Gardening columnist Sonia Day’s latest book has turned to gold.
Titled The Untamed Garden: A Revealing Look at our Love Affair with Plants, the book picked up the top prize from the U.S.-based Garden Writers Association in October.
It’s the first time a Canadian author has won the award and Day’s win came from among 250 American entries in the competition. The book has already been named a silver winner in the same competition.
“The biggie is the gold,” Day said in an interview from her cozy home near Belwood.
Day has been a gardener for longer than she can remember, a love fostered by her father Tom. She’s been a gardening columnist for more than 20 years with gardening magazines and now with a weekend column in the Toronto Star.
Her win south of the border should pick up sales for her book, something every author dreams of.
Outside the refurbished Victorian home she shares with her husband Barrie Murdock, Day overlooks 48 acres of land. The property, with its pond, gardens and trail-lined forest, is the perfect retreat for a person used to living in Montreal and Toronto.
She fell in love with the property when she first saw it some 14 years ago. It was during a tour with her husband to the York Soaring club, where Murdock spent weekends flying, that she discovered what would be her dream home.
“I was driving around the area totally lost and I stopped to look at a map just outside this house,” she recalled. “I saw it was for sale and said ‘I’m going to live there’ and we bought the place the next day.”
There was considerable work that needed to be done to make the home livable.
“Somehow the home told me it wanted to be fixed up,” she added.
It would be two years before they could finally move into the place they have called home for the past 12 years.
In those days, there wasn’t a garden at the rear, but a soccer field instead. Over the years the field has been replaced by gardens, where she grows flowers, shrubs and vegetables.
Today the home is warm and cozy and the perfect place for Day, who spends summers there, to tend her gardens, write books and put her weekly column together in a writer’s den where paperwork is heaped up on her desk.
She manages to write a book each year and has now penned a total of seven. With the The Untamed Garden she steps outside most people’s preconceptions about gardening books.
Her intent with the book is to show that gardening can be fun and even sexy. It’s a side of gardening many gardening writers haven’t explored, usually writing about how best to grow a particular plant or start a garden. Day stays away from having her columns involve gardening advice, something she says people can get from the internet, although she isn’t confident information on the web is always correct.
“A lot of people take gardening too serious,” she said. “I like the funny side of it all, I’m not serious about gardening.”
And like many gardening columnists, she tries to stay away from the Latin names for plants in her writing, preferring the use the name most people know the plants by.
Day’s seductive take on gardening starts with a story in The Untamed Garden about her father when the family lived in the Bahamas. It was a night when he was waiting for his prized cereus to bloom, something that happens within a matter of hours. It’s a memory she hangs onto through a fading Newspaper account she keeps tucked away in her desk. It was written by a journalist about what took place that night when she was 19 years old.
“My proud dad stands grinning like a Cheshire cat as he shows of his ‘lady’ – a night-blooming cereus in full lusty bloom, the flower’s creamy petals shining like silky, see-through lingerie,” she writes, referring to the Newspaper clipping.
“It was the first time that the cereus had bloomed for Dad. And the thrill was short-lived. Almost as fleeting as a kiss.
“His precious flower withered and crumpled, as cereus do, a few hours later. Yet how happy she made us, his queen of the night. How sweetly she smelled. How her golden stamens sparkled in the tropical dawn. I still recall almost every detail of my brief encounter with her.”
It was that encounter that made Day decide she wanted to be a gardener, with The Untamed Garden just another stepping stone along that path.
The book recounts both the history and cultural beliefs embedded in many different species, including orchids, lilies, peonies, tulips and the seductive fruit of the fig.
She writes about how love was intertwined with today’s tradition of giving flowers starting centuries ago when showing affection was not widely acceptable in society.
“This idea of using plants to send secret messages started with the flower-loving Turks (who were the first people to cultivate tulips), but later caught on in Europe and understandably so,” she writes.
“What could be more perfect than sending someone a beautiful flower or a bunch of flowers – and in doing so discreetly revealing exactly what was on your mind?”
“The French and English became the biggest fans of this new, novelty language. During the 19th century, the meanings of individual flowers were the subject of spicy gossip circulating in salons and drawing rooms on both sides of the Channel,” Day writes.
“If a certain lady received a bouquet from a certain gentleman, the ladies in her circle would examine the blooms contained in that bouquet in minute detail in order to find clues as to his intentions. Several books were published detailing exactly what to look for, and hundreds of flowers (plus a few foliage plants) wound up with symbolic meanings. Virtually all of them concern some aspect of love.”
According to Day tulips, first grown in Turkey but traditionally connected to Holland, make perfect flowers for the southern Ontario climate.
“In Holland they plant them in good sand with good drainage,” she said of the commercial success of tulips there.
“They like cold winters and hot summers,” she said of the climate here that favours the tulip’s ideal growing conditions.
Day is a Master Gardener who took correspondence courses at the University of Guelph when she was part of the Toronto Master Gardeners group while living in the city.
“It took me about three years to get through the course because some were boring, but it was the best thing I ever did,” she said. “You learn a lot and make fascinating friends.
“The nice thing about gardening is you never stop learning,” Day added. “That’s such a positive thing when you’re getting older and starting to wonder is this all there is?
“I get a huge amount of pleasure when I discover a plant that I’m not familiar with. It’s such a challenge to try growing. I’m convinced that all dedicated gardeners are eccentrics. It bothers me that we’re dismissed as boring old codgers because it isn’t true.”
She added, “I’m also bothered that so many people nowadays think gardening is sissy and just for women.
“That never would have occurred to my dad. He was a keen gardener all his life – both when we lived in England and later in the Bahamas, where he grew gorgeous avocados, which I used to haul back to Canada after Christmas holidays down there. And my grandfather was head gardener at Chevening (a British country estate once owned by Prince Charles), so gardening is clearly in my genes.”
Day isn’t certain whether she will publish another gardening book and is considering working on a novel. She is also considering taking up painting again (she has water colour pieces in the City of Toronto art collection). She was even part of the Elora-Fergus Studio Tour for a couple of years.
These are hobbies she will have to fit into her hectic schedule of speaking engagements and column writing.
She will also be reading from her book at the Elora Writers’ Festival in May.
As she writes in her book, “How can one help shivering with delight when one’s hot fingers close around the stem of a live flower?”
