LAST Christmas my father sent me pictorial place mats he had found at the back of some auction. They are the kind by Pimpernel: tinted reproductions of old engravings, surrounded by borders of pale green and gold. They show Canadian scenes from the age of subsistence farming, much more than a century ago. In one of them, a pioneer with a rifle slung over his shoulder looks down from a hill over a river settlement; another depicts the ramshackle granaries of Toronto's ancient harbourfront. We have all seen the like. One looks through the patina of gift-card sentimentality: imagine the lives of people in those mud-track days. The idea of gardening-at any level higher than vegetable grubbing-does not come to mind. Yet many of our pioneers did garden, as soon as they could, and some even lived to write about it.
I carried Garden Voices out into the sun with a kind of vicarious nostalgia for those days. "The first and only anthology of Canadian garden writing", it promises material from diaries, letters, articles, and books to evoke a national tradition. Much of our gardening tradition has consisted of desperately seeking help. My own urban yard in Kingston, Ont. is exposed limestone. This is my sixth year of teasing blossoms from the compost above subarctic rock, I was almost hoping to learn something. Just how do you go about planting flowers on such a surface after the daily grind of felling trees, winching rocks, boiling laundry, and haggling over the price of fur pelts?
In particular, the dustjacket invites us to "listen to Elizabeth Simcoe record her observations of gardens in Lower and Upper Canada in the 1790s." How disappointing to find that the lone diary entry from Mrs. Simcoe is shorter by half than the editorial introduction that explains who she was. That her diaries were rich with "details of geography, climate, and natural life" is indubitable, but more than half a page is left blank at the end. Did someone lose some text in a computer? The brief entry describes settlers clearing land by ringing trees, waiting for them to die so the wind will blow them over, then leaving the stumps to rot away. Mrs. Simcoe notes that the scene remains "very ugly for a long time."
Almost four decades later, another diarist, Mary O'Brien, describes the landscape around her brother's house at Thornhill, Ont. The fields were so dotted with tree-stumps that the many which had been removed were "scarcely missed." The house faced a litter of dead trees, I suppose killed by ringing. But the scene is not unremittingly bleak. There were gooseberries in the woods, and within a few weeks Mrs. O'Brien describes transplanting the bushes. There were strawberries, too, and wild plums. Soon she mentions tidying a lawn, which means they had one. A year and a half later, she and her husband walked around their own estate, to admire a wheat field, and a fruit garden watered by a trout stream running through a poplar copse laden with white anemone-like flowers.
By about this time (the early 1830s), Lady Aylmer, another wife of a governor, writes a letter describing the grounds around her cottage, praising the fine wood with fir, broadleaved oak, red cedar, and sumac. A passage through the trees is being widened to admit carriages, and beds are a-planting with "about 200 Geraniums and other Green house plants, Dahlias, Balsams," and so forth. Things are looking up.
For the most part, they are townfolk who appreciate a garden. A letter to the editor of The Canada Farmer in 1864 complains that gardening for the love of it hardly exists in the countryside. Townies enhance their properties with ornamental plantings, and the writer invites homesteaders to copy them. How attractive to see a flower-bed in the country, a gravelled walk, or a lawn with some trees and shrubs. Cabbages and potatoes are a kind of ornament, but why not fragrant heliotrope and showy geraniums too. (The mind is still accounting for all those dead ringed trees.)
By 1889, Linus Woolverton is giving landscape tips to the readers of The Canadian Horticulturalist. The distance a house should be set back from the road may be determined by its size and the grounds; curved drives and pathways are for elegant large domiciles; straight lines and geometry more suitable to city lots; and note, picket fences are offensive to the eye of the cultivated foreigner. We have come a long way, to be worrying about the aesthetic needs of strangers.
Home improvement is a perennial theme. In 1920, Mary Parlby beseeches women to plant flowers at least around the back porch, so that children may learn what they are. The floral colours and perfumes will enhance the stoop where you hang out the laundry. She suggests doing tasks like mending in such a place.
No collection of Canadiana will pass by Lucy Maude Montgomery, who describes the garden of her glowing childhood-the real thing, not the movie set-two sides of it enclosed by what seemed to children a very tall stone wall. An attached ladder lets children rise to the vista beyond: green fields sloping to a sand-shored sea. The house is clothed in Virginia creeper with climbing roses. A little corner gate leads to the kitchen garden where children are not especially welcome. Beyond a grove of fir trees, then birches and whispering poplars, is the "wild garden" full of sunshine and "blue-and-white violets, dandelions, Junebells, wild roses, daisies, buttercups, asters and goldenrod." Her sweetest memories are of this place of tangled growth and secret hideaways. The door from her grandmother's living room opens directly into the garden. The steps from it are large slabs of red sandstone, and at their foot, thick plantings of mint. Whenever little feet crushed their leaves the spicy fragrance charged the air. What a fine hint to those of us trying to raise old-fashioned children: for scent can overpower images and words.
Every strong anthology is eclectic, or there is no surprise; and there is no surprise for a gardener quite like permafrost. Marjorie Pridie and her husband Leo, gardening in the Northwest Territories, drove the permafrost down, or rather raised the topsoil higher, by making compost in industrial volumes. They had four units on the go with soil, moss, and broken scrub roots, lawn clippings, saw-dust, wood ashes, and kitchen waste, yielding a load every few weeks through the summer. It is not easy to get the stuff rich and black, as I can attest. Their secret is to head-start with a motorized shredder.
Nature will have her little jokes all the same, some of them rather nice ones. The heart of which observant gardener hasn't been gladdened to find a "volunteer" plant sprouting between, say, flagstones? Des Kennedy writes of his enjoyment in watching such self-seeders rescue more than one "dull contrivance". After the coddling and disappointments of "important" plants, how gently humbling.
Yet nature can be humourless in our climate, and we must jolly her as well as we can. Midge Ellis Keeble purchased a place in the country that "hadn't been plowed since the glaciers had harrowed the ground, leaving great granite stones behind them." She learned, as I did, that when you disturb rock soil you end up with "an indescribable mess of rocks", which must be removed before manuring or any other ministration. To level the ground, she harnessed two men by ropes to a board, which was dragged back and forth interminably. I'm sure nature was amused by the spectacle.
We do such things because we have a picture of paradise in our mind's eye, and will not wait for heaven. As Jean McKinley held, back in 1952, the Canadian gardener "does not employ hired help; nor does he spend a great deal of money. His garden is more a hobby than a task," and dare I suggest, salvation for the soul. It can also be a form of redemption. One reads the 1931 account of Mrs. Butchard's conversion of a disused lime quarry into the splendid Benvenuto Gardens on Vancouver Island-paradise regained.
"A Homestead Restored" describes the restoration of the fields around the Motherwell Homestead in southwestern Saskatchewan. This took Parks Canada four years. William Richard Motherwell, the Grand Old Man of Canadian Agriculture, began the original project in the 1880s. The site "stands as a model of the principles taught to farmers at the beginning of the twentieth century in order to succeed in conditions particular to the prairies." I wonder if it would have taken more or less time had he had Parks Canada to help him.
There is much wholesome fun in this anthology, from Catherine Parr Traill's favourite plants to Jo Ann Gardner's advocacy of black currants. I was intrigued by the tomato extolled by A. Hood in 1879-fresh from the vine with a sweet cake or soda biscuit. He opens a window on the surprisingly recent prehistory of tomato cultivation. A half-century before that, tomatoes were thought poisonous, and grown only for decoration. Hood had grown the Early Red French variety because he wanted an early crop. It was tasty, but grew wrinkled and misshapen, with a meagre, watery pulp that adhered to the skin, but faults aside, he liked to eat them like plums. In the year of writing, he came across another variety called Hathaway's Excelsior. The shape was more regular, the pulp thicker, and the flavour marvellous. Hood believed that eating tomatoes in quantity would fatten you up and keep the doctor away.

Garden Voices is arranged thematically in seven fairly arbitrary sections, the entries running chronologically within each. It would have been better chronological throughout, for the present arrangement is jumpy, whether you are reading continuously or, worse, leafing through. Some of the inclusions are pointless, or at least puzzling. Why give space to Mackenzie King's strange musings on a balustrade? Does he think it will grow? (Possibly.) Many others are too short: they don't work as aphorisms and aren't sufficiently enticing to send you to the library for more. But in the main, the book is worth having for a rainy day.
I don't have a rainy day at the moment. It is conventional to end gardening reviews by saying, I must get back to my garden. I must roll more rocks out of my vision of paradise.

l Lynn Warren, formerly the custodian of a bar in a large provincial metropolis, now breaks rocks in Kingston, Ontario.