For nearly 27 years, as sure as the crocus will poke through the snow, Elisabeth Ginsburg has provided a horticultural column to the readers of this newspaper.
Her column, “The Gardener’s Apprentice,” is in the paper today, marking the 1,400th time in 1,401 weeks it has appeared.
She says most of the subjects of her column she has grown, so she knows what to write. But others, those she has not grown which, in her words, “covets,” she will purchase and learn by writing about them.
Ginsburg was raised in Batavia, N.Y., about 35 miles west of Rochester. The house was on a quarter-acre of land and her father was a doctor. When not delivering babies, he was gardening for stress relief.
He gave his daughter her first seeds: hollyhock, a plant which would be easy to grow for a five-year-old. Her hollyhock did grow when one day, under its leaves, just above the surface of the ground, she noticed, of all things, fur — and it was gently moving up and down! Then, with a closer look, she discovered living, breathing bunnies.
“It was a good introduction into the interconnections of nature,” she said. “All the members of the hollyhock family are still close to my heart.”
Her mother loved flowers, too. But the “deal” that formed part of the marriage, Ginsburg said, was that her mother would have flowers in the house everyday but her father would grow them. Her father used to say he gardened so as not to go bankrupt.
“My mother was the flower arranger,” she said. “She’d take the peonies and shake them to get rid of the ants; they always attract ants. And she would arrange them. My love of gardening, I got from my father; my love of flowers, from my mother.
“My father loved roses, too,” Ginsburg continued. “We had peonies and a row of poplar trees that were the back border. We had big elms until the Dutch elm disease took them out. There was also a shared summer house with black walnuts. There are only a few things you can grow under a black walnut tree.”
Gardening seemed to run in the family tree. Her mother’s sister was also a good gardener with a great variety of plants. Her husband made sauerkraut every year — lots of it.
“I don’t know what makes a good gardener,” Ginsburg said. “To be good, you have to pay attention. Put the plant in a good place for it, not for you. And this sounds ridiculous, but you have to listen to your plant. You have to hear this voice. There’s no such thing as a black thumb. You have to be patient. Plants do things in their own time.”
Gardening is not totally in a person’s control, she said. It is important for the gardener to cede some control. For instance, the Gerbera daisy: It comes from South Africa. That it comes from that part of the world is in its genes and a gardener must not forget it, she said.
Ginsburg, who is also the president of the Glen Ridge Board of Education, began her tenure as president about the same time she began her column. She attended Wells College, in Aurora, N.Y.. She majored in music/voice. The college has recently closed.
“It had the problem of small, liberal arts colleges after Covid,” Ginsburg said. “I heard that another college closes every post-Covid week.”
She went on to Northwestern University for a masters in history, which may seem like quite a change from singing lessons.
“I had taken a lot of history classes as an undergraduate, so it wasn’t a huge jump,” she explained. “I like a lot of things and history has a lot of things together.”
She met her husband, David, at Northwestern. They married outside of Kansas City, Mo. David, an Arizonian who worked as an investment analyst, was stationed in Missouri as an Air Force missile launch officer in charge of 11 intercontinental ballistic missiles. The couple would have a daughter. The sole interruption in Ginsburg’s 1,400 “The Gardener’s Apprentice” columns was the week David died in February of 2016.
“David knew nothing about gardening,” Ginsburg said. “He was an enabler. The blue hydrangea was his favorite.”
Until their daughter was born, Ginsbury worked a variety of jobs. Then the family moved to New York City and a short time later, the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where Ginsburg wrote freelance for the Riverdale Press. She wrote its first AIDS article and was also published in The Kansas City Star, The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor.
“For the longest time, I wanted to write gardening articles,” she said. “I was inspired by Henry Mitchell, who wrote ‘The Essential Earthman’ for The Washington Post. A good gardening article will want you to do it. There are no headaches in the garden.”
Ginsburg, who currently works as an education lobbyist in Trenton for a non-profit, said sometimes gardening crosses paths with the board of education.
“People come up to me at a board meeting and I think, ‘Oh, oh,’” she said. “And then they say, “Why did my plant die?’ And I think, ‘OK, I can talk about gardening all the time.’”
She said there is one plant in her future which her father loved: the Peace rose. Legend is that the root stock, before the German occupation of France during World War II, was sent to Italy, England, Turkey and, on the last plane before the invasion, to America, for propagation.
“It’s buttery yellow with pink edging,” Ginsburg said. “I’ve never grown it. It’s a finicky rose with a romantic story. I’ll write about it. Writing about it will help me think about it and my father.”
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