As the rains ...

Balder's Traume by Anselm Kiefer

As the rains continue, and I look out on the garden, I have mixed feelings. It looked so much better in July and August. Though autumn is normally its peak season, the recent tropical storms and waves of heavy rain continuing day after day, with almost no breaks for plants to dry and spring back, have changed it into a wet, soggy mass pierced by the leaning towers of tall perennials. But, as I said, my feelings are mixed, some negative, some positive. This is the process of living and dying, to be repeated again in another year.

So much depends on the weather, the light, the wind. The garden has yet to show what it will be this autumn in its visual aspect, tossed about as it has been these last weeks, but the meaning of what I see now is clear:  while the visual experience of the garden may be diminished, garden as symbol remains a potent source of meaning.

In a blog comment Anne Wareham recently questioned how we can develop the skills "to know exactly when naturalistic tips into too messy." As I watch the effects of the weather, Anne's follow-on remark--"This boundary may change as our 'eye' changes as well as when the light and weather change..."--is certainly accurate, as far as it goes. The line between ripe and rotten is a changeable one, depending on what you might want from your garden.

Of course a garden first should be appealing to the senses, should give pleasure. But it can offer other things, perhaps something more than prettiness? When messiness comes, that doesn't mean the end of the garden year I think. The images of disarray contain useful information, lessons to be learned.

So where is the dividing line between naturalistic garden--"wild" garden--and too much disorder? That line is wiggly and it moves all over the place. The constancy of change is just about all one can be certain of.

I'd like to adopt a term William Martin used to describe my garden to get to the point I want to make. When he referred to the "flowing 'emergentness' of the whole," he opened my eyes to something I hadn't been able to put into words. Awkward as the phrase is, that flowing emergentness is what this garden is about, and it can only be perceived over time, through the seasons. It can't be seen in one photograph, or in one visit. So I guess I'm one of the few who can experience it. And my blog readers, of course, if they look at my incessant reports on my own garden!

I drive a lot, and I always pay close attention to the vegetation along the roadside. I'm excited when I see pattern emerging naturally, pattern that I'm sure reflects some underlying organizing principle--seed distribution, wind, aspect, soil type, moisture level ... and though I do decide where most plants go in the garden, I'm looking for that kind of "found" order, an order in precarious balance with disorder.

So the garden now, after a long time of bad weather, tends toward disorder, and, with the constant moisture, toward disintegration and decay. The level of disorder is certainly greater now than at this time last year. Yes, it's messy ... entropy in action.

Messiness is like noise. Or perhaps a better comparison is with my tinnitus. I have a ringing in the ears. At times, it's in the forefront of my consciousness and can be maddening, but most of the time I'm unaware of it. Likewise the experience of the garden depends on focus and awareness. I can walk out of the house and, looking across the garden, even in rain, experience visual pleasure or a kind of depression. After the rain, I can walk thorough it and see "vignettes" of order and disorder. If I keep the long-term perspective of the year in mind, I can see this as just a stage in an annual cycle of growth, decline, decay and dissolution, the "messiness" of death, then regrowth. All is order in the large scale. All of this is appropriate to this place in the woods of western New Jersey.

I yearn for extremes. In fall, I want to see the late winter garden, flat and empty after I've burned and cut what's left. I suppose that's my final answer to the decline from romantic decay into messiness. Take what lessons, what messages, are offered, then wipe it away and let it start again.

Knowledge of the plants and their ecology also plays an important role in appreciation of a naturalistic garden, and in differentiating between the effulgence of growth and messiness of disintegration. While growing plants in appropriate conditions (right plant, right place) does not necessarily make an attractive garden (some "native plant" gardens are indeed unattractive exercises in ecological correctness), seeing plants growing in appropriate conditions is educational and provides useful information. Moreover, awareness of the processes and patterns of plant growth in communities, and the changes in communities caused by competition, distribution of resources (soil, moisture, light vs. shade, exposure), and weather contribute to an understanding of the process of the garden over many years. You can see the past and the future when looking at the garden. Photographs can be a bad thing if they capture only some passing fantasy of a garden, a phantom that doesn't really exist. (Too many pretty flower pictures, scenes shot from just the right angle.)

How to appreciate such a garden? To someone not familiar with the plants I know it's simply a mass of undifferentiated, undulating green, but to anyone with knowledge of prairie perennials and grasses there is plenty of interest. So detailed plant knowledge is certainly one skill needed to appreciate such a garden.

Knowledge of plants also helps one see the garden in four dimensions, so to speak, because it forces you to be aware of time, and changes over time. Messiness and decay, punctuated by strongly structural plants, can maintain visual interest and "extend the season" of the garden, even on occasion carrying it from the merely visual to the intellectual, even the emotional, as with the Japanese concept of Wabi Sabi.

Which brings us finally to the matter of personal disposition and perception. What do you, or I, choose to see at the moment? What filters are we viewing the garden (or the world) through? This brings us close to the difficult concepts of psychology and aesthetics. In this case, it's probably wise to limit the inquiry to what is "appealing to the senses" in some way. Take this painting by Anselm Kiefer as a starting point.

This is certainly appealing to the senses, though in a rather horrific way. It powerfully draws you in, makes you ask questions. Can a garden work in this range of emotions? I think it can, and most likely when it's in a state of disintegration. And a "conceptual" garden with a message certainly can.

Here are two garden photographs from a couple of years back, full of decay and signs of dissolution, even with some of the same colors and something of the mood of the Kiefer painting, but with autumnal coloring and spot lighting that create an entirely different emotional response. Unlike the Kiefer painting, they do not evoke a barren, destroyed landscape, though they do seem to be moving in that direction.

The garden photos have that "beatific" sunlight slanting through the trees, as if something godly might be lurking off to the side. Is some kind of physical beauty ... haze, slanting rays of sunlight ... necessary to meaningful engagement with the garden (not speaking of the "acts" of gardening here)? It's certainly good for a start, to draw you in, but I don't think always necessary.

Depending on what you bring to it, the garden can set off ruminations on many things, including reminders of banishment from the Garden of Eden, apocalyptic images of destruction, or simply the natural cycle of life (perhaps they're the same?). What do I want to see today? What can I see today?

It may be no surprise if I tell you my first "garden" was a cemetery, a beautiful ground blessed by huge Southern Magnolias, full of mysteries from the past, hints of unknown stories, ancient (to me as a young boy) monuments of lichened stone, some thrilling and beautiful, some with mysterious messages in Latin and Hebrew, row upon row of markers for the Confederate dead. It was my safe place, my refuge from a frightening world. Strangely, I always associated that cemetery with life, never with death.

A drive by Felder Rushing's

Over the past couple of years I've become quite fond of listening to podcasts of Felder Rushing's gardening program, The Gestalt Gardener, on Mississippi Public Broadcasting. Having lived in the Northeast for almost 40 years, I've lost my southern accent, so I really enjoy hearing the many variations of "southern" on Felder's weekly program. You can easily find The Gestalt Gardener on iTunes.

Felder's garden, in the trendy Fondren neighborhood of Jackson, Mississippi, is something to behold. The week before Thanksgiving, my sister Linda, Phil and I managed to find Felder's house. As you can see above, it's easily recognizable.

The image below shows a little more of the surrounding context. Felder's house is not on an isolated site. It's in a middle class neighborhood of modest, traditional houses. It's a statement and, perhaps, an implicit indictment of bland middle class landscaping, though I don't speak for Felder here. That's my personal opinion.

References to vernacular architecture and gardens in the rural south abound, particularly in the corrugated metal panels and the bottle trees. The corrugated panels used to make the wall and as roofing have been used as a cheap siding on farm outbuildings and for roofing on country houses throughout the south. Interestingly, I've discovered this to be a ubiquitous construction material throughout the world. Many houses in Iceland, perhaps the majority of them, use the same metal siding (lack of wood, you know) and William Martin, in his fabulous garden in Australia, Wigandia, uses the same materials for his garden walls.

Note Felder's truck garden in the photo below - literally a traveling garden in the back of his pickup truck. I didn't want to get too close, lest I be accused of tresspassing (you can see how close the neighboring house is on the right). Most surrounding houses have traditional front lawns and the standard American foundation plantings. But I believe I've heard Felder say his garden's influence is slowly spreading.

Avant Gardners: 50 Visionaries of the Contemporary Landscape

This isn't a book for the cottage gardener or the complacent. It is certain to spark a powerful response in many readers – if it has many readers. Conceptual landscape design is not a subject of widespread interest in most gardening circles, certainly not in North America.

Avant Gardeners may delight you, annoy you, frustrate you, spark new insights about gardening and design. I have to confess my prejudice. I appreciate the work of some conceptual landscape designers. I’ve always liked Martha Schwartz’ playful park at Jacob Javits Plaza (we call it “the Federal Building”) in New York City – liked it years before I even knew it was designed by Martha Schwartz – even before I knew Martha Schwartz existed. But I dislike many of the conceptual landscapes in this book.

Admittedly, some are beautiful, or so appropriate to place, I can’t deny their relevance to the urban world: I’m remembering the first landscape in the book, designed by Atelier Big City, a small, mainly concrete park for hanging out and skateboarding under an elevated bridge approach in Montreal that seems a perfect solution for an almost-waste-space. While most conceptual landscapes are urban, some are not. Wigandia, for example, William Martin’s ecologically appropriate garden-cum-artwork on the side of a volcano in Australia is full of plants that thrive in drought, and it stands as a direct, even polemical, criticism of the prevalence of "British style" gardens so inappropriate to Australia, a land of sun, heat and scarce water resources.

Tim Richardson defines a conceptual garden as a landscape designed using a single overriding concept: "Conceptualist landscapes are predicated on ideas rather than plants or the architectural use of hard materials. Such spaces are underpinned by a single concept, or visual motif, which informs every aspect of the design." Many conceptual gardeners use no plants, some only artificial materials. Others design what appear to be more conventional gardens, with plants and hardscaping, but the design is controlled with strict intellectual discipline.

Mr. Richardson is a very good writer, and an agile and informed thinker about gardens. I come away from Avant Gardeners feeling disturbed, not quite able to see why many of the conceptual landscapes in this book are not more aptly called outdoor conceptual or installation art. Some choices seem to be arbitrary. Perhaps it doesn't matter and Mr. Richardson's point is just to stir things up.

I can't read his intent but, for me, this is the point of the book: to question the very meaning of the word "garden", to push the borders of our understanding of gardens, and to open up new possibilities. Whatever your reaction to this book, it will make you think about what a garden is. And that’s a service to the culture of gardening throughout the world.

Garden Diary: Two Exotic Groundcovers

Sweet woodruff (Galium odoratum) and myrtle (Vinca minor) make a striking carpet at this time of the year. The myrtle has been in bloom for about a month. Only in the past week have the colonies of Sweet woodruff popped into bloom. Both are considered invasive exotics, but at Federal Twist they coexist happily, seemingly without affecting the native carexes, the numerous seedling trees, or the highly invasive, but native, poison ivy.

I know the myrtle was introduced over 40 years ago because William Hunt's architectural plans called for extensive plantings to control erosion on the steep banks surrounding the house, which was built in 1965. I welcome its periwinkle blue flowers every spring, especially in the wilder woods in front of the house. I have no idea when the Sweet woodruff was introduced; it has formed several distinct colonies that, I admit, seem to grow a little larger each year.

The thick mats of mixed myrtle and Sweet woodruff remind me of William Martin's "layering" planting technique, as he described it in his Vista lecture recently in London (see post below). At his well known garden, Wigandia, in Australia, he gardens on the side of a volcano, in soil and environmental conditions vastly different from mine. His technique does not involve horizontal, visual layering of plants as in a border, but rather vertical layering. He covers the ground thickly with a low, even "thuggish" (to use his word) kind of planting, then grows the larger, more structural plants through the layer covering the ground. I was happy to hear his description because I'm trying to use a similar technique in my garden on Federal Twist Road.

The mat of Sweet woodruff and myrtle is one preexisting example of this "layering" technique given to me by Edith Howeth, the first and previous gardener at Federal Twist. I'm experimenting with other combinations in the main garden at back, where conditions are different - more open, very wet, and sunny.

Vista Lecture Series Podcasts from Gardens Illustrated: William Martin

Gardens Illustrated has published the second podcast in the Vista lecture series. This kind of thinking about gardening isn't happening anywhere I know of in the US. (If I'm wrong, please let me know.) For any of you with an interest in gardening that goes beyond the "how to" or Japanese beetle control, please listen to this lecture series - and read the book of essays edited by Tim Richardson and Noel Kingsbury, Vista: The Culture and Politics of Gardens. It's available for a shamefully low price on Amazon.com. I quote from the GI website:

"Considered something of an agent provocateur in the horticultural world, William Martin describes himself as 'an artist whose ideas find their best expression in the garden'. In his talk he considers the complex relationships between landscape, environment, culture and society as revealed in his own garden Wigandia in southern Australia. Find out more details of William Martin’s work at www.wigandia.com."

GI's description has tamed Mr. Martin, I'm afraid. He's an iconoclastic, provocative, sometimes insulting, personality, with much to say. To listen to the podcast, click this link.

To download it, go directly to the GI website.