Garden Diary: Practical Paths, Visual Structure, Metaphorical Leanings

 Midway in life's journey, I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.

- Dante, The Divine Comedy

A friend recently sent me a CD of photos he took in the garden last summer, almost exactly a year ago. He visited before I started replacing the messy, temporary wood chip paths--which had just washed away yet again in a heavy rain--with much more substantial gravel paths. This was a propitious gift; it helped me clarify my goals in this garden on Federal Twist Road. 

(And that quote from Dante? I have to admit it doesn't at all express my own present state of mind, but I do believe it captures a universal human paradigm that we find in the subtext of many gardens, certainly in mine.)

When we bought the house five years ago, the land was covered with 50-year-old cedars. To make room for a garden, we had sixty or seventy cedars felled, chipped, and removed. I asked the contractor to leave several large piles of wood chips for use in making paths. At that time, I had no clear plan, but knew the chips would come in handy. As the garden took shape, I used the wood chips to lay out the paths that defined the garden. There were very few plants at that time, so these pathways were what defined the layout of the garden.

These chips were certainly useful and easy-to-work-with material but, over several years, they proved to have many disadvantages. They easily washed away in heavy rains, they decomposed and sank into the wet clay, they required constant replenishment, and possibly most important, they didn't make a pleasant walking surface. The garden is wet through most seasons, so the wood chips (above) often left visitors with an unpleasant sense of walking through a soggy field ... highly atmospheric, but not a pleasure up close ...

Last fall I began the laborious, and costly, process of building new gravel paths. (With help, of course; I couldn't transport those tons of gravel, by hand cart, myself.) The process took about seven months, with work only on weekends, and a long work stoppage during the heavy snow of winter. The new gravel path (below) makes a solid walking surface well above the wet. Even more importantly, the contrasting color and mass of the gravel add a strong visual structure, providing a clear sense of direction, making spatial relationships easier to grasp, and linking together the different parts of the garden.

Below, on the backside of the garden, you can see the old path tended to fade into the background ...

... while, in dramatic contrast, the gravel replacement (below) rather forcefully carries the eye through a series of curves ...

... and creates a strong sense of direction and anticipation. What is out of view just around the corner?

In August 2009, the path at the east end (below) was virtually disappearing ...

... but by August 2010, the gravel path (below) has become an armature guiding the view across the width of the garden, highlighting the shapes, colors, and textures of the plantings (and clearly showing where plantings need to be improved, especially along the more sharply defined path edges).

Similar story at the west end, which last year was a flat, static field, with little sense of anticipation, and a generally messy appearance...

... the gravel path (below) juts forcefully into the profuse plantings, creates a felt bodily desire to move forward, a beckoning.

Looked at from the high point of the house (to the upper left above), the paths draw out the subtle lines of the landscape--like a graphic or a musical interpretation of the hydrologic flow patterns of the land--calling to mind a river or a stream flowing across the surface and down the gentle slope toward the creek at the bottom of the valley.

The paths also function at a conceptual level; the sense of physical movement they create also suggests a metaphorical journey, and by extension a mindful questioning--certainly an age-old gardening concept, particularly in Japanese gardens. Thanks to that gift of a CD from a friend, I've been better able to articulate my intention to myself. (To find my way out of the woods, so to speak.) I'm aiming to create a sensually appealing environment, but one that goes beyond the physical environment to evoke a thoughtful repose and contemplation of larger questions.

Photos of bark paths by Ragnar Naess

Woodland shadows

 Midway through life's journey, I found myself lost in a dark wood.

- Inferno, Dante Alighieri

"Woodland was once the predominant vegetation on much of the earth's landmass. In clearing so much for agriculture and settlement, the human race has created conditions much more to our liking, for we have an ambiguous relationship with trees and woodland. There is something primeval about mature woodland; it is a habitat in which we wonder at the majesty and diversity of nature, but at the same time do not feel quite at home. It is almost as if there is an aspect of the collective unconscious that makes us feel on edge when surrounded by trees."

- from Natural Garden Style, Noel Kingsbury

My garden, in an open clearing surrounded completely by a wall of trees, isn't always a comforting place to be. Though it's a bright sunny site, particularly in the morning, and a peaceful woodland setting, with the sound of the Lockatong Creek clearly audible at most times of year, I sometimes feel a sense of unease, particularly when alone -- an emotional undertone that colors the experience of being in the garden, a subtle feeling, one that is simply a part of being in this place. There are certainly moments of beauty, of peace, delight, and the miraculous sense of constant change as the wet prairie plants grow with amazing rapidity, continuously changing the profile of the garden, its colors and textures, as the seasons advance. But that feeling of unease always returns, lingering in the background.

"On edge when surrounded by trees" - Kingsbury puts it so simply. The woodland surrounding my garden is so tight and close, with trees leaning out over the edge of the garden, that the open savannah-like garden area always feels a little too closed in--threatened, if you will--by the forest, so eager to retake the land, to make it into forest again. To return it to its natural state, at least what would be its natural state in this climate, geological setting, and time.

Kingsbury's quotation points to one very  common experience of humans to woodland, and I think we all can relate to this feeling, walking through a forest, sometimes stumbling through tangles of undergrowth, sometimes walking smooth paths through grand halls of majestic trees, then suddenly breaking into the sunlight of an open glade. That is a welcome, a pleasant, and a safe feeling. On a deeper, more symbolic level, the forest can come to represent a host of meanings to us - in Dante's case, a condition of being spiritually "lost," unable to find the right path, the way to safety. These are such common reactions to the experience of woodland and forest, and such long-established conceits in our culture, literature and arts, that it seems almost willful to focus only on the beauty and fragility and peace of the woodland experience when, frankly, the woods can frighten us. Consider Hansel and Gretel.

There is something quintessentially American about this too, at least in this place. As my own  ancestors moved, with each generation, from east to west during the early settlement of this continent (or "taking" of this land, one might more accurately say), they repeated a pattern of settlement that became a motif of western migration, moving into new land, clearing the land of trees first of all, for safety and for utility, to make farming possible, to create pastureland for animals, to create visibility so danger could be seen from a distance. One could ask why the emotions that accompanied this experience are not entirely appropriate to an American garden. At least this is one common historical context, one we can play with, or play against, as we explore the making of a garden.

I relate this unease with the forest, as Kingsbury points out, to something almost like a collective unconscious, but also to a deeply buried, and unresolved, habit of thought, a deep fear of the unknown and unknowable, and the need to find safety in control, to what has become a flight in our current culture into the superficial, something that has taken as one of its prime symbols the American suburban lawn, a smooth, featureless surface of green with no purpose whatever, other than to say, "Don't fear me, don't think I'm different, I'm like you, I'm no threat." Perhaps I exaggerate, or overstate the case, but I do believe there is a truth here too.

This Sunday morning, with the bright sunlight streaming down onto the snow, lighting the white cover deep into the forest, as my thoughts turn to spring, plants emerging from their dank, wet dormancy, the tall wirey flowering stems of the Darmera peltata and hybrid Petasites that will rise in a few weeks (among the earliest clear signs winter is over), to again starting work in the garden, the planting to come, I'm still aware of the looming woods and a sense of a presence, an immanence, out there, invisible, but felt.

 Awakening Filipendula rubra 'Venusta', irises, Rudbeckia maxima in spring - life 

bursting forth against a background of dark wood.

This isn't to say I don't enjoy the garden, that I don't find meaning in the annual struggle with the challenges it sends my way, the planning to give it a form that is appropriate to this wooded place while also setting it clearly apart as a cultivated garden, naturalistic though it may appear, that I don't find it "beautiful" at times, though beautiful with a significance beyond simple ornament and diversion.

The high today is predicted to be 55F, the warmest day in weeks, the snow is melting, at last, and though there are as yet few signs of real spring, I know the brightness and warmth are starting changes that will bring renewal.The garden largely cares for itself because it is planted appropriate to this place, to use that overused word, it is sustainable, continually looking forward to future springs, yet in careful balance with its past, historically, culturally, and psychologically recalling what came before, the idea of being lost and alone, of fear and suffering, then suddenly breaking into the sunlit clearing.

On edge when surrounded by trees, indeed. Where to go from here?