THE SARTORIALLY CORRECT GARDENER

Homemade garden smock.

Dante Gabriel Rosseti's take on the gardening smock.

A small sample of homegrown snow peas and strawberries.

The translucent petals of a trumpet lily glow in the light of a late summer afternoon.

THE SARTORIALLY CORRECT GARDENER

It is neither Pierre Deux, Souleiado, Anthropologie or Smith and Hawkens. It is just a homemade gardening smock made from cotton fabric bought at a factory outlet. Total cost of the fabric was something like five dollars and the ribbon used for the straps cost twenty five cents. Wearing it does not transform one into neither Vita-Sackville West nor Tasha Tudor. At the most, it bears an unintentional resemblance to a servant's smock in in a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

By unintentional I mean that I did not use a pattern. Not using the pattern means that I ended up with armholes that were considerably larger than what I had in mind, originally.

No matter. The correct attire for a gardener is a matter of taste. Cotton denim and corduroy make good trousers and aprons. The lighter muslin and chambray are good choices for summer shirts and dresses. My homemade smoke is a bit frivolous. After two hours weeding a muddy border will reduce it to a rag suitable for floor mopping. The ribbon is a mistake. It should be sturdy grosgrain, but all I had on hand was this shiny satiny length. That can be corrected later.

For the moment my job is to harvest lilies--a very Pre-Raphaelite activity--berries and peas. It is way too hot to fight creeping charlie, lamb's quarters and the dratted trees of heaven.

The yellow boots are excessive. There has been no rain for at least a week and the rain barrel is nearly empty. Plain old clogs work just fine in this dry weather.

Hats are a necessity. No question about that. My heart lusts for Borsalino's Pantropic Montecristi Optimo, but a hat like that requires that one hire a servant to tend it, as the Roman pedisequi tended the sandals of their masters during a banquet. No, this smock calls for something a bit more egalitarian--the conical Vietnamese Non La the Infanta bought at Washington DC's Chinatown, for example. A small Souleiado scarf is permitted , but dollar fifty bandannas from the discount store are best. Gardening is not an activity that calls for status symbols unless your are a disgustingly wealthy type, in which case, I I intend to come to your garden and sing Ca Ira at the top of my lungs. make your own dress, though, and all is forgiven.

In mid-June, the flower garden rests. Coreopsis, that old standbys of perennial gardens does not do well in our clay soil. Shasta daisies need to be replanted in great volumes in order to make a show. Among the roses, only the ubiquitous Dorothy Perkins, purloined from an abandoned farmhouse, puts forth its dusty looking clusters of mottled pink. Blue veronica makes a modest show and russian sage puts in the shiest of appearances. Annuals planted in March demur. Weeds flourish, covering the flower beds in great splashes of misleading green. Black spot, the bane of the organic gardener's existence takes hold upon rose leaves. For real life gardeners, such dismal times balance the easy glory of late spring. It is well that at this point the vegetable garden begins to produce beets, tomatoes, snow peas and rhubarb, although the latter, in spite of muych cosseting and massive doses of blood meal yields just enough to make a deep dish pie for the man in life. We savor it under the wisteria arbor, as sunlight plays hide-and-seek in the woods. A goldfish darts beneath the young leaves of a waterlily, in the fish pond, the wood thrush and mourning doves concertize and all is well with the world.