Holds upon Happiness

by Diana Studer 

 - gardening for biodiversity 

in Cape Town, South Africa

My mother taught me to love reading. Not TO read, although one of my earliest memories, is going round the flat asking two parents and three sisters to read to me. But no one would. So little Diana curled up in a big chair. And read. A whole book. All by myself. My mother, at 97 in 2010, was still reading voraciously and shared this with me.

Eve Palmer and roses from June 2010
Little wooden Dutch doll was my mother's

Eve Palmer wrote gardening books which are a delight to read, for the joy of her words, and the gentle illustrations. This one, written in 1989, is – Under the olives, a book of garden pleasures. Her preface …

Dark Danish cat from Jurg's sister
blonde cat (for bookshelf) found on the spine of England in the Pennines

I woke at three o’clock one morning and heard a turtle dove calling in the darkness.

Three can be a bad hour full of troubled ghosts and formless cares, but not this time. I lay, delight slowly spreading from the heart to the head, to my fingers and toes, listening to the bird – surely the bird of Africa – singing in the night.

It was still calling when dawn came. I stood at the window looking out at the trees taking on form and shape with the light and listening, not only to the dove, but to the chirruping of innumerable small birds among the leafy branches. To have a garden to enjoy tree-tops and birds and other such things – what good fortune! And there came into my mind words that I had read in a journal of the Royal Horticultural Society a little while before written by a hard-bitten and unsentimental gardener. They were “Holds upon happiness”, the things that had brought him particular pleasure in his garden.

When they can momentarily forget water rationing and drought, cutworms and rust, the state of the world and time for weeping, all gardeners know they have them, these “holds” that light the day, and it is good for the temper, the flesh and the spirit to consider them and sometimes to parade them.

Books, ah yes, they follow me home mum!

Garden books and cat books and ...

My mother did not Google to track down a quotation. She simply read widely, thought it sounded familiar and tracked it down to its source – in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. First published in 1818, the year after she died. It is in Chapter 22.

Rain daisies in July 2010

Heart leaf on Hibiscus tiliaceus

‘But now you love a hyacinth. So much the better. You have gained a new source of enjoyment, and it is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible. Besides, a taste for flowers is always desirable in your sex, as a means of getting you out of doors, and tempting you to more frequent exercise than you would otherwise take: and though the love of a hyacinth may be rather domestic, who can tell, the sentiment once raised, but you may in time come to love a rose?’

Clouds on a May 2008 evening

I pick the open roses ahead of fierce weather. Left in the garden, rain will reduce them to porridge. History. Ancient, not modern. But so they are a hold upon happiness to us.

Winter in July 2009

In 2010 I borrowed these books from my mother, when Jack of Sequoia Gardens commented - Ah, Diana... what a lovely post! How I enjoyed it!
Eve Palmer is the person in this world I most regret not meeting... especially as only weeks before her death I discovered that the Serina she speaks of as her 'young friend' was in fact the Serina I knew as a student - because I remet her at a friend's home. She was going to take me to meet Eve and see her garden, but it never happened and the garden too is lost to development...
I dip into her books regularly...

Pictures by Diana and Jurg Studer  
of  Elephant's Eye on False Bay 

(If you mouse over teal blue text, it turns seaweed red.
Those are my links.
To read or leave comments, either click the word Comments below,
or click this post's title)