Gently Pleading for Chaos
Leafless grey landscape and a cup of breakfast tea steaming beside an easy chair; a cozy enough setting for revisiting some gentle chaos. In 1989, Mirabel Osler published A Gentle Plea for Chaos, a slim volume incorporating several of her articles about gardening. Born in London in 1925, she and her husband, Michael, lived in Thailand and Corfu, and eventually they settled down in Shropshire. There they pottered about for nine years at their garden. As her book was appearing in print, Michael died, and she died twenty-seven years later.
Her book’s title derives from that of one of her articles, an essay appearing as part of her book’s third chapter. Before getting too far in discussing her book, we must keep in mind that despite tangents where she meanders through French or Japanese gardens, she is musing on a very English concept of gardening. For gardeners whose wistful winter-time thoughts of planting and cultivating center around drawing up plans for seeding regimented rows of herbs and vegetables, this book will probably disappoint.
Instead, Osler spent her bleak winter days mulling over where to plant new saplings, whether to build another mortarless stone wall, or what rhizomes to plant along the stone steps leading to their pond. For her, flowers were in clay pots on a flagstone patio and rambling around borders. Vegetables she apparently bought each week at market.
While not an overtly religious writer, Osler does allude to the Garden of Eden, and she is aware of limitations to human creativity and imagination. Along with divine omnipotence and omniscience, she seems to say, goes a kind of audacity. “If in your wildest, most creative, moments,” she challenges us, “you had invented a rose, would you have had the recklessness to add scent?”
She also mentions the patron saint of gardeners, Saint Fiacre de Breuil, a seventh-century Irish priest who became a hermit just east of Paris. “Shouldn’t we each have a small figure of him,” she asks, “blessing our gardens from some secluded corner?” With reference to a commercial fertilizer, she adds, “A little homage to this gentle saint, who is usually shown either holding his spade or digging, might be just as efficacious as a blast of Phostrogen about the place.”
When surveying a series of explorers who collected plants, she includes some priests. However, given her interest in such adventurous men, she passes over one of the most famous botanist priests, the sedately cloistered Gregor Mendel. One priest she does highlight, Pierre le Chéron d’Incarville, was an eighteenth-century Jesuit who traveled to China and collected numerous plant specimens, among them a kind of mimosa.
“Priests and botanizing seem to weld harmoniously,” she writes, introducing an anecdote about a Jesuit who took the Oslers searching for orchids in the jungles of Laos. Although she omits his name, she describes him as “tall and fine as bamboo” and “accompanied rather incongruously by his cocker spaniel.” As his cassock “kept catching on thorns, his visionary eye was fixed on the congested foliage overhead” so that, “like other botanists we’ve met, his eyes saw things almost before they became apparent.”
Her intrepid fascination with orchids notwithstanding, Osler’s gentle pleading for chaos returns her to English gardens. “The corrosive vice of trimness,” she laments, “infiltrates everywhere.” She longs for plants cropping up on their own. “Let’s accept random seeding,” she implores, granting that “formality is pleasing in parks, imperative at Versailles and restful in courtyards, but why not let country churchyards be sanctuaries for wild flowers?”
While gently arguing for more cottage gardens in England, the vast spaces in the United States amazed Osler. For all her travels around the Mediterranean and in what in her day was called the Orient, she seems to have missed out touring in North America. She looked at lush illustrations in books about American gardens, and she wondered what it really must be like to garden in each state.
“And that state with the most beautiful name,” she writes, “Pennsylvania (a word whose first syllable should be uttered on an indrawn breath—while sylvania is released like a sigh), has, I’m positive, places worth leaving home for.” She had read about botanical gardens there, and she asks, “what colours are to be seen in the Longwood Gardens of Pennsylvania, among the rolling hills?” No doubt she would have enjoyed strolling through those thousand horticultural acres just west of Philadelphia, and she would also have savored the smaller Hershey Gardens. Begun as the private rose garden of the wife of chocolate maker Milton Hershey, it is now open to the public and sprawls across a hillside overlooking the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Apparently not a Tory, Osler was baffled when a fellow gardening enthusiast, admiring Osler’s articles, said she tracked her down through the Conservative Society. “That’s odd,” Osler said, “because I don’t belong. Never have.” Maybe Osler’s fan meant a Conservation Society, but Osler’s case for gardens that are not methodically contrived or immaculately manicured calls to mind that patriarch of Conservatism, Edmund Burke. In 1757 he published an essay on the sublime and beautiful, wherein he regretted the trend that extended geometric regularity in architecture to gardens.
According to him, designers then transferring their ideas to gardens “turned their trees into pillars, pyramids, and obelisks; they formed their hedges into so many green walls, and fashioned their walks into squares, triangles, and other mathematical figures, with exactness and symmetry.” As Burke saw it, “they thought, if they were not imitating, they were at least improving nature, and teaching her to know her business.”
Regardless of such human effort, Burke noted that unkempt gardens prevailed. “Nature,” he reported, “has at last escaped from their discipline and their fetters; and our gardens, if nothing else, declare, we begin to feel that mathematical ideas are not the true measures of beauty.” More than thirty years later, he was contrasting the scientific plottings of the French Revolutionaries, violently resetting a long-established social order, with the intuitive ploddings of his fellow Englishmen, content to let their culture develop organically.
Whether either Osler voted in patterns that Burke would have endorsed, their approach to gardening would have won his approval. Leafy untidiness that lets Providence have a hand would be their ideal. While many will dispute the claim that “God is an Englishman,” none will deny that God is a gardener.