Mike Dillon reviews Madeleine Wilde's "Notes from the Garden, Creating a Pacific Northwest Sanctuary"

Notes from the Garden: Creating a Pacific Northwest Sanctuary
by Madeleine Wilde
Edited by Mike Dillon
Illustrations by Mark Hinshaw
ISBN 978-1-6339811-6-4
Chatwin Books
322 1st Ave. South
Seattle, WA 98104

http://www.chatwinbooks.com/shop/notes-from-the-garden-by-madeleine-wilde

2021, paperback, 222 pages, $17.00

Madeleine Wilde: At Home in the World
Reviewed by Mike Dillon

 NOTE: Raven Chronicles Press board member Mike Dillon put together a book manuscript from a friend’s garden-related newspaper columns spanning twenty years. She asked if he would do this in the days before she died. This is his Introduction to the book. 

 On May 20, 2018, a warm Sunday afternoon, an interesting crowd filled the University of Washington Club to honor the life of Madeleine Wilde. The Seattle writer, gardener, gourmand, classical music aficionado, serious book reader, world traveler, and community activist died three months earlier after a brave fight against a rare form of lymphoma. Madeleine was seventy-four.

The garden, Madeleine often said, is a metaphor for the world. Madeleine’s columns might deliver detailed advice on mulching one week and insights into the aesthetic pleasures of creating water islands the next.

Two centuries ago, English poet and artist William Blake wrote: “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way.”

Safe to say, those in the crowd that day did not look upon trees as green things that stand in the way. Madeleine’s stance in life was reflected by those who turned out to honor her: friends, admirers of her writing, community activists, her own colleagues, and the colleagues of her husband, David Streatfield. 

David, British born, is professor emeritus in the department of Landscape Architecture, University of Washington, and author of the much-honored California Gardens: Creating a New Eden.

I saw and met people of all ages and accomplishments that afternoon. Still, in my eyes, a common thread emerged: I can only call it a respect for the life of the mind and the work of the hands. These were classic Northwesterners who live in the world with a sense of stewardship and who, like Madeleine, train a fundamentally democratic lens, with a small “d,” on life.

As one of seven people who took to the podium to speak, I read several excerpts from Madeleine’s newspaper columns, “Notes from the Garden,” which ran for two decades in the Queen Anne & Magnolia News, starting in the early 1990s.

I was Madeleine’s publisher at Pacific Publishing Co. for most of that time. The News was the flagship paper in our group of community newspapers in Seattle, when the newspaper world was on firmer footing than it is now. We featured a stable of strong freelance writers and staffers, some of whom had contributed to The Village Voice, The New York Times, MSNBC, The Seattle Times, and other venues.

Writing from her garden on Queen Anne’s southwest slope—one of Seattle’s most beautiful neighborhoods—Madeleine’s voice stood out. Over the years, I urged Madeleine to gather her columns into a book manuscript. In the last weeks of her life, she asked me to complete the job. 

The garden, Madeleine often said, is a metaphor for the world. Madeleine’s columns might deliver detailed advice on mulching one week and insights into the aesthetic pleasures of creating water islands the next. She was not shy about sharing her love for certain gardening books or reminding us there is a proper way to stack a woodpile (do it “right”). A column on the art of raking touches base with Van Gogh rhapsodizing on the colors in the sky. Madeleine’s prose, at times employing a canny wit, moves fluently between the practical and poetic. 

Moments of Blakean wonder would occur. An April 1999 column reminds us how revelation waits in the lineaments of the familiar: 

“The garden continues to come to life, with the spring bulbs in full glory under deciduous trees filled with tender new leaves. There is a sense of a grand unfolding and nothing represents this better than the sword fern crosiers that are lifting their heads skyward. These new fern leaves are often also called fiddleheads, and are the edible part of the fern plant. Each day brings greater emergence, as the crosiers unfurl in scroll-like fashion. There is no riotous color to attract the eye, so why the intense fascination? For me, they evoke a sense of the primeval, the unfolding, the unbending, the loosening of a beginning.”

Madeleine was born in Pasadena, California, on February 27, 1943, and grew up in the Bay Area within a privileged, cultured family environment. The headstrong rebel of the family said goodbye to all that. After earning her degree in social science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, she headed for New York City and entered the brave new world of computer programming.

Madeleine returned to the Bay Area in the 1970s and continued her computer programming work. She also took an extension course at the University of California, Berkeley, where she immersed herself in garden design and building. The young woman from an upper-middle class family bent her back and got her hands dirty.

After moving to Seattle in the late 1970s, she met David, who was teaching at the University of Washington. In 1986 they bought a beautiful old house, built in 1911, on Queen Anne’s steeply pitched southwest slope. To risk understatement, the house had seen better days. The couple, over the years, reclaimed the house and cleared the brambles to make way for their garden.

It is a woodland garden, a diverse micro-universe. David laid out the basic design for the terrace walls and paths. As time went on, Madeleine took the lead. Over the years the couple planted numerous trees, including stewartias, maples, oaks, ashes, and three redwoods. The understory included many species of rhododendrons. They loved contrasts and delighted in bold ferns growing beside smaller, textured plants. Several strategically placed water pots still attest to Madeleine’s deep delight in the play of tree-filtered light.

In Madeleine’s cosmos, her garden was the place, an enclosure of passionate discovery to be shared. Here, then, is a modern Book of Hours opening to a more abundant life.

Mike Dillon, former publisher of Pacific Publishing Co., grew up on Bainbridge Island and lives in Indianola on the Kitsap peninsula. His most recent book is Departures: Poetry and Prose on the Removal of Bainbridge Island’s Japanese Americans After Pearl Harbor” (Unsolicited Press, April 2019). In 2013, the WNPA recognized him with its Master Editor/Publisher Award.