Margaret Leland Goldsmith: The Journalist Who Reflected on the Perils of Gardening Hue
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
May 4, 1894
The journalist, translator, and historical novelist Margaret Leland Goldsmith was born.
Though she penned weighty works of history and biography, it is her light-hearted confession in a 1936 essay for Scribner’s Magazine that endears her forever to gardeners: a declaration of war against the color magenta.
She admitted, with something like theatrical despair:
“For years I have avoided magenta with feverish zest. I do not like it. It kills my henna reds. It fights with the cedar brown of my cottage. Yet every year something of that hue intrudes. If it isn’t Sweet William reverting to type, it is a red phlox gone decadent.”
One can almost hear her sighing as she surveyed the flower border, betrayed once again by a phlox with romantic notions.
It is a scene familiar to every gardener: you design a palette of harmony, and the garden, willful as a prima donna, insists upon improvising. Magenta, in her telling, becomes a scandalous interloper — a brash guest who will not be left off the invitation list, however strenuously one scratches her name out.
And so we may picture Goldsmith at her cottage window, glaring into the border with the sharp eye of a general across enemy lines, muttering imprecations against a single shade. Vita would have understood this quarrel with colour; Lady Whistledown would have relished the drama.
For in truth, the garden is never entirely ours. Its rebellions remind us that beauty, like society, thrives on both discipline and a hint of disorder. Even magenta — tiresome, brazen, incorrigible magenta — has its place in the gossip of the border.
