A visit with the columnist on a notable achievement

GLEN RIDGE, NJ — Elisabeth Ginsburg has been writing her column on gardening for this newspaper for nearly two decades. It is called “The Gardener’s Apprentice.” You’ve seen it, and probably have read it many times. We decided to meet with her and learn more about this woman who is a reservoir of horticultural knowledge for our community.

Ginsburg, who is the president of the Glen Ridge Board of Education, said her father was a great gardener, and when speaking with her, it is not unusual for her to refer to his gardening experience. It was him and a maternal aunt, a botanist, who nurtured her passion in gardens. She describes her first columns on gardening as conversations with her father. These “conversations” passed a notable marker with the recent publication of her 1,000th “The Gardener’s Apprentice,” in Worrall Media.

“I was aware of the milestone,” she said earlier this week. “I’m pleased with it and I try not to duplicate. But it’s difficult with 1,000 columns.”

The 1,000th made her contemplate why she wrote those first ones.
“When my father died in 1996, that communication was cut off,” she said of their horticultural discussions. “I was already writing for publications, but a year or two after he died, I started the column. I contacted The Glen Ridge Paper.”

Ginsburg has written for The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Flower and Garden Magazine, among other publications. At one time, she said there was more gardening writing in newspapers. The Times, she said, had a staff of four writers and an editor.

“You try gardening every day,” she said. “It is a great place to take your stress.”
Naturally, her writing follows the seasons and much of what she observes first hand. Readers are doing the same things in their gardens, she said, and this gives gardening columns an immediacy.

“I look at my garden or other gardens and see what’s going on,” she said. “For instance, last May we had an influx of a butterfly called the Red Admiral. It was in Glen Ridge and other areas in New Jersey.

“It was abnormal to have so many,” Ginsburg continued. “I thought, ‘Why is that?’ I did research. The research turned into a column and an article for a group of butterfly enumerators.”

She said the butterfly increase, according to friends, was due to climate conditions that could support the population.

But her column is not all local. Sometimes her research brings her far afield. Spring hyacinths would prompt a telephone call to England for a conversation with Alan Shipp, an authority on the plant. This was before the Internet.
“I love to write about roses and garden history,” she said. “Every plant has a story. When I go out in my garden, I think out their stories.”

Ginsburg’s writings are primarily about ornamental flowers and right now the peonies in her backyard are preparing to bloom.

“I have one that’s gorgeous,” she said. “It’s a Festiva Maxima. It was hybridized in 1851.”

She said this peony was an heirloom plant. That means one that has been on the market for at least 50 years.

“It stood the test of time,” she said. “My peony is a descendant of the one introduced in 1851. Now there is cloning of them with tissue cultures.”

The market for gardens is always changing, she said. Sometimes a plant becomes commercially extinct and not available. Other plants become extinct because people are not growing them.

But not everything is grown with a green thumb. Sometimes it is grown with all thumbs, so to speak.

“There’s a saying, ‘You can’t grow a plant until you’ve killed it three times,’” Ginsburg said. “I’ve written about things that I’ve killed, which is fun. I try to write what I know.”

And that fun can be experienced in her writing.
In her column of Feb. 2, 2017, named “A hardy, dependable, year-round friend,” Ginsburg writes about a geranium called a cranesbill and a particular kind, called Renard’s cranesbill. She wrote: “My biggest cranesbill crush happened over 10 years ago when I saw Renard’s cranesbill — Geranium renardii — across the crowded pages of an English garden magazine.” She went on to say that to buy one, it took a two-hour car trip with her late husband David, “always the crown prince of garden enablers,” volunteering to drive. The lone week that Ginsburg missed a column was early last year following the sudden death of her husband.
She acknowledges that if she were to be picked up and dropped into a garden in, say, Albuquerque, she would pretty much have to start from scratch. But she does not mind being buttonholed to the flowers of a particular locale because writing about any garden is thought-provoking.

“Wherever I go, I walk the streets to see what people have,” she said. “I find botanical gardens and get to know the plants. In the countryside, I look at the wild plants. Some plants you would like to see and you go to those places to see them. I’m always looking for a story and frequently they find me.”

There are some plants whose stories Ginsburg would like to learn.
“I would love to see some of the English National Collections of plants,” she said. “This is where designated individuals cultivate every known variety, or as many as possible, of a single plant species. I would also love to go to South Africa, which is a cradle of biodiversity, and see the ancestors of many of our favorite garden plants in their native habitat. I learned wildflower identification from my father and aunt. Close observation will tell you about what creature pollinates it.”

She said her home garden has gotten bigger each year.
“As you change as a person, your garden changes,” she said. “My husband was a coin collector. As he became more educated, he developed an interest from Roman coins, to American to antebellum gold coins. He was an authority on that.
A garden is an analogy of life, a spiritual exercise. The garden and the gardener evolve together.”

Ginsburg took the title of her column from “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” She said a column may take her a week to write or an hour and a half.

“I think ‘apprentice’ implies someone who is always learning, like me,” she said.
One thing she would like to find, she kids, is a bumper-sticker that reads, “We brake for gardening centers.”