Faulkner's place

"Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer 

than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."

- Light in August, 1932

In this opening passage to Light in August, William Faulkner is drawing a distinction between the lasting effects of early memories formed before language and self-conscious "knowing" exist. I doubt Faulkner thought much about gardens, except as symbol or literary device, but his recognition of the power of early memory to shape an individual has bearing, for me, on the nature of emotional response, and by extension, on emotional response to the garden. I have my own inarticulate memories.

On a recent sad visit to Oxford, Mississippi, I visited Faulkner's home, not to see the house, but to walk the grounds which, especially near sunset, have a tranquility and quietness any garden might hope for.

Spacious grounds

The garden is very simple--sky, space, trees, derelict remnant of a long lost rose garden, lines of ragged privet hedges. In years past, I might have doubted whether this place could properly be called a garden, but now know it can.

Vacant brick-lined beds mark the old rose garden, now moss covered in the deep shadow of trees, evoking thoughts of time past, layers upon layers of cultures mostly forgotten. Like a palimpsest, the substance is wiped away, but the outlines remain.

Rose garden

These scattered bricks make a profoundly evocative garden that far surpasses any actual rose garden that might have existed in this place.

The old, straight cedars (Juniperus virginiana) measure off the large space, giving sense of scale ...

House through trees

... and they frame the sky. Light and sky are, in fact, a central theme of this happenstance garden. Everywhere you walk the sky opens through apertures in the trees, and light floods in, making dark shadows appear even darker ...

Sky encircled by trees

... and the effects of low sunlight at this late hour and this late season are everywhere apparent. Just look at the chiaroscuro-like quality of these images ...

House, circa 1840

Privet hedge

Culturally, the subjects of the images take us back beyond the rose garden to even earlier times, suggested by the modest house of a beloved black servant ...

Another life, another race, another story

... and to an even older time when this land was inhabited by native people who had no concept of ownership of the land ... and even further back, to wilderness itself.

Ancient grape vine

It's fitting that our exit should be not through some wrought gate or formal entryway, but by an almost invisible path through a tangled green hedgerow.

Hedgerow path to the car park

"He ranged the summer woods now, green with gloom, if anything actually dimmer than they had been in November’s gray dissolution, where even at noon the sun fell only in windless dappling upon the earth...

- The Bear

Hilltop

Near sunset on a hilltop near Oxford, Mississippi, early January 2012.

White oak (Quercus alba), a growing population of American beech (Fagus grandiflora), Sweetgum (Liquidambar Styraciflua) are the most notable trees, though the woods are full of vines and undergrowth, and many seedlings, especially beech. This is a forest in transition.

I spent my formative years here and this landscape speaks to me. This is William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, and the myths he created still linger in these hills and in my memory.

"Memory believes before knowing remembers, believes longer than recollects,

longer than knowing even wonders."

- William Faulkner, Light in August

William Faulkner's Garden

I like the melancholy atmosphere of derelict gardens, even waste places like abandoned rail lines, old roadways, forgotten graveyards. Next to our house on Federal Twist Road clumps of daffodils, a huge deutzia, and tangles of white wisteria make it clear this was the site of someone's house many years ago. I haven't yet found physical evidence of the house, but an old well pump, probably in the front of the house, and a pond, likely at the back, suggest where it could have been. The whole area is so overgrown with multiflora rose it's difficult to explore. Nevertheless, it's a pleasant place to spend a few moments of contemplation.

Two springs ago, on a visit to see my ailing mother and my sister in Oxford, Mississippi, I stopped by to visit William Faulkner's house, Rowanoak. The house has been restored to the genteel shabbiness appropriate to the time of his residence there. The gardens around it haven't, which I'm grateful for. But they show someone's attention to a sort of formal design long ago, with old brick paths and brick lined beds, a double row of cedars along the path to the entrance, and rather gappy formal hedges of privet. Several outbuildings, most probably dating from the 19th century, add architectural interest.

The garden probably was never brought to a state of more than middling finish, but it has a peacefulness and charm, and offers a sense of privacy and security, hard to find in our 21st century world. Let's call it a strolling garden, a contemplative garden.

It's possible to make a circuit around the house, where you see remnants of old shrub plantings - hollies, hydrangea, hostas, but with no discernible plan, a simple maze-like arrangement of waist-high privet hedges in the back, a wisteria growing on a post, dogwoods (Cornus florida), red buds (Cercis canadensis), camellias.




Off one side of the house you can walk through open clearings surrounded by woods, where Faulkner kept his horses. These small fields are mowed and make a pleasant stroll to the edge of the woods where a massive grape vine (probably muscadine) writhes like a serpent in the Laocoon.

In more open space nearer the house, the cedars have been trimmed high, leaving irregular clouds of green at the tops of narrow soaring columns, dark against the blue spring sky.