Thoreau’s Garden

Thoreau’s Garden by Peter Loewer is an engaging book, but it takes a little while to figure out what the author is intending with it. Chapters are devoted to various plants discussed by Thoreau—most but not all of them flowers—and are generously peppered with quotations from the Journal and expert discussion by the author (an experienced botanist and gardening author) and illustrated with the author’s own pen and ink drawings.

Beginning with the serviceberry, Thoreau’s Garden also covers the bog rosemary, bearberry, swamp pink, jack-in-the-pulpit, milkweed, aster, barberry, cardoon, jimsonweed, horsetail, joe-pye weed, rose hibiscus, desmodium, false foxglove, turtlehead, dyer’s greenweed, wild geranium, bluet, water lily, puffball, earthstar, and more.

Yet this is a far from exhaustive list of the plants Thoreau wrote about. The shrub oak, for instance, is missing, though Thoreau had warmer feelings toward it than probably any other plant. ("I love and could embrace the shrub oak with its scanty garment of leaves rising above the snow, lowly whispering to me...")

The scarlet oak is also missing, as well as the maple and all the other trees that supplied the material for his essay on Autumnal Tints—as well as the apple tree, which was the subject of its own essay. But Loewer has not deliberately left out the trees, since the hemlock has a chapter.

On page 70, Loewer reveals at least some of what he’s about. After commenting on how he (and Thoreau) like the barberry despite its disagreeable smell, he goes on:

That’s why it’s good that Thoreau’s Garden is a garden of the mind. The small pool is kept full by a waterfall that ripples along, fed by a hidden spring, glistening as it turns and tumbles over rocks. Perfect ferns arch over the pool and everything is shaded by a towering three-hundred-year-old tulip tree. And there’s a comfortable rush chair that is impervious to the elements, a chair for dreaming and thinking, a chair for idleness. Surrounding this garden is an impermeable hedge of common barberry, protecting me from the world, just as in ages past hedges ringed farms to keep out the wild.

This, then, is a book created to realize the author’s vision of an ideal Thoreauvian garden. He has included what he wants and excluded what he doesn’t care to write about (including that tulip tree). He has made room for well-chosen quotations from Thoreau on sexual relations, water and water bugs, the tourist sights of New York City, and many other matters. Not everything is here, or meant to be here, but what’s here is presented with charm and affection.