On Taste
So I started writing a(nother) learned disquisition on taste last week, but I don't have the energy to finish it. However, I wonder what you think about this fuschia: hot or not? It is ridiculous but endearing, and I change my mind about it several times a day.
I was going to note your likely surprise at the number of yuccas in Gertrude Jekyll's gardens, and then state the obvious: taste in the classical sense absolutely requires cold hard cash, in the form of land (lots of it), and the men to work it. Taste is feudal. Of course, the problem in the nineteenth-century was how to dinstinguish oneself from the nouveaux riches eagerly aquiring these manorial trappings, complete with Jamesian ancestral lawns. But that takes us rather far afield from the problems of the contemporary suburban garden, which Michele discusses here (though she's got considerably more space to work with than I).
posted by Anonymous at 10:53 AM
4 Comments:
I have a soft place in my heart for fuschia, but I think they look best when massed, so they don't look like one silly little specimen (my own kind of looks like I just stuck a branch in the ground at the moment).
I think of fuschia as a fun indoor hanging plant, but have a hard time imagining it in a garden. I've never seen a large planting of it, that sounds worth trying.
My preferred spot for peonies is in an old master still life. I think it ill-advised but not inexplicable to succumb to the urge to plant them. Drunks on a rail, indeed.
Fuschia are amazing. There are hedges of them in Ireland and they remain the maccers' family (if such a thing even exists these days) favourite.
My father calls them "fuckshas". Endearing. Nearly 20 years ago now, when he was likely attempting reconciliation #3,000 with my mother, he had this idea of buying small fuschia plants from the garden centre and smuggling them into the garden, planting them late at night. After the sly replanting "whilst outside smoking" of number 200, my mother became convinced that her already numerous fuschia bushes had been self propagating. I thought this hilarious and romantic in a fashion I could only aspire too. I still don't think my mother actually believes it was my Dad.
It's settled then: We're keeping them in honor of Maccers. (At least until I find a suitable mite-resistant species).
Your dad, by the way, was (sort of) right: they're named after Dr. Fuchs.
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