The Bouvier Beales of Apaquogue Road had raccoons in the parlor but they also had certain pretentions. They spelled the “gray” in Grey Gardens in the British manner, with an “E.” I’ve mentioned before my secret sympathy for the Edies, our most East Hampton-y of East Hampton celebrities, and their high-hat manners, and the way their domestic lives came to demonstrate so theatrically the second law of thermodynamics: entropy.
As I’ve mentioned in this column before, I find the eccentricity of the Bouvier Beales somewhat simpatico in light of my own talent for self-mythologizing and for letting bric-a-brac pile up in closets and storerooms. I’ve never worn a skirt on my head like a turban but I may have once or twice done so with a sweater, and I, too, could be accused of having a somewhat affected Mid-Atlantic accent (in my case and possibly that also of Little Edie, influenced by watching too many screwball comedies of the 1930s while still an impressionable adolescent). The Bouvier Beales floated in time in a rather detached fashion, losing track of its passing days, weeks, months, years, decades, and centuries, and I understand and sympathize, especially when it comes to yard maintenance.
We cling, we cling to the past, Miss Edie, like silk charmeuse to limbs damp with sweat on the dance floors of a Georgica July.
Our house here on Edwards Lane was, over the last two or three years, almost entirely swallowed up by vines, brambles, and ivy. It got rawther Grey Gardens over here.
How swiftly Mother Nature reclaims what’s hers. My disheveled garden, unlike that of the Beales, was not evidence of mental dysfunction — at least I think not! — but rather was a result of a severe austerity budget that barely afforded lawn mowing and did not allow for yardwork of any more substantial measure. The yard got out of hand around here due to fiscal austerity combined with an unwillingness on my part to do any more than the most lazy gardening.
A few times a year I will wander out the kitchen door wearing long, leather gardening gloves and stand in the sunlight thinking about hotels in Barbados, in what the Victorian novelists called “an abstraction,” while stretching out an arm every few minutes to pull a rope of English ivy from the porch or rip up a stick of pernicious snakeroot from the peony bed, but strength of character sufficient for wholesale garden maintenance I do not possess. I mean, I live on nearly an acre over here on Edwards Lane. Surely that’s too much for one middle-aged single mom to cope with single-handedly?
By October of last year, the wisteria planted to beautify the garbage enclosure by my back door (wisteria planted about 20 years ago that never once bloomed) had climbed onto the roof. The snake root was so thick among the tired old roses that it created a blowsy white cloud at waist height in autumn. Ivy crept over the face of the house like green witch fingers, reminding me rather sinisterly every time I entered the house that ivy destroys shingles. The ancient lilac bushes, a variety of particular plumpness and purple perfume, had snapped and collapsed under the weight of the years. Ant hills erupted from the circular brick patio my parents put in circa 1974, crawling up bare legs and creating a nuisance whenever we used the barbecue grill. The potting shed out by the barn had actually disappeared under a mound of blackberry canes. And rooting deer had overturned the sod on three sides of the property foraging for grubs, leaving a lumpy, brown-polka-dotted prairie where once there had been green lawn.
Point of fact, the insects and wild animals did seem to appreciate my Grey Gardens botanical disarray. My privet hedge had interesting, tiny, white wild-rose-like vines entwined in it, and the birds feasted on my feral blackberries.
Well, guess where my federal tax refund went? My tax refund was spent last week on a white-lace graduation mini-dress for my Nettie — who will, God willing, march to accept her diploma across the much-better-manicured lawn at Exeter, New Hampshire, on a Saturday in June — and to pay a crew of stout fellows to do their damnedest to tame the ungodly mess in my garden and yard. My house was stripped bare again. It was, to use a very ungainly metaphor, as if my house got a Brazilian bikini wax.
The yard men did their heroic best, anyway. My potting shed is still hidden under a blackberry mountain, but they carted away a cargo of vines and branches and debris that filled a trucking container bigger than a 20-yard dumpster. They laid down fine-grained brown mulch that smells of manure in the undulating garden beds, and within 48 hours, I could see the daffodils and hostas poking up their green needle noses. Spring has sprung.
Have you ever stood in your own modest garden and wondered exactly how much physical labor the fine English ladies in 19th-century novels were actually doing when they carried trowel and trug into the gardens and greenhouses of their grand estates? I do wonder, every time I make one of my feeble stabs at weeding or pruning. Am I just deficient in energy and determination? Dorothea Brooke in “Middlemarch” or the ladies of Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Wives and Daughters” and “North and South”: How dirty did their fingernails actually get? It’s my opinion that most of the heavy labor done by the grand and virtuous gardening ladies of George Eliot novels was probably not the shoveling, hauling, or weeding but, in actuality, mainly just the picking of the Bourbon roses and the foxgloves and the harvesting of a trugful of cucumbers. Did you see Meghan Markle in her new Netflix show, “With Love, Meghan,” following her beekeeper outside in a white beekeeping suit, dressed for labor but actually just standing there looking adorable while he did the work? I mean, they had staff. Am I right, Miss Edie, am I right?