Translator’s notebook

Lavandula pedunculata ssp. pedunculata (top), L. 'Ballerina' (middle), L. 'Pukehou'Write with your spade

and garden with your pen

–Vita Sackville-West

 

 

Monday morning. Back at my desk. One hundred and five years ago today in 1909, here on page 198, Lily and Natalie are frolicking in the garden of their first June together. I can only join them in translation.

Leaving your arms, I’ve left everything, I’ve become a robot…where is the moonlit garden–where I kept and caressed the youth who spoke the secret language of the night!

Élisabeth de Gramont: avant-gardiste © 2004 by Francesco Rapazzini
Translation © 2014 by Suzanne Stroh

In my own garden, it has been so satisfying to see the bees settle almost instantly on the fruits of one’s labor: lavenders coaxed into a south facing bed on the clearest, most beautiful summer’s day we’ve ever spent in Roanoke.

The varieties I’m trying from Abernethy & Spencer, the Leesburg nursery, are Ana Luisa (silvery with blue flowers), Blue Water (airy and low) and Seal (tall and rangy). The site is a bed that lies beneath a hot brick wall.

So many great flowering herbs for the garden. Try lavenders in Virginia. Don’t forget to amend the soil. Ours is too heavy and clay for them. But they love the heat.

What’s going on in your garden?

 

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