Suspense and Mystery in the Garden

Bird’s Blanket Garden Border

I’ve been reading Agatha Christie mysteries featuring Miss Jane Marple and watching clips of Alfred Hitchcock after watching the movie “Hitchcock” the other night.

Do you know what this means?

This means new ideas and thoughts about gardens and gardening related to mystery and suspense are swirling around in my mind.

Alfred himself explained the difference between mystery and suspense which you can hear on a clip on YouTube.

If I may paraphrase, we have an intellectual response to mysteries. We have information and we want to figure out why or who-dun-it.  On the other hand, we have an emotional response to suspense. We have enough information to know something could happen but we don’t know when or what’s next.

In the garden, for example, it is a mystery to me where all the tulips and grape hyacinths are in the garden border around the locust tree that I call Bird’s Blanket.  I know, though, that they are buried somewhere in that border, so if I dug in there now, there would be suspense each time I shoved the shovel in the ground. Will I slice a bulb in two? Or will I miss them completely?

Forget that every gardener knows that as soon as you dig around where bulbs are planted, you are going to slice a bulb right in half, or so it seems.  The point is there is a difference between mystery and suspense.

I’m going to move some surprise lilies, Lycoris squamigera, to Bird’s Blanket. I’ll do it in the spring when the foliage of the tulips and grape hyacinths solve the mystery of where the bulbs are planted.  Then I’ll know the lilies are there and the enjoy the suspense of waiting for them to pop up out of nowhere in early August.

Lycoris squamigera hiding in the hydrangea

Then I’ll go off and think more about suspense and mystery in the garden. Or maybe I’ll get two cats and name them Suspense and Mystery?  

Who knows?  

-or-

Who knows what will happen next?