One morning, maybe while taking out the garbage or picking up an errant flyer that has anchored itself under a dormant shrub, you find yourself migrating into the garden.
I suppose you feel it the same way a robin does.
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That strange magnetic impulse that dictates your behaviour without you even recognizing it.
One morning, maybe while taking out the garbage or picking up an errant flyer that has anchored itself under a dormant shrub, you find yourself migrating into the garden. It’s just a quick look-see — a cursory inventory. You’re not gardening, per se, but just checking on the canes of the roses. Your eye catches on the tiny buds nestling upon the woody stalks you missed when you pruned them in the fall. You wonder: Is it too late to hack out those superannuated rose canes, or do you let them soldier on, glory bound? You are then distracted by the brown asterisks of last year’s rhododendron blooms that beg to be flicked off under chartreuse new growth.
You start with the rhodos. Deadwood breaks in your hand without much effort — oddly satisfying. You notice the camellias are getting too spindly for their own good. That will have to be attended to. You’re probably in slippers. You are wearing your kitchen sweater and it seems more than enough. The late winter sun, feeble but effective, soon has you knotting that sweater around your waist. It suddenly dawns on you that, what was supposed to be a hasty detour, is evolving into a full-fledged gardening session, the first of the season.
You force yourself back indoors. I mean, slippers, for gawdsakes! At least dig out the gardening clogs. And the gloves. Promise yourself that this year you will always, always wear gardening gloves — but know, secretly, deep inside your soul, that you will rarely, rarely, if ever, wear those gardening gloves. Retrieve your favourite pruners, the ones you keep in the kitchen junk drawer. It’s a universal truth that the kitchen junk drawer is where you store all the really useful stuff, the stuff you want to keep tabs on. And there they are, tucked protectively inside the box they came in. The pruners you got as a Christmas present several years ago and for which you were as excited about as your 20-year-old self was about jewellery.
In my adult life, I’ve had several gardens. Each garden has always included a few marquee players. This, I figure, must be my third Sunsprite rose bush. It’s the only yellow plant I have in my garden, but it’s a mainstay, chosen equally for its brilliant sunshine shade, as well as its powerful fragrance. It’s mandatory that the garden includes sarcococca ruscifolia, also known as fragrant sweetbox. A knockout shrub, it blooms in the dead of winter with incidental little white flowers … but the fragrance, the fragrance. It’s like Elizabeth Taylor has dropped a bottle of her signature jungle gardenia perfume on the pavement. Overpowering. This compact little bush punches well above its weight and has been known to prompt passersby into asking, “What is that heavenly smell?”
Any garden I have simply must have peonies. For years now, I’ve babied a can-can line of peonies, keeping scissors at the ready for the early June rains that can so easily defeat them. I also favour shocks of blue. Ideally, any garden of mine will be punctuated by spires of delphiniums or monkshood. In keeping with my edict of fragrance, I’ll sew a batch of sweet peas come spring. These fragrant, floral butterflies I value most of all. I hoard them the way a miser hoards gold.
And so it begins. The season of accidental gardening is upon us.
This week’s question for readers:
Question: What is your horticultural specialty?
Last week’s question for readers:
Question: Any old-timey edibles that you miss?
• Date squares rank as one of my all-time favourites. I remember my mother making them when I was a child. When I make them I still use the recipe from the 1940s. Another classic was tomato soup cake. Eggs were scarce during the Second World War. A can of tomato soup took the place of eggs. The cake has spices and raisins. It is always moist. Another of my favourites.
Laurella Hay
• Mmmm … matrimonial squares. My favourite dessert. Store-bought edibles that I miss: Chocolate Wafers and Stoned Wheat Thins, both discontinued by Nabisco/Christie’s. And those big bags of Canadian puffed wheat and puffed rice that we used to find on the bottom shelf of the cereal aisle.
Bruno Bandiera
• Prairie lore from my (very) long-ago younger years was that if a woman made a good date square she was good marriage material. My sweet tooth longs for flapper pie — I think the recipe used to be on the box of graham crackers. Graham cracker crust, vanilla custard filling, and meringue topping.
Douglas Jameson
• Your column conjured up a memory that goes back many, many years to when I was in junior high school. My bosom pal and I were visiting her elderly grandmother. During the visit, the topic of matrimonial cake came up. She asked us whether we knew why it had that name. We shrugged our shoulders innocently. With a huge grin she announced, “It’s a date between two sheets!”
Ingrid Suderman
• My prairie mother always had glass bottles of cream on hand and, if it soured, she made what I considered to be the most delectable sour cream fudge. Two-to-one white sugar and sour cream, with a pinch of salt and a splash of vanilla. Not exactly a health food, but I loved to slowly savour as many pieces as I could cadge.
Pati Hill
• I read your piece on Matrimonial Squares (yes, my mother, grandmothers and aunts called them that). It brought back many memories of my childhood growing up in the wooded wilderness that was Surrey in the late ’60s and ’70s. I loved Matrimonial Squares as they signalled the beginning of the preparatory Christmas baking that would be done — one recipe per weekend and squirreled away in the deep freezer in the basement with dire admonitions to not touch them until they were brought out for Christmas fortnight. Another such recipe that I recall from those days that no one seems to make anymore is Confetti Slice. Only four ingredients. My mother would make the recipe and roll them into logs with oiled wax paper and store them in the fridge. She would then slice them into rounds just before serving. These easy, no-bake treats deserve a renaissance.
Joanne DeVries
• Stong’s sells delicious Matrimonial Squares — made in-house and often only a few packs of them for sale. I’ve been buying them for my 90-year-old mother for a few years. She loves them and we recently took them for tea to visit a friend. Our friend is American and doesn’t see them down in L.A. According to mom, her niece in Alberta makes the best ones. She adds lemon juice to the dates, which is apparently a game changer.
Monica Stekl
• When I came to Canada from England as a foreign student (the official term then) in the 1970s, I discovered raisin pie. I was asked in a diner if I wanted it “à la mode”, a term I hadn’t heard before. That’s when I discovered the joys of raisin pie with ice cream. I still miss it.
Madeleine Lefebvre
• One of my favourite memories is the chocolate fudge that my father and I would make. Dad would say, “Want to make some fudge?” and I always jumped at the offer. Together, we would mix the chocolate squares, milk, butter, sugar in a pot. When the soft ball stage was achieved, and the mixture cooled, the fun began as dad would beat the mixture furiously until it was creamy. The trick was to know when it was still pourable and would set in the buttered pie plate. There was a fine line between still pourable and having the fudge set rock hard in the pot, so we often chipped out chunks of the sugary, chocolatey treat.
Shelia Charneski
• Matrimonial Squares have never gone out of style at my house. I use my mother’s old recipe from Winnipeg, but I use half the amount of sugar in the date mixture (and they’re still plenty sweet) and I add some fresh orange juice and zest for a little taste of sunshine. I have a friend who recently celebrated her 83rd birthday and has everything she needs, so, the last few years for her birthday, I have made her a plate of date squares, which she has declared “the best present ever”.
Michele Libling