I like lists. I particularly like lists that organize abstractions, lists that name categories of kinds of objects or ideas. Put another way: I find typologies not only helpful but also pleasant and, ultimately, reassuring. Something about that way of ordering knowledge provides my 21st century (thus, frantic) mind with a bit of calm, of Zen, even if typologies are just a construct and even if my mind enjoys that list-induced zenitude for only a few seconds, the time needed to take in a set of solid, i.e. logical, time-honored headers. Nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative. (Ahh…)

I intended this blog to be about… well, I’m not quite sure yet… It’s still tbd, but language and gardening and art and the color green were the impetus behind the project. Also: my hope to exist here as an amateur, a dilettante. I want to claim and embrace the freedom that comes with dilettantism. I shall thus improvise and share in writing ideas having to do with those issues that occupy my mind, occupy it not entirely and not professionally. One such topic I’ll call “writing about gardening”. I enjoy books as well as articles and essays (not to mention podcasts! There. Are. So. Many!) created by either gardeners who write well or by writers who garden well or, at least, diligently. It’s a very wide field, overflowing with passion and even brilliance. In and of itself, trying to understand why so many gardeners need to write about what they do and why just as many writers garden and find in dirt nourishment for their writing is a very deserving topic. Many have treated it. Maybe I will, too, one day. In the meantime, I recommend Alice Vincent’s Why Women Grow podcast for a taste of all that.

I was recently reading — during the same sitting — Jamaica Kincaid’s “My Garden (Book)” as well as Dan Pearson’s “Natural Selection. A Year in the Garden”. This blog of mine obviously occupied some part of my mind because I started comparing the two books qua texts instead of reading each of them in search of information and inspiration for the new season. That’s when the idea of a list poked its little head, as it often does, offering itself as an answer or a path forward as I asked myself the following questions: What if there existed a new way, a different way, to write about gardening or horticulture? What if it were still possible to be original if not in content (every gardener-writer will eventually mention bulbs or hellebores or basil or dahlias or slugs!) but in style? In tone? (A more sober part of my mind whispered that it was surely impossible in 2024 to write originally about horticulture and, if at all conceivable, not something to be achieved by me. It reminded me that I have many qualities — as a human and as a writer — but that I am not particularly original.) In any event, this new way could or would only come about if and when the “old way” is defined and clarified. And how better to achieve such clarity then by making a list of all the tropes common to texts (of a certain literary quality) about gardening! More specifically, I asked myself, what rhetorical devices and figures of speech do all such texts employ? (Not an answer to the previous question but here’s something already: If they appear in English, these texts will use the epithet “glorious” at some point, and I can’t stand that otherwise ok word anymore! I’ve seen it too many dozen times attached to flowers, to trees and to the color of the sky.) 

A beginning: apart from telling stories about eccentric old ladies or long dead green-thumbed friends or grandfathers who once upon a time shared a cutting or a few seeds with a younger version of the writer-gardener, all of them resort to good old personifications. Dan Pearson, for instance, dreams of a tree he will plant in his garden-to-be and imagines it nodding respectfully to its cousin on the hill (p. 35). I liked what this image conjured when I read it. Not everyone is as skilled as Pearson.

The weather was glorious (ha!) in Chicago this past weekend, but I felt it was too much sun too soon for a new kind of fritillaria I am growing, Fritillaria imperialis “rubra maxima”. So I grabbed a stick, planted it next to one of my almost flowering but now tilting under its own weight top-heavy fritillaria and gently attached its thick stem to the stake. Well, that was a mistake. What the plant needed was simply water. Today, it can stand without support but its stem is slightly (and forever?) crooked because of how I forced it to grow and adapt during a couple of days. Its neighbor (sister?), the one I left in peace because it did not seem to require staking — and because I had only one stick on hand — stands perfectly straight. It would be easy to personify or to metaphorize my fritillaria, to turn it and our interaction into a bit of a life lesson: “Wait before making assumptions about the needs of others; sometimes, well-intentioned gestures hurt rather than improve a situation.” I won’t do that. I’ll simply state that, if you have never seen a Fritillaria meleagris, you will not believe such a flower exists for real! It’s got checkered petals! Seriously! I have several dozens growing in the backyard right now. I’m still not used to the sight of them even though it’s their third season here. Another type of fritillaria — and new to me this year — is my favorite of the moment. It’s less impressive but, should a person be after sophistication rather than flash, I’d recommend Fritillaria michailovskyi. Yes, I grow three of the 120 or so species that make that fabulous genus. And that’s another thing we gardeners who write, we writers who garden do: we share seasonal lists of what’s growing, however short a list, and we give advice. If we blog, we also post photos:

© Caroline Guindon, 2024

I suspect there are many words in all, or at least in most languages, to name humans who are considered old. I like the ‘Greis’ of German. (The Grimm dictionary suggests etymological links to the color grey, grau in German, gris in French, griseus in medieval Latin.) Greis as a noun, is much harsher than the obvious ‘die Alte’ or ‘der Alte.’ I think I may have encountered a ‘Greis‘ for the first time in Brecht’s Moritat von Mackie Messer. Mack the knife, suggests the song, is responsible for a fire that killed seven kids and a… Greis. Sieben Kinder und ein Greis. Two softer two-syllable words followed by three one-syllable ones, the last of them an accented diphthong: Greis. It stuck, though I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use the word in everyday conversation. I should call Ute or Helga or Monika and ask. And mention en passant that I now have a blog. “Ach, Caro, they will say, es ist ja wunderbar! Aber musst du uns unbedingt namentlich erwähnen? Könnten wir uns nicht vielleicht Undine, Hettie und Melisende heissen?” Ok, then. I shall soon call my friends Undine, Hettie and Melisende and ask them what kind of word they think Greis is.

I’m sure Spanish knows how to make old age sound harsh, too, with a single word, but my Spanish vocabulary, though in good working condition, is not terribly wide, and I can only think of ‘viejito, viejita’ right now. The gentle suffix conjures up ‘little old man, little old lady’, people who, at the push of a thumb, would always have an already unwrapped Lifesaver to offer. I’ll ask Margarita for a meaner way to name an old person in Peru. I shall also ask her if she’d like a nice pseudonym, too.

French has this homely suffix, -ard*, that easily provides its feminine by adding just an e: -arde. In Québec, we perceived its ugliness so distinctly that we have turned what the French call merde into marde. It sounds so much dirtier, no? (Actually, I have no idea why we say marde, whence it comes. All I know for sure: maudite marde! is a favorite expletive, used by all, young and old.) Back to -ard as a French suffix: it is harsh-sounding and most often pejorative. You can attach it to a verb, to a noun, to anything, really, thus immediately turning the thing, the action or the person in question into something a bit more contemptible. Someone interested in such things could have a look at, for instance, how and by whom the words dreyfusien or dreyfusiste were used in comparison to the word dreyfusard. In Proust, say. I won’t. But one could.

Which brings us to vieillard and vieillarde.

My sister, once, when she was about four years old, vehemently refused to spend a day at my maternal grandparents’ in their Saint-Urbain street apartment in Ahuntsic** because, as she said to their faces, ‘there are only vieillards here’. With ‘here’, she may also have meant the Nicolas-Viel Park, which was a sad place for us kids back then: maybe a working swing-set, a dirty sand pit, a dangerously out of control merry-go-round. It’s all very vague; that was a very long time ago. In any event, I remember being terribly embarrassed for my grandparents after my sister implied she considered them vieillards. Sure, they were ancient – probably seventy-two or three at the time- but one ought not have reminded them! And with such a harsh-sounding word! But I also remember all the adults laughing hysterically. That word, vieillard, in such a cute little girl’s mouth! It was the funniest thing! The anecdote was shared widely in the family. And remembered, by me, this morning, as I was reading about the artist Françoise Gilot, who continued to create and to paint well into her nineties -there is now a room at the Musée Picasso in Paris that will display her art; about Lore Segal, who still writes wonderfully witty fiction at 96; and about Hélène Cixous, born in 1937, whose published seminars I have been reading and enjoying so very much! I am fixin’ to prepare a list of such women -do Southerners still say that, fixin’ to, or just in the movies? It’s a theme that fills me with delight, that of women-writing-and-painting-and-just-thinking-and-living-and-mattering well into very old age.

Yeah. One day, maybe, I will write something about that, a text entitled ‘Mes vieillardes’. And I’ll dedicate it to my grand-mother Cécilia of Saint-Urbain street in Montreal, to her long life…

* -ard has a lot to say (or to say for itself) in English, of course. I’ll just write bastard and leave it at that.

** One does not think the word Ahuntsic is weird until one encounters it in writing. The A is silent. For more info -tho few solid facts- there’s Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahuntsic_(missionary)

Si on ne sait que trois fois rien de Van Gogh, on sait au moins toujours qu’il s’était tailladé l’oreille. C’est comme les cailloux dans les poches de Virginia Woolf. On lit ou on se fait dire un jour: cailloux dans les poches; oreille coupée. On oubliera tout le reste, peut-être, mais ça, jamais. Je me demandais donc l’autre jour si, la première fois que je me suis arrêtée, seule et concentrée, devant cet auto-portrait de Vincent du Artic*, j’aurais d’emblée passé autant de temps à étudier ces trois lignes brunes horizontales, ce trou placé trop bas, ces petits traits roses sur son lobe, bref, le détail de toutes ces taches colorées qui font l’oreille, si ç’avait été l’auto-portrait d’un autre rouquin. Sans doute que non. Et je m’en suis voulu. Me suis dit: “c’était avant le tailladage, cette peinture. La prochaine fois, laisse l’oreille tranquille! C’est anachronique de la fixer comme ça. Regarde ailleurs. Laisse tes yeux plutôt que l’anecdote guider ton attention!” La semaine suivante, je crois que j’ai réussi. J’ai vu autre chose, j’ai vu mieux. Le vert des yeux, il est émeraude. C’est fou! C’est magnifique! Pourtant, l’immense front semble avoir encore plus à dire que les yeux. Et les joues, c’est elles qui émeuvent vraiment. Cette maigreur, que la barbe en feu n’arrive pas à dissiper. Vincent mangeait-il jamais à sa faim? J’ai sorti mon calepin. J’ai pris dix pages de notes. Avant l’arrivée des touristes, quand le musée n’ouvre ses portes qu’aux membres, on peut faire ça: carnet et crayon en main, rester plantée très longtemps devant le visage de Van Gogh, comme lui, peut-être, en 1887, devant son miroir, palette à la main, étudiant de près les traits de ce modèle qui était lui-même. 1887. Dans sa piaule à Paris. Il n’avait rien mais il avait ça: ses couleurs, ses pinceaux, ce visage aux joues creuses.

* Le grand Art Institute of Chicago.

Ce sera un blogue en plusieurs langues. Ça parlera de mes jardins et de mes collections: de mots, de couleurs et de plantes. Je jardine en anglais et à la sauce latine; je fais de la littérature en français; je vis mes amours et amitiés en d’autres langues encore. Beaucoup (trop) de mots, de bruit…

Au musée, je suis silencieuse. Comme d’autres à l’église, je vais m’y recueillir, aussi tôt que possible les jeudis matins. Parfois les lundis. Cet hiver, je me suis rendue compte de mon amour pour le vert. Ça m’a transpercé les entrailles, comme un coup de foudre, comme une épiphanie. On se croit amoureuse du bleu, de toutes ses nuances, et puis, vlan! On se tient seule devant Vincent*, devant ses espoirs (il attendait impatiemment l’arrivée de Gauguin à Arles lorsqu’il peignit ce jardin qu’il semble lui dédier**) et on se rend compte qu’on a vieilli et que le vert, ô! le vert, c’est la couleur qui nous manquerait le plus si on la perdait un jour… Tous les verts, les gais et les perdus tout autant. Je reviendrai à ces mots anciens.

* Il signait ses oeuvres de ce mononyme. Alors, on peut dire Vincent, je crois. Comme on dit Novalis ou Sting.

* * Les lettres de Vincent mentionnent une passion pour le ‘mariage’ qui unit Pétrarque et Bocaccio: il y suggère qu’il serait ce dernier et que Gauguin serait Pétrarque, qu’ils vivraient comme ces poètes amis: pour et dans l’art. La maison jaune, leur sanctuaire; le jardin d’en face, le reflet de leurs espoirs. (Utopie qui ne durera pas: aussitôt arrivé à Arles, Gauguin ne veut qu’en repartir).

Extrait de la lettre du 3 octobre 1888 de Vincent à Gauguin:

“Pour la chambre où vous logerez j’ai bien exprès fait une décoration, le jardin d’un poète (dans les croquis qu’a Bernard il y en a une premiere conception simplifiée ensuite). Le banal jardin public renferme des plantes et buissons qui font rever aux paysages où l’on se représente volontiers Botticelli, Giotto, Petrarque, le Dante et Boccace. Dans la décoration j’ai cherché à démêler l’essentiel de ce qui constitue le caractere immuable du pays. Et j’eusse voulu peindre ce jardin de telle façon que l’on penserait à la fois au vieux poete d’ici (ou plutôt d’Avignon), Petrarque, et au nouveau poète d’ici – Paul Gauguin.”