The Garden Path Read Free Page B

old Scotsman in knickers and a cap. She had wondered how one went about getting a plot there, and always meant to ask Mr. McPherson, but she never did because then Peter was born and she no longer needed a garden. Peter was her plot, her lovely, lush flowerbed, and she was his Mr. McPherson; she was little Mary Lennox, and he was her secret garden.
    Rosie was a gardener, of course, the daughter and granddaughter of gardeners. It was in her blood—green veins run in the family, her father used to say. Rosie’s father was Peter Liliano—named for the owner of the estate in southern England where her grandfather, Massimo Liliano, had worked as a gardener. He had been imported from Italy for the purpose in 1896 when Peter Elliot-Casson, a wealthy young fellow on the Grand Tour, admired the work he was doing at a villa near Naples and decided the gardens at Silvergate needed restoring. He had a vision, he said, at the Villa Bianca, on the steps that swept down to the goldfish pond bordered with box and camellias, of the way life should be—green and verdant and full of flowers. He offered Rosie’s grandfather a job on the spot, and Massimo and his wife, Anna, arrived in England less than a month later, in August. Silvergate was a wreck. The following summer it had become a promising wreck, a year later a charming wreck, and by the time the century turned it was on its way to being a showplace.
    The Lilianos emigrated enthusiastically to England, and like typical converts they became more English than most Englishmen. Times had been hard in Italy; their padrone was mean and stingy—so tight he squeaked, as Massimo learned to say when he got to England. A real skinflint, Anna would add, but you had to know her well to catch the words through the maze of Italian inflections they were lost in. They both learned English quickly, but they never lost their accents—Rosie’s grandmother especially, who always called her Rose in three elongated syllables. No one else, Rosie was sure, had ever spoken her name so beautifully.
    Rosie was born at Silvergate in 1931, and she always thought her grandparents’ story was better than a story in a book: the two simple young Italians brought by a great lord to the ruined estate, to turn its brambly wastes into a place of beauty, and succeeding beyond anyone’s dreams, and founding their modest dynasty there. Anna and Massimo had three boys, all given English names—Frank and James and finally Peter, named after their new padrone. All of them became gardeners at Silvergate, all three married English girls, and all three—in the late thirties, when old Sir Peter was dead, Massimo was dead, Anna was an old woman gone blind, Silvergate belonged to the National Trust, and war was on the way even to the gardens of Kent—all three emigrated to America. Peter was the last. He had hoped to stay at Silvergate forever, but he didn’t get on with the caretaker the National Trust had installed to oversee the place, Mr. Horace Hogg, who called Italians “Eye-ties” and wrote a monograph for tourists stating that Sir Peter Elliott-Casson had designed the gardens himself and carried out his plans “with the help of imported peasant labor.” No mention of Massimo Liliano, whose genius had cleared away the decades of brambles and brush and neglect and put in their place the roses, the delphinium borders, the lily pond, the clipped box hedge that people traveled to Kent especially to see. Peter Liliano took his mother and wife and daughter, his copy of Gertrude Jekyll’s Wood and Garden and his back issues of The Countryman , and sailed to New England to work in the garden center where his brother Frank was manager. In three years he had his own place—Liliano’s Garden Center, as famous in its way as Silvergate had been. Where else could you buy Bramshill lilies and the double bloodroot?
    Rosie was six years old when she arrived in