Elegance in green: Henry Mitchell’s ode to shade-loving plants
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
November 15, 1981
Dearest reader,
On this day, the ever-observant Henry Mitchell penned a sparkling meditation for The Washington Post entitled “Blooms in the Boxwood.”
It is no ordinary article—it is rather a love letter to restraint, to the measured harmony of green upon green, gilded only ever so slightly with petals of white. How curious, you might think, to find such romance in simplicity!
Yet Mitchell, with his gardener’s discernment and poet’s patience, reveals that a garden limited in hue need never be meager in splendor.
Regarding the Japanese anemone, Henry wrote,
“It abides a good bit of shade, and never looks better than against a background of box and ivy.
The delicate-looking (but tough as leather) flowers are like white half-dollars set on a branching stem about four feet high, with a yellow boss of stamens in the middle.
Its leaves all spring from the ground, like large green polished hands, so it looks good from spring to fall, and in winter you tidy it up and the earth is bare (sprigs of the native red cedar or holly can be stuck in…).”
Is that not pure poetry disguised as plant advice?
One imagines him strolling through a shaded walk, stooping gently to admire those “white half-dollars,” his tone both tender and instructive.
Tell me, dear reader—do you not long to see such luminous discipline in your own patch of earth?
Mitchell also turned his discerning eye toward the stately bugbane, writing,
“…named for its supposed baneful effect on bugs... Its foliage is as good as or better than that of the anemone, and in October it opens its foxtail flowers (a quite thin fox, admittedly) on firm thin stems waist to chest high.
The flowers are made of hundreds of tiny white florets, somewhat like an eremurus or a buddleis, only more gracefully curving than either.
Against a green wall it is very handsome; gardeners who sometimes wonder what is wrong with marigolds and zinnias, reproached for their weedy coarseness, need only consult the bugbane to see the difference in elegance.”
Ah, elegance!
One can practically hear him arch a horticultural eyebrow at the petulant excess of a marigold. There stands bugbane—a plant of refinement, the sort of guest who never overtakes a conversation yet always commands the room.
It is as if Mitchell himself whispers to us from his garden gate: simplicity, my dears, is not absence—it is artistry.
And what of the chrysanthemums, those symbols of late-season endurance?
“As fall comes, you might indulge in a white cushion chrysanthemum.
Chrysanthemums in my opinion cannot be made to look very grand or elegant, so I would not overdo them.
Of course they are fine for specialists who like to grow hundreds of different sorts, but I am speaking of just a green garden with a touch of white.
Then you come again to the white Japanese anemones and bugbanes.”
How practical—and how graceful!
A green garden with “a touch of white,” as he puts it, sounds far more serene than a carnival of colors. It is a philosophy for gardeners who prefer conversation to clamor.
Can one create beauty through restraint?
Must a masterpiece shout, or can it whisper beneath boxwood and ivy?
Mitchell leaves us pondering as we walk through our own plots.
Perhaps the truest gardens are those that reveal themselves slowly—the way moonlight does—glimpsed in shades of green and white, inviting the eye to linger and the heart to rest.
As you tend your border this season, ask yourself: what might you discover if you let green be the melody, and white, the grace note?
