Not sentimental about Valentine’s Day. Not, not.

But I seem to have accumulated all this pink. And when Bill Linsman saw it, he said: That looks like a blog post.

So I thought about the great American landscape architect Fletcher Steele, about what he said about pretty. I read it years ago, but it popped up again today:

“I want all my places to be the homes of children and lovers. I want them to be comfortable and if possible slightly mysterious by day, with vistas and compositions appealing to the painter. I want them to be delirious in the moonlight…. I believe that there is no beauty without ugliness and that it should not be otherwise. Both are capable of stinging us to live. Contrast is more true to me than undeviating smugness. The chief vice in gardens is to be merely pretty.”

My imagination is always sparked when visiting gardens by that most essential of cultural constructs: the boundaries of daily life — the ideas of inside and outside.

Ideas of sides and doors and rooms and thresholds must have been conceptual and linguistic leaps for all peoples of the world. Yet leap we did, ending up with doors and rooms and then — perhaps a thousand years later, aided by prosperity — “that most excellent garden tool,” as one writer has it — we wanted rooms outside.

Garden “rooms” can be terraces, patios, yards, strips of concrete driveways. They can be constructed with walls of living material, highlight or hide plants of definite season or color. They can be glimpsed opening and opening from one to another.

I will never forget garden rooms high on a hill in the walled medieval town of Lussan (on the Languedoc border of Provence). There was a direct experience of the gardening passions of an artist. The garden is the heart of a chambers d’hote (bed and breakfast inn; never mind finding the right punctuation here), Les Buis de Lussan.

It was installed and is nourished by a former Parisian chef, Thierry Vieillot. The square centerpiece of this small (about 50 by 70 feet) walled garden is a knotted buis (boxwood) maze cultivated with other plants known to medieval France. Each element of this center square, or indeed each piece of this garden, whether shaped plant or constructed garden support, reveals Vieillot as someone who understands that beauty is form. The garden is transcendent, and Vieillot, a quiet and intense man, reveals his intimacy with his plants in every leaf and bloom, moving this guest to tears.

http://buisdelussan.free.fr/

This is a photo from June 2007 — before the garden’s last revision, in 2009, and before my friend Karen Kukil said, in late July of this year: This is a finished work of art. Thank you, Karen. The house is sold. The deal has closed. We’ve said our goodbyes, the salt from our tears washed away by the weekend’s rain.

Mary Oliver, again:

Goodbye, house.
Goodbye, sweet and beautiful house,
we shouted, and it shouted back,
goodbye to you, and lifted itself
down from the town, and set off
like a packet of clouds across
the harbor’s blue ring,
the tossing bell, the sandy point — and turned
lightly, wordlessly,
into the keep of the wind
where it floats still —
where it plunges and rises still
on the black and dreamy sea.

We are selling our beloved house in Northampton, Massachusetts. The one we said we would never sell. The one that has entered our hearts and will never leave. That one.

I clipped from trees and shrubs this morning, gathered the bits and pieces into this pitcher, snapped the photo while standing on a chair. The pitcher is on the living room mantle, on the left.

The foliage from a Japanese maple is from the tree in the backyard. We inherited it from the Nugents, from whom we bought the house, in 2001. Its green/bronze changes everything back there. The hydrangeas are from a tree also inherited from the Nugents — in bloom at this magical moment of hydrangeas. But our sole tree echoes the many in in my beloved neighbor’s yard — big, mature trees, a blizzard of white. I can see them now as I write from the dining table.

Sue’s trees were planted by her grandparents, in the 1930s. Her great aunt built the house, in 1924. Sue’s mother grew up in the house; Sue spent her life visiting it until she and her husband raised their own three boys in it. The eldest is off to college this month.

Sue’s grandparents and her mother knew Margaret Storrs Grierson, who lived in our house for fifty years, from the 1930s to the 1980s. Mrs. Grierson was a archivist who began, at Smith College, to gather primary material on women’s history, which forms the center of the college’s Sophia Smith Collection — one of, if not the first, archives on the subject in this country if not the world.

Mrs. Grierson changed the simple 1890s farmhouse. In the 1930s, she built a wonderful porch along the front of the house, which faces Massasoit St., changed the location of the front door, built a garage. Above the garage she added three small rooms, a fireplace and a bathroom. And a flight of stairs off the kitchen. (And when a carpenter was in the living room, working, a couple of years ago he said: “My great-grandfather worked on this remodel.” He meant the 1930s. He is a fourth-generation carpenter. This is New England.)

Our friends, Stephanie, and Ken (no longer married to each other), bought the house from Mrs. Grierson, when the aged lady was no longer able to negotiate the stairs. Their daughter Rebecca, our daughter’s age, showed up when we bought the house to collect from her childhood bedroom a scrap of wallpaper. She framed it.

We found an antique mezuzah in the garage and called Ken. It had belonged to his grandmother. He was deeply moved to put his hand on it once more.

You may notice a cutting from a red osier dogwood in the arrangement. I planted it when I built the front garden, right below the porch, in 2002. But last year, when everything, especially the river birch nearby, had crowded it, I moved the bushy dogwood to a back garden. It hasn’t quite decided if it is happy there.

I don’t know if this sale is going to happen. We are down to the last few days, a cliffhanger.

Mary Oliver wrote a poem called “On Losing a House.” Here’s a snippet:

We never saw
such a beautiful house