Library Director’s Notebook
January 2012
While losing weight, getting organized, or saving money may be some of the more popular new year’s resolutions that many people, myself included, make each year, I thought that this year I would concentrate on something more enjoyable and satisfying. I enjoy my garden, but I have one of those unruly gardens that could easily be mistaken for a wild garden, not because I planned it that way, but because I didn’t plan it, and it looks it!
Although I may not always have the time or the self discipline to make my garden behave as I’d like it to, I certainly enjoy reading about gardens and gardeners. One of the very best garden books I’ve read in a long time is a used copy of a book I found at the most recent Friends of the Library book sale. Entitled The Invisible Garden and written by Dorothy Sucher, a practicing psychotherapist, the book grabbed me right away with these lines from the prologue:
“Gardens give their owners so much joy and discontent that sometimes they seem to be a metaphor for life. There is more to them than meets the eye; all sorts of memories and emotions cling to them… I think of this complex of conscious and unconscious associations as an ‘invisible garden’ that each of us, gardeners and garden visitor alike, carries around… These associations remain dormant until the plants we happen to be looking at reawaken them… Always it is the invisible garden that gives the visible garden its deepest meaning.”
The Invisible Garden is divided into chapters such as “the stream”, “the wildflower meadow” or “the path” that discuss how Sucher planned and executed her garden schemes throughout various parts of her multi-acre woodland property in Vermont. Yet each chapter is much more than a “how-to” manual on gardening. What makes this gardening book rise above the rest are the very personal and insightful memories, regrets, and small but delicious triumphs that Sucher enjoys, whether it is her bittersweet memories of a deceased friend who planted white daffodils among the drifts of yellow ones, or the delicate détente she and her daughter observe in the planting of an oak tree, or her growing respect for the native Vermonters who know the land, work hard, and don’t waste much time brooding about things.
Reading this book made me think about my own invisible garden and made me realize that although my garden will never make it into any issue of House Beautiful, I will always look at the honeysuckle and recall the delight I feel when the hummingbirds visit; look at the crocuses and think of how I love to dig them out from the snow and leaf mold each year; and look at the dogwood I planted the year my son was born and remember how tiny he and the tree were in that important year. The honeysuckle vine, the crocus blossoms and the dogwood are visible to everyone; the invisible part is the love and gratitude they always bring to me.
