The prettiest garden flowers can be emotionally hazardous.
Gardeners are prone to an overwhelming obsession with their plants. The history of human plant lunacy is long, including the tulip mania, orchid fever and fern craze of earlier centuries. Even little verbena once excited the passions of gardeners.
Today is no different, judging from the titles of recent books: Des Kennedy's The Passionate Gardener: Adventures of an Ardent Green Thumb (Greystone, $16.95), William Alexander's The $64 Tomato (Algonquin, $13.95), James Dodson's Beautiful Madness (Plume, $15 paperback) and James Raimes' Gardening at Ginger: My Seven-Year Obsession With Designing and Planting a Personal Landscape (Houghton Mifflin, $23).
Aurelia Scott's Otherwise Normal People profiles "rosaholics" – people fixated on growing and exhibiting roses. They grow not a few, but hundreds in even nonconducive settings. A few of them brave bodily injury to "rustle" (save) abandoned antique roses, while others willingly exhaust their time, energy and bank accounts for a chance to compete for a mere ribbon.
The personal lives of rosaholics are determined entirely by their plants. "There's a sad story behind every rose garden," observes a knowing rosarian in Ms. Scott's book. Just as sad stories lead to undertaking rose gardens, the gardens themselves can lead to sad stories.
Marriages can wilt and fail in rose gardens – after all, passionate rose-growers have found their one true love. But sometimes rose gardens can inspire marriages, though these unions endure only when strict protocols for spousal interaction in the garden are clearly defined.
While fellow rose-lovers talk incessantly to each other about their mutual interest and share garden secrets, they are never close. They are, Ms. Scott reports, "simply disinterested in one another's non-rose lives." Roses are their lives, period.
Ms. Scott writes beautifully and compassionately about the rose-afflicted. Fascinating facts emerge in her profiles, such as how the world of roses is dominated by men, how rose aficionados hold more meetings than any other group, how old roses (those hybridized before 1867) have virtually no value to rosaholics, how hard it is to cross red roses and how rattlesnakes use rose bushes to shed their skins.
Otherwise Normal People offers no remedies. It also (alas) has no index – so keep a pencil handy to mark passages you will want to revisit or read aloud to a friend.
Bill Scheick is a garden writer and professor of American literature and culture at the University of Texas at Austin.