Everything is late in this reluctant spring, so I have an easy time keeping up with the garden chores. A couple of sunny afternoons made me decide it was time to restore the rose bed and its surrounding lavender hedge to their former excellence and to cut back the other purple bloomers. They’re all highly treasured. The bluebeards for their late flowering and the buddleias for their profuse bloom and heavy fragrance, which hold a magnetic attraction to butterflies. I also cleared the ground under the cottage box bread and the other shrub beds. The new plants all seem to be doing fine. A row of St. John's wort bushes (Hypericum H. ‘Hidcote’) will soon be coming around for the first time together with a queen bush (Kolkwitzia Amabilis ‘Syvdal’) a star top bush (Deutzia Mag.‘Magicien’) and a bell bush (Weigela Hyb. ‘Carnival’). The queen bush and the star top bush will begin blooming in June in pink and rose and the bell bush will add more tints of rose from July until October.

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CONFESSIONS OF A COMMON READER

I have been reading Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris, Confessions of a Common Reader (1998). It’s a funny collection of her writings on book folks and their various idiosyncrasies. I enjoyed the essay on sesquipedalia, long words. She had to look up the word ‘diapason’ as I did when I came across it in Peter Ustinov’s autobiography Dear Me (1977), so that brightened up my day. It’s nice to have company in your ignorance. I think Ustinov’s autobiography introduced me to twice as many new words as Carl Van Vechten’s Tiger in the House (1920) did to Fadiman. She ascribes her affection for long, mysterious words to their beauty and ability to create associations. Her children also have a lot of fun playing with them, she tells. It’s much in accordance with an observation in Ruined by Reading, A Life in Books (1996) by Lynne Sharon Schwartz that with reading there’s also a sense of magic, especially if you have begun reading at an early age:

“Because I read when I could still believe in magic, reading was magical, not merely breaking a code or translating one set of symbols into another. The idea of translatability was itself magical, and so it remains. Semiotics, before it became a formal branch of study, was the sleight-of-hand way of the world: signs and things, things and signs, layered, sometimes jumbled, partners in a dance of allusion.”


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