Garden of Light

"We garden with light!" - Anne Wareham

 
I thought the heavy, wet snow storm of October 28 (an extraordinary storm so early in the season) would have destroyed the garden, at least for the rest of this season, and for the most part it did.

But the clear air and low sun yesterday morning showed the power of light to transform even a scene of ruin into a kind of beauty--light, and the frame of a camera, can create appealing pictures, even of colorful destruction, but a walk through the garden in the morning light was something much more special than I had expected, more than a series of pretty pictures; it was more about atmosphere, context, and illusion.

Certainly no one would call this a "flower garden."

A garden of light, perhaps?

Even this scene of apparent devastation has quite a bit of interest, for me anyway. A kind of botanical archaeology of the garden year. If you click on the image to expand it, you may see what I mean:  evocative contrasts of color, shape, and tone, like impasto on a canvas.

This morning encounter set me thinking about the limits many of us put on our use of the word "garden" because what I was experiencing, while certainly appealing to my senses and thought-provoking, wasn't typical of what most people seek in a garden visit. That is changing, I think, as more gardens imitate, or seek to replicate, the processes and "look" of wildness--gardens like the High Line in New York City or any of many gardens in the "New Perennials" style. As these new gardens become more popular, they may be leading to a gradual change in expectations.

The scene before me was of destruction in large measure--flattened plants, mangled grasses lying in heaps and broken spires, circles of green iris foliage looking for all the world like they had been exploded from their centers and laid out flat on the ground, leaning towers of rich leaden brown Joe Pye Weed, limber willows sprung back from their ice-covered flatness with feathery foliage still intact, the giant miscanthus badly battered but still mostly upright. It was a scene of colors and shapes clearly akin to a kind of abstract painting, some elements a result of intentional choice during planting of the garden, others completely random.

Grasses, even torn into such asymmetrical shapes, are one key to gardening with light. But not just any light; backlighting the tangled foliage makes such a damaged garden come to life. Grasses become like myriad and intricately shaped lanterns, catching the light, amplifying and transforming it through some process of inner refraction and building up of color effects into a bit of the ethereal, a hopeful glimpse into potential, the possibility of beauty in ruined things.

The opening of the woods as the leaves fall lets the light stream through in picturesque shafts of brilliance. Ironic though it may seem looking at these images, the pleasure of my garden is an old, and obvious, one, going back to the Picturesque tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Consider the effects of light, atmosphere, color, scene in the paintings of the Hudson River School, a vision of landscape, with a powerful dose of nostalgia for the past, that formed one of the most enduring myths of America. Much of my appreciation of the ruined garden is a similar romantic, even sentimental, feeling for  "nature," an old and very traditional sense of landscape characteristic of the American experience with the natural world--also my penchant for seeing the garden as a theatrical stage set, though one that takes years to make and that constantly changes. Smoke and mirrors, a human kind of seeming magic.

The spaces in the woods created by the fall of the leaves and the newly penetrating light bring a sense of release after a summer of profuse growth. This seems appropriate to the time of year. In summer, the focus is on the garden; the woods are simply a wall, an enclosure. Now, with the shortening days, the light of the sun streaming through the woods makes me raise my eyes from the low plain of the garden to the bright depths of the surrounding trees, to the wooded world beyond the garden, reawakening awareness of the interconnections of garden and natural world, of human culture with nature, present with past.

The smells were sweet that morning. The fragrances of autumn will soon become the odors of fermentation, rich, earthy, savory, but this day the early processes of slowing growth and decomposition were sweetly reminiscent of freshly mown grass or fresh cut hay.

So this is my goodbye to the garden for another year.

Talking Gardens

Tim Richardson and Noel Kingsbury lead a talk with Dan Pearson, Cleve West, and Andy Sturgeon on the latest Gardens Illustrated podcast. This is GI's annual lecture held at the end of last spring's Chelsea Flower Show (where Cleve West's garden won Best in Show).

I find this discussion fascinating because I've become quite comfortable "translating" the British garden world into the world I know here in America. The conversation ranges from the application of the New Perennials style to small gardens (and whether that can even work ... Dan Pearson makes a case for it), how availability of plants has changed (the selection of shrubs is much more limited and they are harder to find; perennials are far more available), to Cleve West's interest in the so-called Sheffield School of gardening (scientifically selected seed mixes for randomized planting), and Dan Pearson's clear description of the benefits of layered planting (an imitation of natural layering of plants ... starting with trees and shrubs, down to the understory of sun loving and shade tolerant perennials).

We have little offering this richness of subject matter and intellectual stimulation available on our side of the Atlantic. Perhaps, because our country is so large and diverse, it's just not possible for such ideas to make it into the American media, which isn't friendly to garden-related subjects, except in "life style" or "how to" formats. Listen and see what you think.

Garden Diary: October 24 - Coming Home

View of the garden at Federal Twist - just as the sunlight began to break through,
completely changing the mood of the garden

A certain level of disorientation is a good thing in a garden, at least at the start of a visit. A feeling of being a bit lost sets the stage for a new way of seeing, a receptivity to new perceptions, exploration and discovery.

On Sunday, October 24 I got up early enough to see the sun rise; once it was light, I went out to record the progress of autumn in the garden.

The cloud cover muted the colors. The garden appeared to be in a state of stasis. The clock had stopped. The slide toward winter was temporarily suspended, leaving me with an ominous feeling of disappointment, dissatisfaction, a wish for change.

For most of my life I've lived with the illusion that "emotions" are a mental state, all in the head, so to speak. But that's not true. Emotions are a bodily response. They arise in the body, and in a very real sense,  are physically "felt" before the conscious mind names them. This is the old saw about the head and the heart, the conscious and the unconscious.

Before an emotional impulse is named, before a label is applied, one experiences a state of unknowing, of being lost, and the start of a journey toward understanding--a journey that may last a millisecond or a lifetime.

I have difficulty naming emotions, and my own inclination is to seek meaning in metaphor, or in narrative--using images and stories to explore the world of feeling.

Look at the photo of the small pond below: on this dreary morning the reflective surface, largely obscured by dying growth, called to mind an eerie scene out of Edgar Allan Poe--the "dank tarn" in The Fall of the House of Usher--an image that carries associations of abandon, decay, withdrawal of life, a suggestion of some ominous potential.

Although I don't particularly care for the work of Poe, he's a part of my culture and the images and metaphors contained in his stories are ready to hand, so I saw the scenes below with a sense of the "dark and drear" Poe evokes so powerfully. Glistening wet, dark, perhaps even threatening. I was telling myself a story, though the story seemed to be telling itself, arising spontaneously as I simply observed. But I know that wasn't so; I was participating in the process.

Then things changed; the sun broke through the cloud cover (photo below), scattering light into the garden, and my mood lifted, my emotional response changed. All thought of Poe vanished.

Suddenly the garden was full of warm golds, reds, browns, tans, the backlighting dramatically silhouetting the individual plants, and reflective light revealing surface textures and color. I had been lost, musing on images from Poe, then I found what I didn't even know I was looking for. As the sun sparked the garden into life, my response was visceral, a sudden flood of anticipation, an aching tension in the body like a lover's response to the beloved.

This was more than appreciation of a pretty picture, more than painting with plants. The closest I can come to expressing my feelings is to say the change was like coming home.

My garden is clearly of a type, heavily influenced by the so-called New Wave or New Perennials style that grew out of a naturalistic garden movement in Europe, Germany and Holland in particular, and that began to influence gardening in the UK around the mid-1990s. It broke onto the American scene about ten years ago, prominently in books by Piet Oudolf, Noel Kingsbury, Michael King, and Henk Gerritsen, and was already making its mark in the work of our own Oehme and Van Sweden.

This new approach to garden design and planting is usually described as "Romantic," almost always with a capital "R". When I hear that word used, I hear a pejorative. It is too easy to dismiss this style as a nostalgic retreat from reality, as dreamy-eyed picture painting while our world seemingly tumbles into the chaos of terrorism and political fragmentation.

I think we've misnamed the look and the feel of these naturalistic gardens. "Romantic" isn't the right word;
it paints with too broad a brush, and it's been so overused it has little meaning.

Though it may look Romantic, my own garden was very much conceived as a rational, clearly thought-out response to the nature of this place, to difficult soil conditions, to poor drainage, to the surrounding wood that casts deep shadows, to the presence of a low mid-century house overlooking it all.

When I recall my feelings looking at this land six years ago, before the heavy growth of cedars and assorted brush was cut and removed, I think of Poe again. It was a dreary place, full of fallen trees and the detritus of decades of neglect.

But I brought with me five years of experience in my Rosemont garden, where I had first tried my hand with a garden in blatant imitation of the gardens I saw in the books of Oudolf, Kingsbury, Gerritsen, King, and, of course, our Americans Oehme (naturalized American from Germany) and Van Sweden, who himself was trained in Europe. The list could go on, but these are the bright lights in my memory.

So faced with this place I knew was not a good or easy place to make a garden, I approached the situation with the knowledge and tools I had learned from these men (why not women, an interesting question?).

I knew I also needed some very specific advice about the appropriateness of plants to my challenging habitat, so I got a copy of Hansen and Stahl's Perennials and their Garden Habitats (Die Stauden und Ihre Lebensbereiche), translated into English. Based on decades of research conducted in central Europe, this book contains exhaustive lists and descriptions of plants suited to various habitats. It was extremely helpful in selecting plants to match my garden conditions.

I don't see my garden as a result of plant painting to create a "Romantic" picture, not at all. It's the result of a very rationale process of design and planting, as well as a lot of practical experimentation to see what would die, what would only survive, and what would thrive. It is a very practical response to a difficult situation.

Certainly, for me, emotion is at the heart of my experience of this garden. And in a sense, any emphasis on the importance of emotional response might very well be called romantic. But what we have in the New Perennials movement isn't a retrograde or reactionary way of seeing the world, but is a synthesis of the rational and the feeling, a search for a way forward in a world that has experienced the degradation of overuse, pollution, and an out of control (human) population, and of course limited resources. Labor is expensive today, and most gardeners need to manage their gardens with minimal paid help (very practical).

But I do not mean a "return to nature" in any sense, and I have certainly not tried to create a native plant garden.

Note the liberal use of Miscanthus, a Japanese grass, not native, for sure, but one that looks right in this situation, and it thrives. Mixed in you will see several native plants: Pycnanthemum muticum (Mountain mint) in low silvery masses, scattered Physostegia virginiana (Obedient plant) in buttery yellow, dark seedheads of Rudbeckia maxima, and the almost black stems of Joe Pye Weed (Eupatorium purpureum).

This is an American prairie--not a real prairie certainly, but a simulacrum of a wet prairie, adapted to my local conditions and to my personal preferences.

So where does emotion fit into this picture? That depends on the observer. To someone familiar with the New Perennials style, there is an immediate recognition and connection with an established palette of feelings associated with appreciation, or critical observation, of this style. To the less knowledgeable observer, the uninitiated, a state of confusion may result. Some simply see wild, uncultivated land. Some actually experience discomfort, possibly even fear, and want to quickly return to the high ground near the house, or even retreat inside the house.

I've observed this many times, and I don't see this reaction as bad. My garden has, in a sense, ambushed such visitors, attacked their preconceptions of what a garden should be, and this attack occurs at an emotional, possibly unconscious, level. Perhaps it will set off a longer term rethinking and future change in attitude.

Below, Panicum virgatum 'Shenandoah', a native plant, but its attraction for me is a sensuous pleasure, not an intellectual satisfaction or an ethical statement on use of native plants.

Another merging of the native and the non-native into a naturalistic prairie planting--native Pycnantheum muticum surrounded by Miscanthus sinensis 'Silberfeder', a grass of Japanese origin, with a German cultivar name.

The "transparent" tall grass below is Molinia caerulea 'Transparent', another European.

In the case of my garden, the style of the house overlooking it, and the situation of the house at an odd angle to the border of the property (to make it face south) also dictated a naturalistic, informal style, without a perceptible grid or axis. Again, this was not a romantic impulse, but a practical decision to keep the garden in a style appropriate to a modernist house built in the mid 1960s.

A small, secluded sitting area in the middle of the plantings.

I've said a lot, perhaps too much, so the rest will be silent.

(well, almost silent)

Postscript

The New Wave has been much in the news recently--that is, the horticultural news--and I imagine we will soon be seeing magazine articles and books about this garden design phenomenon. With a "Dutch Wave" exhibition at the Garden Museum in London, blogs by Noel Kingsbury and Darryl Moore, and newspaper articles about this perennial-intensive, naturalistic, emotional style of planting, we appear to be in for some retrospective, and reassessment, as the media makers look back over the past 15 years.