The Garden of Ignorance

OK, by popular request, more Marion Cran.

I decided we’d look at The Garden of Ignorance this time, since we can all identify with that and it takes us back to her beginnings. Including, horrors, her name at that time.

It used to be common for women to adopt (which sounds voluntary but hardly) their husband’s Christian name. Apparently it was part of the concept of “coverture,” where a woman’s legal identity was considered merged into her husband’s. Good to see this has changed on her later books. Mind you, my mother in law never forgave me for not adopting Charles’s surname.

I love to see who has owned this book before me, and especially when:

After some thoughts about why some people must have a garden and why some don’t care, we get to:

“There came a magic day when the Master rented three acres of shaggy ground in Surrey and I entered into paradise.“

Though it took a while before the garden possibilities actually dawned on her -

“A guest: ‘ What a paradise this will be after you’ve worked on it two or three years.” The idea that a garden was a canvas on which to paint a picture in flowers and trees and winding paths never occurred to me until that moment; and from that moment it has never left me. A landscape gardener was created with a sentence.’”

And what follows are her experiences in discovering the how to. What wonderful innocence. Today she would have, instead, to contemplate making an ideological and ecological wilderness designed to provide for every possible predator and prey - and to protect her mental health. Well, it was over a hundred years ago.

Then “Now that I am declining on middle age I begin to perceive that I am not really so very stupid and with this pleasing idea is born the courage to say what I think. And I think most garden books are dull. Frightfully dull.“ Well, some things don’t change so much.

“So I am going to write of gardening as I would have liked to read of it“ - which no doubt contributed to how she can remain readable and popular over a hundred years later.

Here she creates a delectable picture, encompassing what was a totally new to me and perhaps a potentially useful object: a brasero: apparently a heater once used in Spain. It was placed under a table which was covered with a cloth extending to the floor, to provide heat for people sitting at the table. We will shortly all need one. And her use of it? For primroses -

“They look indescribably fair among the oak and brass and copper of the cottage when gathered and arranged, with their leaves among them, in a big shallow brass bowl. A finely polished Spanish brassero, or an old refectory bowl, filled flush with newly plucked primroses, set in a dim corner of a cottage room on the glossy surface of an oaken gate-legged table, gives an effect of pure flame, a spot of glowing pallor, which does no other flower that I know of; the perfume of primroses is one of the sweetest, freshest things in the world.”

She objects to daffodils grown in rows or circles - now which of us ever sees that now? But she continues “Used with sympathetic intelligence they are the most decorative of flowers; used stupidly, they are incredibly boresome.“ That’s a great word!

There is a chapter on colour schemes, where she acknowledges the contribution of Gertrude Jekyll: “Surely never was such a gardener as she is, so patient, so sincerely alive to colour, so gentle in expression of opinion, (rather unlike Marion Cran. And myself. ed.), and every scheme she offers has been through the mill of her personal experience.“ And she declares: “To get colour effect it is essential to plant in masses; many people have one of everything in their gardens and so in the sum total get nothing.” Nothing changes, you think?

There are difficulties for us as fans of Marion Cran, besides her odd lapses into sentimentality. Many of the plants she mentions will no longer be available. And her notion of the size of a garden is perhaps somewhat different from ours:

“Of all the gardens in an garden devoted to roses, surely mine is the smallest, and none in the world can give such exquisite joy as mine to me. It has twelve beds only, a row of pillar roses, and a tiny flagged centre circle with four tiled paths radiating away from it.” But I love her acknowledgement: “I must confess I have never really mastered the art of pruning. It is an extremely complicated science.“

She is entertaining on the subject of Kniphofia :

“One plant made a horrid mistake last year, and sent up a splendid spike in early June. I shall never forget the astonished expression of that lorn pioneer towering among the columbines and Canterbury bells, nor the obstinate courage with which it bloomed stolidly from base to tip through weeks of comment and criticism..”

She was well geared up for our fashion for dahlias: “Sometimes I dream of great groups of dahlias in every variety against the green background of imagined distant trees; little pom poms, tight and prim, and flaunting cactus or paeony types. I can see them cunningly arranged to colour, white deepening to cream, cream to flame, flame to terracotta and that again to dark purplish-brown.” However, she is discouraged, hearing how they can be devastated by frost, by fellow feeling:

She continues fashionable, with an enthusiasm for keeping bees, sleeping outdoors, (or am I imagining we should have such a fashion?), keeping cats and dogs (and a raven), and providing a chapter on children’s gardens.

And spending winter absorbed by plant catalogues. So that: - “I come out of the imagined garden as I have lived in it with the help of catalogues, and face reality as if it were a strange land.....So the garden becomes, like Bottom the Weaver to Titania, a peg to hang dreams on.”

Isn’t that still the case for us all?

Do you want some of her next book too??? Soonish??

OK - next time The Garden Of Experience! What has she learned. If anything??