“We weren’t going to kill ourselves gardening,” said Lewis Gannett in his book “Cream Hill.” “Just a vegetable garden the first year and a few ferns was our motto. But the flat stones about the water barrel outside the door after the barrel had been removed and the water turned into the house looked even shabbier.
We decided it would be a good idea to plant a few nasturtiums between the stones. That was the beginning, and there has never been an end.”
The beginning (when Ruth, noted artist and lithographer, and her husband Lewis, writer and daily book reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune, first started spending three days of the week in the country) was 25 years ago. Right back then, the motto fell through.
If you have a flair for it, gardening, like all the lively arts, is entertaining enough to keep you going. It kept the Gannetts going.
Advancement Of The Gannetts’ Garden
Their garden advanced from close by the house down the hill to the east. Here they discovered what made the lawn uneven was a rock ledge.
In uncovering it, hauling off layers of debris, they discovered magnificent boulders which suggested rock plants. So they planted some like Phlox subulata.
Basket of gold, dwarf iris, grape hyacinths, and primroses, and then as they unearthed another boulder, their garden advanced some more. Now a half acre is festive with blossoms. Ruth’s collection of primroses alone (increased from divisions) soon ran into thousands of clumps.
With so much of everything at hand, she never hesitates to rearrange her layout or color scheme. Indeed, she manipulates plants like paints and looks at her garden as a vast canvas.
Friends helped the garden move along: Stewart Holbrook (author of “The Moguls”) came east from Oregon with blue primroses, and the pool set these; the late Louis Adamic (“From Many Lands”) came with dill from his place in New Jersey.
It was set in the vegetable garden where it has flowered and reseeded for a decade among the giant pink, red and yellow zinnias Ruth grows for cutting. Lewis remembers each gift made to the hillside though the plants there may be several generations removed from the original clumps.
New England Wildflowers
Lewis brought in New England wildflowers—trillium, arbutus, Dutchman’s breeches, hepaticas, snakeroot, and cohosh—and set them in log-edged beds in leafy woods’ soil.
His particular pets are tiny, lime-loving ferns. For these, he lugged limestone boulders from the valley below.
Lewis’ New England background also is seen in his tidy, well-mulched vegetable plot, which produces squash, tomatoes, and even lima beans (not usual in northwestern Connecticut gardens) for the table, the freezer, and visitors. Ruth’s good hand is seen here too.
Running through the short, precise rows of beautifully grown cabbage, broccoli, and eggplant, are more giant zinnias. The high fence, which keeps deer and woodchucks out of this weekend garden when the Gannetts are in New York, is covered with nasturtiums and morning glories.
So the Gannett garden grew and grew. Ruth’s imagination pictures it as “just a mite extended here and there,” and some more land is cultivated. The result is an exuberant color that shifts from place to place over the weeks and months.
First, it appears in the rock garden where, among other goodies, drifts of daffodils circle the largest rocks and nod to themselves in a tiny pool at the edge of some woods, and sheets of dwarf phlox and basket-of-gold flash in the sun. Then it shows nearer the house in perennial borders filled with tulips, iris, and delphiniums.
Climbing Roses In June
In June, the roadside comes alive with climbing roses, and butterfly weed bursts into flame against two rock walls that once flanked the old dirt road and now make a perfect background for flower beds.
An important item in this garden economy is a 100’ foot terrace of compost at the base of the original rock garden, built through the years by deposits of weeds and leaves.
The Gannetts have blended it into the landscape close to operations and saved themselves many steps to and fro while accumulating topsoil.
Ruth recently devised a new technique. She now banks composting material behind taller plants in perennial borders.
Long lengths of plastic hose stretching to the farthermost corner also figure importantly in the Gannett economy, saving steps and time and ensuring transplanting success.
Because Ruth can get water to transplants in a second, she can move as many as 25 clumps of orange primroses in full bloom to make them part of a composition close to the deep coppery ones down the hill.
As soon as she plunks them in, she can turn a fine spray on them and keep it going until the soil they are in is soaked and they feel completely at home. Orange, by the way, is a favorite at the Gannetts for itself, and because their garden is large and so vivid, a color carries great distances.
Ruth’s Secret Weapon
Lewis uses ordinary tools, but Ruth has a secret weapon—a bayonet trowel, a relic of the Spanish-American war. The fine balance between its wooden handle and 10” inch blade makes it easy to use despite the weight of the steel in it.
She can lift the smallest seedling out of the most crowded flat with the pointed end. Yet the 4” inch-broad shank of the tool is strong enough to raise a large rock or pry out the roots of a fair-sized tree. With the bayonet trowel, too, she turns the soil into new beds, then frees it of roots and weeds by hand.
Principles About Preparing Soil Before Planting
Gannett is not fanatic about any particular method, but both have principles about preparing the soil before planting. Plants are bound to succeed in a bed ready for them, and weeding in such a bed is reduced to nothing.
They have evolved a pragmatic approach that includes fertilizers and compost and plants that like Cream Hill but are not especially liked by deer, chipmunks, woodchucks, and other fauna that visit at night.
They both find dusting and spraying a bore but dust and spray when forced. Recently, when a dry spell caused a great infestation of red mites among the primroses, Ruth did drive Lewis to spray at the point of her bayonet trowel.
Both Gannetts, too, are consistent gardeners. They need to work in fits and starts. No matter how many house guests Ruth may have or how many huge meals she has to produce for a weekend, she manages to get some gardening in.
Even in the rain, she steals out to the garden, even if it is drizzling, while her guests are napping or occupied for an hour or two.
Garden Parties
They give parties often, too, and always hope to give one in May for the rock garden though sometimes their gardening frenzy prevents it.
Friends from the city and neighbors (the butcher and the farmer from up the hill, Irita Van Doren, the literary editor, from next door three-quarters of a mile away.
Mark Van Doren, the poet from over the hill, and his son Charles who has made the little community even more famous than his illustrious kin) may turn up.
A lot of good may come out of garden parties. The talk may turn to local politics and momentous community affairs; if need be, something is done the next day about whatever needs doing.
The preservation of the wonderful old covered bridge in West Cornwall was brought to the attention of the proper authorities by a letter to a newspaper concocted at a Gannett party.
In speaking of their old farmhouse in “Cream Hill,” Lewis says, “No Gannett has been born in the house, and none has died there. We are, after all, only summer or weekend residents, and it takes something deeper than that to establish the kind of title which goes by word of mouth.
Anybody with a few dollars to spend can get his name inscribed in the tax books, but establishing one’s name as a part of the local landscape is another matter.”
Lewis is wrong, as anyone in the village will tell you. He and Ruth have inscribed their names on their hill and all the hills around them.
Proof of this is the community’s pleasure in them and theirs. Last autumn, when Lewis retired after 28 years with the Tribune, he received several awards and tributes to his work in the city—Cornwall Town Committees made him moderator of the upcoming elections. He and Ruth were most pleased by this local tribute.
44659 by Gertrude Foster