In The Garden: Fashion and Passion

Breeders and sellers know what pushes our buttons. And we make their jobs easier by being drawn to extremes. We’ll line up to buy daffodils, say, that have the biggest, bustiest blossoms … and also those with the most minute. We love our old faithfuls, yet we can’t wait to experiment. I’m a prime example. I’m a total sucker for the latest lisianthus and just-off-the-presses portulaca. And yet I also find antiquity alluring. A decade back, when “heirloom roses” were the rage, I bought in to the tune of half a dozen bushes. Three died; three remain. One, ‘Mme. Isaac Pereire,’ has been an unqualified success, throwing huge, blowsy magenta flowers with a powerful raspberry scent from May through September. The others … not so much. My actual favorite is pretty pink ‘Queen  of Denmark,’ for its incredibly lovely fragrance and perfect quartered form. Alas, it only blooms for about 10 minutes in early June.
 
The truth is, roses are a pain. But then, all of gardening is a pain. To keep us out there — keep us digging and weeding and watering and mulching — horticulture centers and breeders and the catalog kings employ every weapon at their disposal. They hire wordsmiths who craft exquisite descriptions of the most mundane plant life. (“Fills entire beds with dazzling color!”) They employ skilled photographers who can make a sow’s ear look like a star. (I once bought a dozen very expensive bulbs of a variety of flower that had blossoms — though there was no clue to this from the photo — smaller than my pinkie fingernail.) They create fads — remember the contest Burpee ran for decades promising $10,000 to anyone who could grow a true white marigold? They lead us on, sure, but we play along.
 
We know the dangling carrot of newer, bigger, better isn’t always trustworthy. We prove it by regularly deviating in the opposite direction, back toward the unimproved, the untampered-with, the holier, truer, purer grails that Grandma grew. We buy into the legends — the Mortgage-Lifter Tomato, so huge that its hybridizer paid his off in six years — and those romantic antique names (forget-me-not, love-in-a-mist, love-lies-bleeding) that ring of hope and despair. So it continues, the constant battle between old and newfangled. Both have their claims on gardeners’ hearts. We are entranced by the promise of a fresh form of begonia, a revolutionary rose (will there ever be a true blue?), any exotic rainforest anomaly that’s brought to our attention. Yet at the same time, we cling to the tried-and-true — sweetly unassuming alyssum, dainty violets, downright retro columbine.
 
Comfort versus challenge. The solace of the familiar set against the seductiveness of the great unknown. It seems to be human nature to seek a balance between the two, or at least to veer wildly from one to the next. The dichotomy likely reaches as far back as Eden, to a crafty serpent hissing, “Sure, sure, the peaches are lovely, and so are the pears. But hey, you’ve really got to try this new apple.”