Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [80]
Flett) is talking about ordering pull drapes (or draperies, as she’s learned to say) in a floral fabric, something to "pick up" the room, give it some vitality. What’s more, she’s sick and tired of the morning glory wallpaper in the living room with its numbing columns of blue, yellow, and pink; she’s planning on a solid color next time around, Williamsburg green, maybe, with white enameled woodwork for contrast. And that shabby old carpet gets her down, the way it’s worn along the seams so that the backing shows through, awful, like a person’s scalp seen up close. To tell the truth the whole room looks undernourished and underloved, though she can’t help feeling just a little proud of the coffee table which she has recently altered by topping the walnut veneer with a sheet of glass, beneath which she’s positioned photographs of her three children and a copy, slightly yellowed, of her marriage announcement:
Mr. and Mrs. Barker Flett
Wish To Announce
Their Recent Marriage in Ottawa, August 17, 1936
She got this coffee table idea from Canadian Homes and Gardens, an article called "Putting the Essential You into Your Decor."
Every room in the house, even the upstairs bathroom, has a gathering of ferns at the window, maidenhair, bird’s nest, holly fern, rabbit’s foot. (These indoor ferns, in the year 1947, have an old-fashioned look of fussiness, though they are destined to achieve a high degree of chic, and ubiquity, in the mid-sixties.)
The fact is, green plants and coffee table aside, Mrs. Flett is not much interested in her house. Some insufficiency in herself is reflected, she feels, in its structural austerity. Its eight highceilinged rooms four up, four down, have a country plainness to them, being severely square in shape with overly large blank windows. The light that falls through these windows is surprisingly harsh, and in winter the walls are cold and the corners of the downstairs rooms drafty.
She lives for summer, for the heat of the sun—for her garden, if the truth were known. And what a garden!
The Fletts’ large, rather ill-favored brick house is nested in a saucer of green: front, back, and sides, a triple lot, rare in this part of the city, and in spring the rounded snouts of crocuses poke through everywhere. Healthy Boston ivy, P. tricuspidata, grows now over three-quarters of the brickwork (it has not prospered on the north face of the house, but what matter?); then there are the windowboxes, vibrant with color, and, in addition, Mrs. Flett has cunningly obscured the house’s ugly limestone foundation with plantings of Japanese yew, juniper, mugho pine, dwarf spruce, and the new Korean box. And her lilacs! Some people, you know, will go out and buy any old lilac and just poke it in the ground, but Mrs.
Flett has given thought to overall plant size and blossom color, mixing the white "Madame Lemoine" lilac with soft pink Persian lilac and slatey blue "President Lincoln." These different varieties are "grouped," not "plopped." At the side of the house a border of red sweet william has been given a sprinkling of bright yellow coreopsis, and this combination, without exaggeration, is a true artist’s touch. Clumps of bleeding heart are placed—placed, this has not just happened—near the pale blueness of campanula; perfection! The apple trees in the back garden are sprayed each season against railroad worm so that all summer long their leaves throw kaleidoscopic patterns on the fine pale lawn. Here the late sun fidgets among the poppies. And the dahlias!—Mrs. Flett’s husband jokes about the size of her dahlias, claiming that the blooms have to be carried in through the back door sideways. A stone path edged with ageratum leads to the grape arbor and then winds its way to the rock garden planted with dwarf perennials and special alpine plants ordered from Europe. This garden of Mrs. Flett’s is lush, grand, and intimate—English in its charm, French in its orderliness, Japanese in its economy—but there is something, too, in the sinuous path, the curved beds, the grinning garden