T A B L E_T A L K What do you wear when you travel? Discuss comfort versus style on the road in Table Talk's Wanderlust area R E C E N T L Y Chili con carne, anyone? By Vijai Maheshwari In Moscow, buyers are snapping up whatever's on the shelves (09/14/98) From nudism to Buddhism By Tanya Shaffer Desperately seeking solace in three European retreats (09/11/98) Bangkok's got a brand new bag By Karl Vetas Sex change capital of the world (09/10/98) Have dress, will travel By Lori Leibovich Test-driving Travelsmith's "Indispensable Black Travel Dress" (09/09/98) A legendary cafe-restaurant in Paris By David Downie Le Pied Rare is celebrated in novels -- and by its pork-loving patrons (09/08/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		"OPEN GARDEN" DAY IN RURAL ENGLAND REVEALS THE TREASURES OF THE GARDENER'S ART -- AND THE SPIRIT OF COOPERATION AT ITS HEART. - - - - - - - - - BY SIMON FIRTH The other day a handwritten note was left in my mailbox. "You have a splendiferous garden. Thank you!" it said. It was unsigned but brightly punctuated with the kind of ebullient stick-figure flower a happy adult or a child will draw for you if you are lucky. I did indeed feel lucky, and also rewarded for a winter of double-digging, composting and mulching, not to mention succeeding months of planting, watering and worrying. I live in the Bay Area of California -- somewhere that's not been held hostage to the great American Cult of the Lawn to quite the same degree as the rest of the nation and where there are many fine gardens to inspire a would-be Californian Capability Brown. It was nice to think my garden might begin to compare with some of my neighbors'. But I also knew that however splendiferous it might be in local terms, my garden was nothing compared to those to be found at their most dense, florid, brazen best in an English village in July. I knew this, or rather the truth of it had been reconfirmed to me, because this last July I visited my parents' house in the southern English county of Hampshire. I was there for the weekend and we were running through the (rather brief) list of events cultural and agricultural that were on offer to us when we came across the clear weekend winner -- "In aid of East Meon charities," it said, "Gardens Open." There is nothing more interesting to your average middle-aged, middle-class English couple (and their expat son) than the chance to peek through the gates, behind the hedges and beyond the tall stone and brick walls of their neighbors' homes. In this case we were hopping a couple of villages along the lee of the chalk hills the locals confusingly call "The Downs" to East Meon, an ancient settlement that has managed to avoid the self-pastiche that's befallen many English villages that are similarly well-situated and full of fine old homes. And we (or rather my folks) even knew many of the gardeners who'd be opening up their gardens to all and sundry in the name of charity. Some of them, indeed, were people with whom my gardener father traded cuttings and seeds. The frisson of horticultural nosiness was infectious. What treasures, we were wondering, might these gardeners have been hiding from us behind their garden walls? Now we were going to find out. I have fond memories of East Meon. I received my secondary education in a nearby market town courtesy of a school founded 300 years previously to train navigators for merchant sailing ships bound for the nation's colonies. In the late 1970s it still excelled best at directing the bright sons of local yeoman farmers, bank managers and sales representatives into the remnants of empire -- recruits of the ever-shrinking British Armed Forces. It was a school that rewarded and most admired prowess on the playing field and success in the school's own military cadre -- its Combined Cadet Force, an institution where, itching in cast-off World War II uniforms, I first learned how to shoot a gun and to understand how easily absolute authority can corrupt those in whom it is invested. But at age 16 my school life became much more tolerable when I discovered I could escape, at least on the afternoons the school devoted to worship at the altars of (depending on the season) rugby, hockey or cricket, by claiming an overwhelming interest in the solitary sport of cycling. This interest, or scam, I shared with a boy called Julian but known to all as "Dinz." With furtive glee we'd exit the school gates and cycle energetically straight to Dinz's house -- in nearby East Meon. There we'd make tea, eat crumpets, play music and otherwise fail to be energetic before we'd cycle back to school, at last racing manfully so that we arrived apparently exhausted. Now, for the first time in many years, I was back in the village. Dinz and his family have long since departed, but the town, I was to realize, was still a place of refuge for men whose idea of manhood was very different from the swaggering, aggressive posturing that so many "good" English boys' schools still try to reproduce in their pupils. These men were the village's gardeners. N E X T+P A G E | Open to fellow gardeners and thieves