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Dr. Leda's Rose Journal |
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Falling Off the Guilt Wagon
Dr. Leda vanquishes the neo-puritans...
By Dr. Leda Horticulture, O. R.
December, 2003
There's a wonderful little horticultural vignette in Harper Lee's Pulitzer-winning novel To Kill A Mockingbird, starring the Finches' irreproachable spinster neighbor Miss Maudie Atkinson. Miss Maudie is an avid gardener whose yard is "ablaze with summer flowers." One day, a wagon-load of stern-faced religious zealots passes her house, and a shrill-voiced woman points at the yard and calls out in pious disapproval: "He that cometh in vanity departeth in darkness!" Miss Maudie, wearing "a grin of the uttermost wickedness" and possessing her own formidable command of King James scripture, hollers back: "A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance!" The grim moralists purse their lips at the impertinent she-devil and speed away, as fast as their old mules will pull them.
Most serious rose lovers have probably taken Miss Maudie's side in a similar debate at one time or another. We may have been heckling back at modern-day politically-correct versions of her foot-washin' fundamentalists, or merely conversing with those harsh little Voices of Judgment that rattle around inside our own skulls. Either way, we have felt the need to defend our beautiful and beloved roses as accusations of vanity, frivolity, irrelevance, hedonism, decadence, and other direly unattractive vices are flung at their innocent and perfectly pedicured little feet.
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| 'Fourth of July' in December |
"Roses?" the ascetic puritans scoff. "Who has time for roses? Those silly things are much too high-maintenance for me. Why bother growing something you can't even eat? Native plants are so much less wasteful. You have how many roses? Well I hate to think how much you've spent. You should have planted Ligustrums; at least evergreens would increase your property value. You're just trying to impress a bunch of uptown snobs at some hoity-toity rose society."
I always try to explain how much I enjoy the time I spend cultivating my roses, that they bring me so much pleasure, that I'm not trying to impress but to delight my friends and neighbors. I usually refrain from citing Miss Maudie's scripture, however, since I find it somewhat challenging to maintain a cheerful countenance when I'm grinding my teeth to powder in frustration over critics who have already stuffed their fingers in their ears and sped away on their figurative mules.
It's too easy to make us feel guilty and defensive. We're unwitting heirs to those collective cultural convictions passed down by our Puritan forbearers: the deep-seated belief that all sensory pleasures are sinful; that style is inimical to practicality; that beauty is superficial, superfluous, and dangerously deceitful. But this is really a delusion based on a false dichotomy.
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| Red roses at Christmas |
Now in order to illustrate my point, I'm afraid I'm going to have to share a shocking confession: I, Dr. Leda Horticulture, am addicted to shoes. Yes, shoes! I adore them. I know, I know: how frivolous, how shallow. So I'm a Philistine. Anyway, when I lived in Berkeley (sometimes affectionately referred to as "Birkenstockeley"), I used to see a bumper sticker around town that said, "Life Is Too Short For Uncomfortable Shoes." One day I quipped to a friend, "Sure, but life is also too short for ugly, boring shoes."
My friend was aghast at my unenlightened attitude. "Do you have any idea what 6" stilettos will do to your spine?" she gasped. "Not to mention your arches! We might as well go back to the days of foot-binding." As if the only two choices in the universe were to suffer painful disfigurement or to clomp around in dreadful but "sensible" shoes. And of course only the shallowest, vainest, most pathetic puppet of the patriarchy would care about the way her shoes looked.
These assumptions may have been valid several decades ago, when dinosaurs like my Great Aunt Agnes roamed the earth wearing shoes so hideous they could stop clocks and traumatize small children. But the world has since plunged head-first into a new Golden Age of Aesthetic Awareness, where everyday objects from toasters to tea kettles to trash cans bear the signatures of famous designers, and ordinary people demand a cornucopia of choices in color and style.
Oh, if only poor Aunt Agnes (rest her soul) could go shoe shopping today! Imagine her joy, trying on pair after pair of shoes that are not only comfortable and practical but also colorful, whimsical, imaginative, sexy, artistic, and timelessly beautiful. Picture the sheer, girlish glee on her 112-year-old face if she could dance down the street in cute Camper maryjanes, or kick around in stylish Cydwoq ankle boots, or pitch the woo in a fetching pair of Icon slingbacks. It does the heart good, doesn't it?
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| An old white tea rose in December |
This same Miraculous Explosion of Fabulous Choices has rocked the rose world as well. Our options are no longer limited to either spending 24 hours a day slaving over some histrionic neurotic hybrid tea, or growing rutabagas. There are so many more roses available today than could be dreamed of twenty years ago, from the voluptuous, fragrant Austin roses with their myriad imitators, to all the new everblooming maintenance-free landscape roses. Hundreds of lovely antique roses that had nearly become extinct are now back on the market, and the mad-scientist rose hybridizers are working 'round the clock in their high-tech labs to develop exotic new varieties that will make our heads spin and our socks go up and down. Even a humble peasant like me can throw together a rose garden that would make Empress Josephine green with delight.
Gadfly journalist and social critic H. L. Mencken once defined puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." Well, I'll tell you what: if the puritans ever get hold of my rose list for 2004, they'll be quaking in their sensible shoes.
The joyful, creative urge to enrich our lives by decorating and adorning ourselves and our surroundings has been with humans since prehistoric times, and it always seems to find a way to thwart those who would repress it. If you stop to think about it, it's probably one of our nobler, or at least more benign, urges. So what the heck. Maybe it's finally time for us to embrace this innate aspect of humanity, to let go of guilt and shamelessly enjoy our beautiful shoes and roses, toasters and teapots, not to mention rich spicy eggnog served in exquisitely perfect handcrafted Italian mugs.
'Tis the season, dear readers: let's hurl ourselves off the guilt wagon, and spread the joy! May you all have merry hearts, as you plant the roses of your dreams.
