Bean Books 1 and 2: Wonderous Wisteria

My first "bean book" was one I happened to have on hand, Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees. I first read The Bean Trees in college and while I did not love it the way I had loved Kingsolver's Animal Dreams, I loved it enough. Kingsolver illustrated for me that one could be a biologist and a novelist, that one could write books with interesting plots and characters that one cares about and that social issues can have a place in fiction. I clearly wanted to be her (sans the insomnia, messy divorce and rural Kentucky childhood). Sometime later I fell out of my infatuation. I enjoyed both Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer, but unlike one friend who thought they represented Kingsolver's transition into literature, I thought they were substantially less fun than her earlier works, and a good bit longer. The time I spent defending Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and the locavore movement (both to family members who did and did not read the book) exhausted me with the side effect of making me annoyed with Barbara. All told, it had been many years since I had last read The Bean Trees when I picked it up a few weeks ago, and I was expecting a disappointment.

The disappointment never came. The Bean Trees is still a wonderful book. True, the flaws are more apparent to me than they were the first time I read it: some characters are way too folksy, the plot wraps up a little too easily, there are individual bits that could be considered outlandish, outdated, preachy or downright silly. However, as whole, it works for me. Beyond that, the bean references, while only a passing part of the story, are fabulously accurate. Dead vines in a scary urban park erupt one day into a profusion of wisteria flowers. Several weeks later another conversation takes place in the park.

Turtle was staring up at the wisteria flowers. "Beans," she said, pointing.

"Bees," I said. "Those things that buzz are bees."

"They sting," Lou Ann pointed out.

But Turtle shook her head. "Bean trees," she said, as plainly as if she had been thinking about it all day. We looked where she was pointing. Some of the wisteria flowers had gone to seed, and all these wonderful long green pods hung down from the branches. The looked as much like beans as anything you'd ever care to eat.

"Will you look at that," I said. It was another miracle. The flower trees were turning into bean trees, (pg 143-144).

Immediately upon finishing The Bean Trees, I unknowingly began reading another wisteria book, The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim. One of the "fun thoughtful books" from my SiL, The Enchanted April was the one I was least looking forward to, largely because I've seen the movie and remember only that it wasn't memorable. Imagine my surprise to find the book, following exactly the same plot, to be strikingly memorable. Yes, it is the story of four English women who travel to Italy to sit in a garden for the month of April (written and set just post World War I). Yes, April, Italy and gardens enchant them, and yes, very little else happens. Yet von Arnim makes things happen. As women are sitting alone admiring the freesias, conflict is broiling. It is never loud, it is never action packed, yet things definitely are happening. Von Arnim's particular skill is taking a very sweet plot and making it tart in places. Everybody is transformed by the enchanted April, but everyone remains the same. The self-absorbed twit is still a twit, the crank is still a crank. They will all return to London and still be miserable. Yet somehow it's believable that they will all be better, too. Highly recommended for those intrigued by the romance of the garden, the romance of Italy or the romance of someplace, anyplace, where it is spring in profusion.

Garden plants of all sorts play a role in The Enchanted April, but three legumes are featured: the wisteria whose promise draws them to Italy, the Judas Tree (a red-bud) that defines the a private garden and the acacias (probably black locust, Robinia pseudo-acacia) that perfumes the air and snows petals as they leave.