Remember the great American plant fad?
Chances are you will, provided you're over 40 and spent the years of your youth either in the city, or in suburbia, or in any other setting where nature isn't taken for granted.
The 1970s, my demographic's decade of high school, college and lowered expectations, was without doubt the tackiest decade of the last century. Oh, you think the Fifties were worse? As the French say, "uh-uh." Hula hoops, poodle skirts and Davy Crockett hats were as nothing compared to what the decade of oil embargoes and Watergate gave us. One fad after another came and went, each more idiotic, tasteless, annoying, or all three, than the last. Streaking. Glam rock. Pet rock. CB radio ("Break-break 19, good buddy. Brain-Dead here. Got yer ears on?...") Disco. Roller disco. Polyester leisure suits. Big, ugly medallions. Pop Rocks. Mohawks.
You get the idea. And in the midst of all this, while we were watching (or avoiding) The Waltons, Charlie's Angels, Three's Company and Battlestar Galactica (the original version, in which Lorne Greene and the blow-dried warriors of Galactica went up against the Cylons, an army of malignant outer-space jukeboxes) we were also hanging, stringing, and potting plants all over our houses, apartments and various flops. Your hanging plants became as much a part of your family as your schnauzer or your tabby. When you moved to a smaller place, you found friends to adopt your plants. Just about everybody's place, in the '70s, looked like a cross between the Amazon basin and the local gypsy tea room. In the 1974 film Conrack, Jon Voight spray-waters his plants before getting his day started. Very "Seventies," that scene.
Where did all of this originate? Who knows? There was a conservation fad at the very beginning of that decade which exalted everything green, but of course that's not what it was called. "Conservation" was hardly a good marketing term for a fad that wanted to tie itself to the Sixties counterculture movement. After all, "conservation" has the same lexical root as "conservative:" how un-hip does that sound? No, the politically-charged buzzword for the conservation movement was "Ecology," although conservation was really what Earth Day was all about. Could you have imagined all those tree-hugging hippies chanting "Conservation Now?" I think not. A popular band of that era, Rare Earth, called one of its albums Ecology. Had it been called Conservation, it probably wouldn't have gone too far up the charts. (Without wandering too far afield here, "conservation" has a Latin root, while "ecology" comes from the Greek. Were the Greeks "cooler" than the Romans?)
Be all that as it may, my point is that it could have been a natural segue from "Ecology Now" and "Save The Whales" to surrounding yourself on all sides with burgeoning, friendly ferns that you could dust, spray-water and talk baby-talk to, in order that you might feel "close to the land," up there in your sixth-floor walkup with the orange-crate bookcases, the waterbed, the hibachi on the fire escape and the wall poster over the beanbag chair of David Bowie as Aladdin Sane.
I wasn't part of it. Then or later. The closest thing to plants in my room were the dust-bunnies under the bed, or the occasional science project that would start spontaneously in a cup of coffee forgotten in the bathroom. The last gift anybody ever wanted to give me, if they knew what was good for the gift, was a plant.
As a little boy when I had my tonsils out, I was given a small plant, in a cute little planter that depicted a baseball-catcher, crouching behind the plate, as a get-well gift. I got well, but the plant didn't. Despite my watering (or maybe because of it) the plant died.
That pretty much set the tone for my life with plants. In short, I have a proverbial black thumb. I can't grow anything. A couple of summers ago, when my father was still alive, I did manage to put in our family's annual crop of summer tomatoes in the back yard, and they did quite well. In fact we had so many tomatoes we were giving them away. But I was just functioning as my father's hands and knees; he was the one who knew about growing tomatoes, but at age 89 he could no longer do the necessary kneeling and digging. So I did the kneeling and digging, putting the plants just where he told me to, spacing them apart just so, putting in the fertilizer just so, and then watering them according to his schedule. Result: vicarious success.
But this past summer, with my father sinking into dementia, I could no longer rely on his help. Reluctant to abandon a family tradition that went back more than 20 years, I tried to put in the tomato crop without his guidance, and the result was a regular tomato massacre: half my plants died and had to be replaced. At least half the rest ended up rotten or caterpillar-gnawed and had to be thrown into the weeds for the neighborhood possums, who fortunately aren't too choosy. We did have a few fresh tomatoes last summer, but with me playing the Old MacDonald role, the glory days of bumper crops were over.
And now my wife and I have decided to go into business. We have bought a bed-and-breakfast in Spokane, Washington, the Fotheringham House (www.fotheringham.net) We're very excited about this new venture; neither of us has ever run a B&B before, or in my case, ever run anything before. Until Valerie and I were married, I always assumed that I was going to spend the rest of my functional life on someone's payroll or unemployed. This will be the first time I've ever been in business for myself. Fortunately, Valerie has been in business before. She has run a successful real-estate business for almost ten years. This pretty clearly indicates what the breakdown of work is going to be at our bed-and-breakfast. Valerie's an experienced businesswoman; I make a mean omelet. She's going to be running the business; I'm going to be the chief cook, sommellier and groundskeeper.
And therein lies my source of anxiety. The Fotheringham House has a rose garden. And not just any rose garden, but one which is pretty well-known in the area. Take a look at it: http://www.fotheringham.net/gardens.html. We flew to Spokane this winter to see the place and meet the couple from whom we're buying it. We discovered that the gardens around the Fotheringham House are something of a local attraction: there's a park right across the street, and in the spring and summer when the weather is good, people visiting the park often stroll across the street to behold the Fotheringham rose garden.
And I'M going to be responsible for the care of this magnificent garden? I, who couldn't keep ferns alive in my apartment in Germany, even though the windows faced east and west and I was able to give them both morning and afternoon sunshine? I, half of whose tomatoes last year either wouldn't grow at all or ended up being tossed to the possums?
Poul Jensen, who has been running Fotheringham House for the last five years with his wife Irene, told me I have nothing to worry about. He didn't know anything about roses when he took over either, he said, and the gardens have been flourishing under his care.
Somehow I don't find that too reassuring. He doesn't know he's talking to the Jack Kervorkian of the plant world. Yes, I do take some solace in the fact that the Jensens aren't moving far away--in fact they're only moving across the street. Should I discover in a panic one fine morning that my flowers are dropping like audience attention at this year's Grammy Awards, I can dash across the street and ask Poul for some guidance. But of course I don't want to do that too often.
My wife bought me a copy of Roses For Dummies. This book might prove helpful; I'm hoping to be able to secure some guidance from it. But I do have a track record for always coming up with the one problem, whether we're talking about a car, a computer, a cell phone or a rose, that's not covered in the book.
And it doesn't help any, knowing that these gardens have a reputation. I'm going to be the keeper of a landmark, for heaven's sake. Talk about psychological pressure: now I know how the guys who sweep up around the Lincoln Memorial feel.
I guess I'll go leaf through my new handbook and see if I'm able to anticipate--and maybe head off--a few potential rose-disasters that might confront me when it's time to put on the overalls and face my delicate, redolent charges...not to mention my public from the park across the street. But I can tell you this much for certain: before actually attempting the hands-on care of Fotheringham's famous garden, I'll be consulting some other titles as well.
Four Roses sounds like a good one...
No comments:
Post a Comment