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.

Plants for Wet Clay: Ludwigia alternifolia (Seedbox)

This little native plant isn't of particular interest until early fall. It does have small yellow flowers in mid-summer, but it's more inoffensive than pretty.

Now the foliage will quickly turn a fiery red. Seedbox does well for a few spots of early fall color. Below it's come up next to another self-seeder, Great blue lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica). Quite a blast, however brief.

But its seed cases are it's main claim to a place in the garden.

If it were more prolific, I might have to call it a weed.

Naumkeag

Among the most iconic of all American garden scenes, the Blue Steps at Naumkeag.

From Gilded Age to Art Deco, Mabel Choate and landscape architect Fletcher Steele made this classic American garden by freely adapting influences from cultures around the world--England, China, particularly Renaissance Italy.Though rooted in the Picturesque tradition, Naumkeag broke new ground in several ways, introducing large earthworks as a major landscape element for the first time in the U.S., and making Art Deco a significant garden style. Mabel Choate and Fletcher Steele avoided pastiche by staying true to the sense of place, to the low, misty, magical Berkshire Mountains, and by using simple, ready-to-hand materials like concrete, brick, wood, and paint. No imported marbles or recreations of European gardens here ...

Below, the entrance to the house, a building of subdued opulence, designed by Stanford White, only for seasonal summer use, and located in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, near Edith Wharton's home, The Mount, not at the shore in Newport. The Choates bought the land and fell in love with the mountain views early in the life of the family, and their love of this place and its distant views was an important influence on the garden that would come to be, assuring the house would be sited high, and the gardens would surround the house on high terraces.

Below, the Top Lawn and terrace, behind the house, with a view of the mountains. Making a garden must have been a challenge on this steep slope. Frederick Law Olmstead, who they first consulted, told them to build at the bottom of the hill. They had visited the land and picnicked there for several years, and were not willing to give up the views. So they promptly hired another architect.

Renaissance Italy haunts this garden. The Choates named this view at the end of the Top Lawn the Perugino View.

A glance toward the South Lawn, just before entering the Afternoon Garden, Fletcher Steel's first design at Naumkeag ...

 ... the Afternoon Garden functions as an outside room ...

 ... with (Italy again) painted Venetian gondola poles (though of simple materials, reclaimed from Boston Harbor, carved and decorated with paint) ...

 ... a pergola ...

 ... a boxwood parterre ...

... and Mabel Choate's sleeping porch, like a treehouse, overlooking the garden ...

... a formal, yet quiet, intimate, tranquil place ...

The Pyramid Steps are an unobtrusive and beautiful transition, leading from the Afternoon Garden to a runnel of water sloping away to the iconic Blue Steps (we'll get to that later) and the South Lawn, which stretches off into the distance.

Looking back toward the house, the South Lawn is defined by a double hemlock hedge on one side and a curving line of globe locusts (Robinia pseudoacacia 'Umbraculifera') in the other. It provides a long, sunny walk ...

... to the Pagoda ...

The South Lawn is one of the earliest examples of use of an earth work for landscape purposes in the U.S. By chance, Mabel Choate stopped a fleet of trucks carrying loads of earth, bought it on the spot, and had it dumped in the rough area that was to become the South Lawn.

Research conducted for the application nominating Naumkeag as a National Historic Landmark notes that "here, Steele was inspired by the shape of distant mountain silhouettes and by the experiments of modern sculptors such as Brancusi. It was the earliest modern 'earthwork' recorded in this country and the progenitor of many later experiments with abstract modeling of earth forms. Steele wrote, 'So far as I know it was the first attempt that has ever been made to incorporate the form of background topography into foreground details in a unified design.'"

Fletcher Steele used the material "to create an abstract form in the manner of modern sculpture, with swinging curves and slopes which would aim to make their impression directly, without calling on the help of associated ideas, whether in nature or art." The National Historic Landmark application documents the influence of this work on earth artist Robert Smithson and landscape architects such as A. E. Bye, Rich Haag, and George Hargreaves.

 A beautifully designed reference to the Italian water steps of the Renaissance and even earlier Islamic gardens, the Water Runnel leads from the Afternoon Garden and Pyramid Steps ...

... to the Blue Steps. Though the design concept comes directly from history, Steel's success, perhaps genius, was his adaptation of the design using modern materials--a blaustrade of simple metal tubing painted white, concrete steps and ramps, blue painted niches--that make it Art Deco of the highest order, and more closely akin to a Hollywood or Busby Berkeley stage set, than to Renaissance Italy ... not to mention the white birches, which are pure New England.

Though at the bottom of the steps there is nothing but grass.

This is quite a disappointment. After this brilliant descent, the bare expanse of grass with a few diseased fruit trees seems like an unkind trick. Mabel Choate had her cutting and vegetable garden here, but I doubt it could have provided a satisfying conclusion to the journey down the steps. A creative solution would be for the Trustees of Reservations, who own and operate this extraordinary property, to commission a modern design, or hold a competition, to complete this work.

Otherwise, visitors will have to resort to cropping out the lawn at the bottom of their photos, as I did. But only this piece of the garden seems unfinished. Back at the top of the steps are other pleasures ... such as the misty landscape views ...

... which could indeed be the background in a Renaissance painting.

The Rose Garden is another Fletcher Steele tour de force (not because of the roses; almost anything would look better than those gangly, bare sticks), but because of the striking abstract, geometric design, best viewed from above.

Here is a borrowed photo from Todd Haiman's Landscape Design + More, which gives a better view. (Do click the link to Haiman's blog for a fascinating and more detailed account of Naumkeag.)

Though the most notable parts of the garden only began when Mabel Choate inherited the property, and began a 30 year friendship and collaboration with Fletcher Steele, Nathan Barrett developed the original design for Naumkeag's terraced gardens in the 1880s.

Barret was responsible for some of the more traditional parts of the garden including the Arborvitae Walk, shown below, which leads ...

... to the Evergreen Garden.

Here we find a different spirit entirely, more traditional, certainly less playful than the rest of the garden, nothing modern at all.Tranquil, certainly, though the symmetry is marred by the slightly misplaced, or mispruned, Thujas on the right.

But a glance to the right reveals Fletcher Steele again, with a terraced approach to the Chinese Garden. I admit this isn't my favorite, though I find the subtle terrace plantings and the cloud motif of the large stones embedded in brick to be masterful.

And the moon gate. Beckoning, dramatic, intriguing, mysterious, stalwart, magical. It leads directly to the front of the house, completing the high circuit of gardens that is Naumkeag.