Welcome to Litsy!

I‘ve always had a fondness of wild, unkept English gardens with stone walls. There are some beautiful passages in this book about the human condition that are expressed in the language of wild, growing things. The main character leaves a hollowing London and finds herself in such a garden, tasked with growing food for wartime. The garden meets her with mystery surprise, and ghosts, leading her to go deeper into her relationship with the ⬇️

The thing about gardens is that everyone thinks they go on growing, that in winter they sleep and in spring they rise. But it‘s more that they die and return, die and return. They lose themselves. They haunt themselves. Every story is a story about death. But perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love. And this is what I have remembered of love.

The language of roses shifts like sand under our feet. It blows in and out like the wind. It carries the fragrance of the flower and then it is gone. Rugosa. Canina. Arvensis. It is how we learn to speak about something that is disappearing as we say its name. It is a trick, a false comfort. Humilis. It is what we think we need to know and how we think it needs to be known. Involuta. It is where we want to go, this name, and stay⬇️

Sometimes our passion is our ruin. The thing with roses is that they were just too unmanageable for Ellen Willmott—indeed, for any single person—to pin down and categorize, to fix on the page. They kept fluctuating, changing their names and associations, refusing to lie still. The roses kept growing, even on paper. They were a living language. And Ellen Willmott couldn‘t hope to contain them. What I love about The Genus Rosa is that it⬇️

The Garden of Loss blooms in May. It is a simpler construction than the Garden of Longing. It contains fewer species, but more plants. The middle of the three gardens, it begins with a great, breaking wave of peonies. The blooms are white and pale pink, grow upright for now, giant buttons of brilliance festooning green leafy tunics. But soon their heads will become too heavy for the thin, weed-like stalks on which they rise with such⬇️

The plant not yet in bloom is lavender. I love lavender. What is more potent than to have that scent on your fingers as you leave the garden? To rub your hands over the leaves, so that all day, as you do your duties, the dying smell will remind you, will make you feel longing all over again. Dead flowers keep their fragrance. And with lavender on them, it is as though your hands become dead flowers themselves, losing the living scent little⬇️

I was dreaming of a great tangle of roses, and when I woke, the first thing I saw was roses. That wooden arch above my head was a bower entwined with roses. A mass of roses. All on fire.

He settles back in his chair, a skitter of worry across his handsome face. If he were a flower, he would be something magnificent. A giant indigo-blue delphinium. A flower that knows, and practices, how to be in love with itself.

Some of the roses mentioned in the book.
R. Egalanteria
R. Arvensis
R. Rugosa
R. Phoenicia

On summer days, with my window open, I could smell the rubbish quite strongly, often mistaking it for the odors of my parsnip specimens. But I was left alone there. I did not have to fuss with people, only parsnips.

(I know what she‘s saying, but this is what I see in my mind🤣)