraying. Continue reading →

One dull, chilly morning a few weeks ago, I looked up from my laptop to see a flutter of blue and red in the living room window of our house in the Berkshires.  An American bluebird was snacking on the winterberry branches that I’d tucked among the pine cones and evergreen boughs in the window box.  It’s hard to describe the joy I felt at the sight of that bird!  But it was pure and unexpected — and happened in a flash.  And then, in another flash, it was gone.  But the joy has stayed with me in a way that I’ve found puzzling.  Had I seen the bluebird of happiness? Continue reading →

French gardens are a lot like French women: chic and elegant and pulled together in a way that makes the average American gardener want to just throw in the spade.  I’ve made something of a study of the French garden over the years — from the glorious and enormous public jardins to the perfect little vegetable patches or potagers that seem to be tucked behind every cottage in the countryside — and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just one of those things in life that will remain forever out of my grasp.  (Like, alas, the French language itself.) Continue reading →

Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a small, close-knit community, but something in me periodically needs to break free, sail away, explore the wider world. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Questions of Travel” she writes: “What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life/ in our bodies, we are determined to rush/to see the sun the other way around?/The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?”

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I think there must be a gardening gene, yet to be discovered in some secret strand of our DNA.  My paternal grandmother created one of the most beautiful and extensive rose gardens I’ve ever seen (and I’m a devoted rosarian) in the small Pennsylvania town where I grew up.  In the midst of the Depression, newly widowed and with six children to raise, she began what was to become a horticultural heaven on earth that remains to this day — in the hands of a first cousin — a lovely, edenic refuge.

I first heard the call — and it really did feel like an almost audible cry from somewhere outside — at a place we were renting in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts 20 years ago.  It was a ramshackle, brown shingled Cape that had once been surrounded by traditional perennial beds. After several decades of neglect, however, the gardens had become grassy and weed-choked. Continue reading →

For me, few things are more satisfying than digging into the earth, uprooting weeds, pruning back shrubs, and planting bulbs. It’s also a beautiful way to commemorate someone you love.  We have neighbors in the Berkshires who plant a fruit tree each time a new grandchild is born. (They have a whole orchard now!)  When my mother died a few years ago, a bleeding heart was flowering outside her bedroom window. After the funeral, my aunt uprooted a bleeding heart for me to plant in my own garden in my mother’s memory. Every June now, when it comes to full flower, I’m able to recall those final, loving, remarkably happy weeks my mother and I shared. I think gardens are great reminders of the fundamental truths: nothing lasts forever … keep your eye on the sparrow… if winter comes can spring be far behind?

Though the observation is hardly original, I’ve come to understand firsthand that, at its heart, gardening is the urge to add order and context to the landscape, to somehow harness and humanize the wild.  In that sense, Mother Nature herself is the wisest and most patient of teachers.  Now remember, dear, you can almost hear her say as you take in the sad little heap of shriveled stems and leaves, never plant your basil before Memorial Day.  I’ve also come to believe that being out in nature and learning how to listen to its secret harmonies is one of the great joys and privileges life has to offer. Here’s a photo of my garden at pretty much its height this summer.  However, as all gardeners will understand, it remains very much a work in progress.  Continue reading →

Because gardening is such a solitary practice and in many ways repetitive, it can easily serve as a form of meditation.  When you’re going through a difficult time — or have a serious problem to work through — there’s nothing like pulling up weeds or pruning back a wayward shrub to help focus the mind.

There’s also a primordial aspect to it — the sense of being the latest in countless centuries of hunter/gatherers who have worked the earth.  I feel that most deeply at the very beginning of spring — when the fields are still blanketed in morning frost — that yearning to dig my hands into the soil.  To once again join the healing rhythms of the natural world. Continue reading →