My husband and I are inveterate collectors of frivolous ephemera. To poke fun at us some years ago, a friend christened our home in England Tchotchke Mahal (“tchotchke” is Yiddish for dust collectors). The moniker was apt, and it stuck. At the time we were living in the Cotswolds, where every cottage proudly displayed its name. Had we stayed, we probably would have gotten our own placard.
In England, a name customarily remains with the house, but we recycled ours when we moved to Colorado. English tradition extends the home’s name to the garden, but since it hardly seemed fair to call the plants “dust collectors,” the garden remained nameless. It didn’t help that we’re both name-phobic. (I’m embarrassed to admit we once had a dog named Zero because that was the sum total of usable names we could come up with for him.)
Gardens generally aren’t named in Colorado anyway, so we didn’t give this much thought. That is, until we joined in a garden tour in 1993. The organizer, Sandy Snyder, whose garden carries the poetic name “Alpenridge,” decreed that every garden on the tour should also have a name. Other gardeners came up with romantic “Arroyo,” “Wildflowers in a Meadow,” “Wildwood Shanti” and the “Winsome Garden.” Although we racked our brains for several months, we were stumped. Our garden ended up with the mundane “Tatroe’s Garden,” the garden equivalent of Zero the dog.
Motivated by the more creative examples, locals launched into a garden-naming frenzy. Author and artist Bob and Cindy Nold called their rock gardens “Little Fantods,” literally “little emotional outbursts.” Beth Wilton named her Fort Collins Xeriscape “High and Dry.” Dick and Ann Bartlett collect frogs, so their garden became “Froggy Bottom.” Rebecca and Bob Skowron garden at “Raven Ranch” in Franktown. I had plenty of garden-name envy but still no inspiration.
All that changed this past winter with a friend’s e-mail. An avid linguaphile, she’d discovered an obscure garden term on the Internet she thought I might find interesting. A “godwottery” (god-WOT-uhr-ee) is a garden “marked by an effected and elaborate style.” This word was reputedly coined in the 19th century when poet T. E. Brown rhymed “rose plot” with “God Wot” (“wot”-an archaic variant of “wit,” to know, in other words “God knows”) as he rapturously lauded his overstuffed garden.
The website recommended that if you’d like to create a godwottery of your own, you might consider “sundials, gnomes, fairies, plastic sculptures, fake rockery, pump-driven streams and wrought-iron furniture.” The author went on to suggest that a pair of pink flamingos would “round it out nicely.”
It was a eureka moment. The garden thus described is our own. Our garden contains a sundial, two wooden gnomes, a pump-driven waterfall, a pair of wrought-iron benches and a pink flamingo’s head on a spike.
No fairies or plastic animals, but that seems to be splitting hairs. To compensate for this insufficiency, we display a dragon-shaped birdhouse, wind chimes (both terrestrial and aerial), several birdbaths, ceramic rabbits and spheres galore.
A new sign by the garden gate now proudly proclaims “Tatroe’s Godwottery.”
Marcia Tatroe is a garden writer and lecturer. E-mail her at rltaurora@aol.com.
