Chronicling A Gardeners’

Work Of A Lifetime

 

By Shannon Hicks

Sydney Eddison has lived in her home for 50 years. She has done all the things a person does while spending such an extended time in a single home, both happy and sad. She spent most of those years with her beloved husband Martin, hosted countless gatherings of family and friends, and established a very successful career as gardener, author, and lecturer. There has also been heartbreak, including Martin’s death five years ago.

During her 50 years in Newtown, Mrs Eddison has also created and maintained a magnificent garden, which has had its own series of ups and downs.

Gardening for a Lifetime: How to Garden Wiser as You Grow Older, Mrs Eddison’s seventh book, is not a memoir, but is instead a book that shares the life of the garden that has grown and changed right along with the author over its lifetime. It offers ideas for those who are themselves aging and realizing that the idea of a garden with perfectly trimmed edges may no longer be a dream to hold on to, that softer edges can look just as beautiful.

In spite of this, it is not just a tome for those who have already retired or are approaching that time of life. Gardening for a Lifetime (April 2010, Timber Press, 204 pages, hardcover, $19.95) is equally enjoyable for those who want to garden but hesitate, concerned they do not have the time due to family or professional obligations.

“It’s the story of the garden, and the garden is a very large part of my life. They’re inseparable, really,” Mrs Eddison, a certified master gardener, said one recent afternoon, sitting at a small round table in front of a set of glass doors that overlooks a porch filled with containers of every shape and size and out to the upper lawn. Nearby, as always, was her canine companion, a Jack Russell named Phoebe. “It’s the place where I live. It’s the place where Martin and I lived, very happily, for 45 years.”

Mrs Eddison’s new book shares the story of her garden, as well as her life while living and growing with the garden that she loved working in, even if her husband did not always understand her enthusiasm.

“Martin was a lovely man with more patience than Job, a wicked wit, and a gentle nature,” she wrote in an early chapter of Gardening for a Lifetime. “He grew up in Yorkshire, England, where his mother had a beautiful garden. While he admired it and always waxed nostalgic about the sweet peas that grew against its brick walls, he hadn’t the least desire to work in the garden. Manual labor simply wasn’t his idea of fun, and he was baffled by my enthusiasm for what seemed to him drudgery.”

Sydney Eddison has always loved the drudgery of her garden. She has lived — sometimes enthusiastically, other times with disappointment — through demanding plants that need constant attention, the heartbreak of losing favorite trees, the joy of spring’s first blossoms, and even the triumph, she writes in the new book’s preface, “of a yellow lady slipper’s first bloom.”

In the past, Mrs Eddison’s books have focused on gardening and maintenance in the winter (1995’s The Unsung Season), using color confidently (2002’s The Gardener’s Palette), the unexpected joys and advantages of container gardens (2005’s Gardens to Go), and even offering step-by-step guidance for those who know they want to enter the magical world of growing things but do not know where to start (The Self-Taught Gardener, 1997).

Now she continues to do what she has always done so well: She is writing about something she knows very well. She has also worked once again in the companionable writing style that makes her books feel like one is sitting down and chatting with a dear friend.

“It’s about staying in one place, and how the view changed dramatically over 50 years,” she said. “It’s also about choice. Mine is to stay here, only to be removed feet first.”

As she approaches her fourth score of life (still a few years away…), Mrs Eddison remains realistic about her body and its limitations.

“The essence is about change in a garden of this many years. The changes have been enormous. The same is true for me,” she said, laughing.

Over the course of 16 chapters, Gardening for a Lifetime covers types of plants, learning to accept help, and learning to accept imperfection, picking battles, container gardens, woodland gardens, and taking steps toward simplicity, among other subjects the author has lived through.

Each chapter is devoted to a single subject, filled with anecdotes and growing tips. And then each closes with a collection of gleanings, in which readers are offered brief recaps of what they have just learned.

“The story tells you how I arrived at certain conclusions, and then these, the gleanings, are things I think will help people,” she said.

The inspiration for this book came in part from an article Mrs Eddison wrote for Fine Gardening magazine that also covered the idea of reducing garden maintenance.

“It’s very unusual for me to receive letters anymore, but I received about a dozen after that one,” she said. “There are so many people in the same boat.

“It isn’t for want of desire,” she continued. “It’s just less time or energy. It’s about working until you bump into something and suddenly you realize ‘Oh, I can’t do this anymore.’ This is all about trying to do it differently.

“Martin always wanted to know when the garden would be finished,” she said. “I finally got him to understand to this is a concept that is not seen by a gardener. We are never truly ‘done.’”

Tea With The Gardener & Illustrator

To celebrate the publication of Gardening for a Lifetime, The Garden Club of Newtown will host high tea at The Dana-Holcombe House this weekend. Mrs Eddison and fellow Newtown resident Kimberly Day Proctor, who provided the illustrations for the new book, will both be in attendance.

The program will run from 3 to 5 pm on Sunday, May 2. Mrs Eddison will offer readings from the new book at 3:15, followed by tea at 4. Ms Day Proctor will have many of the original designs that were used in the book, and garden club members will have floral arrangements to complement the illustrations.

The reading will be accompanied by a slide presentation that will show the Eddison property from the time Sydney and Martin moved in back in 1960, where the four-acre piece of property was little more than tall grass and woods. It took five years for the Eddisons to clear the land, in fact. Slides will show the transformation and appearance of stone walls and the first evergreen garden.

Tickets are $20, and reservations are required; contact Garden Club President Beth Caldwell at 203-994-4849 to make one.

The Dana-Holcombe House is at 29 Main Street, Newtown.