May Days: The Garden in May

In May we are gardening gods. This is the month where the fullness of spring meets the opening of summer, creating a moment in time where the garden in our heads matches reality. May is the month for horticultural hubris. For a few weeks, we are the masters of our plots. Like Midas, all we touch turns to flower.

Of course, May’s glory has nothing to do with us. Even the abandoned lot down the street looks like a field of Arcadia. The florets of the unmown bluegrass hold and toss the morning light like water, and drifts of dandelions emerge from of islands of lilac ground ivy. For a few blessed weeks, the cool nights and warm days grant us the perfect gardening climate. I know what it’s like to live in coastal California or Britain, or one of those places that the glossy garden magazines obsessively feature.

But that’s no matter. My plot is a result of my gardening genius. It has nothing to do with the fact that all of the plants have freshly leafed out, coating even the dowdy foundation shrubs with the glow and firmness of adolescence. Or that all of the perennials have recently emerged low and tight, as if the ancient gardeners of Kyoto had spent decades clipping them. It doesn’t even matter what you planted next to each other. The swelling border makes my impetuous April shopping spree at the nursery look wise and carefully composed. I look over my plot like a champion chess player, confident of my strategy. Gardening mistakes won’t show themselves this month.

May is the month for plants whose glory is short lived. The late spring geophytes—the tulips and the scilla—overlap with the early summer ephemerals like trilliums, bluebells, and trout lilies. These plants emerge from nowhere between the gaps and crannies of plants, bloom for a week or two of glory, then vanish as the heat of summer comes. Why can’t all plants behave this way? They do their thing, and then poof, they’re gone, making room for the other fat hens to swell during June. Gardeners know these are cheap tricks. Stick a few alliums in the ground in the fall, and voila!: nodding purple baseballs declare to your neighbors that you are, indeed, a plant whisperer.

It’s May, and gardeners everywhere should enjoy their mastery. For August is coming and will judge us all.

Pleasure Garden

Thoughts about our garden.

“We desire,” the Emporer dictated, “that in the garden there should be all kinds of plants.”  Charlemagne the Great

I do a lot of writing about gardens, but our own personal garden has never been the subject of this blog.  Our garden is always a backdrop to my thinking about gardens and gardening—a sort of character in my story whose face is never revealed.  There are many reasons for this: first, our garden is just in the process of being established; I’m a terrible photographer and our garden is surrounded on three sides by unattractive roads and on one side by our unattractive house; and mostly because the act of gardening feels profoundly personal to me.  It was designed for us, for our own pleasure, so the idea of opening for public consumption is a bit terrifying to me.

BEFORE: The garden area when we bought the house.

But I love other blogs that openly share their own gardens.  James Golden’s View from Federal Twist is a brilliant blog about two wonderful gardens.  That James bears his own soul through the garden is a source of endless inspiration to me.  I’m just not that brave.  And Scott Weber’s Rhone Street Garden is another fantastic blog.  Scott transforms his small garden into and endless expanse through the lens of his camera.  Through his images, I see and enjoy Scott’s garden much in the way he probably does.  

Nasella tenuissima and Salvia 'Caradonna'

The Garden in October

October is one of my favorite times in the garden.   The weather is pleasant and I find myself less manic than in spring.  I enjoy the garden more now.  As the plants prepare for dormancy, there is simply less for me to do.  I’ll defer decisions about what to plant for dark winter evenings when green thoughts are necessary for my sanity.  Now I move through the garden with a calm repose.   The boxwood, yews, and espaliered firethorn get once last clip before the winter; sprawling summer annuals are cut back; and I make a few strategic transplants.  Otherwise, I walk and look at the angled, autumnal light as it falls over the plants.

The garden is in its second year. Despite the fact that certain parts of the garden have an adolescent awkwardness, the garden is beginning to look a bit more established.  As the garden settles into itself, I have a strange sensation that I’ve never felt before: the feeling of dominion. 

 “Dominion” is sort of an archaic, unfashionable sentiment, isn’t it?  It reeks of colonialism and the idea of man controlling—even dominating—nature for profit.  Not only is it a politically incorrect sentiment, but it is silly as well when applied to a tiny perennial border on a tenth of an acre lot.  This is not Downtown Abbey, after all.  But it is precisely what I feel.  Two years of breaking the earth, planting, watering, re-planting, and endless gardening have resulted in the creation of a place that is anything but natural.  I’m not simply a proud owner; I am the gardener who reigns over this plot.  It is my dominion—not just a place, but an expression of identity and self.

That a garden can be an expression of identity is an interesting idea to me.  The pre-modern man believed identity is a product of birth.  You are who your father was, where you live, and what your social station is.  In many ways, it is good that we’ve liberated identity from birthright.  But modern man has perhaps too much power to dictate identity.   We live in a post-authentic age.  I have to remind myself that each time I participate in social media.  Social media creates a seductive mirage, a watery image of our selves.  Identity is not created by what you tweet, but what you do.  What you create.  What you love.  

A slant of light shifts through the trees and illuminates a tall grass in my border.  The October light is soft yet intense.  The grass seems to glow from within, vibrating in incandescent ecstasy.  I raise my hand to shield my eyes, but stop and instead stare into it.  The intensity of the light makes my eyes water.  Standing on the path, I try to absorb the moment.  But just as quickly as it began, the sun slips again on the horizon and the moment is over.  The grass turns a dull gray in the dusk.

It is enough though.  I may have dominion over this plot, but the life that animates it is from beyond.  I am grateful for a handful of luminous, radiant moments. They remind me who I am. 

Spring Fever: The Latter Phase

My spring mania is finally tempering, and fortunately, I did not hurt anyone in a plant-induced craze. Except my wallet, of course. My house still looks a band of maraudering garden pirates attacked it--seed packets are still strewn all over the house; my bedside table is a precarious stack of plant catalogues and garden books; and you can follow the trail of dirt-covered shovels, trowels, and soup spoons from the bedroom to the back door—which remains permanently open in the last few weeks.

Spring Fever

It happens every year about this time. The soil warms and roots begin to stir. The slant of light from my window grows a bit longer. A few subtle shifts—a few degrees of warmth, a few minutes more of light—and I erupt into a fit of howling lunacy.

When the earth shifts, it is like some enzyme gets triggered in my brain that tips everything off balance. I become plant obsessed, soil obsessed, garden obsessed. Yes, I am fully aware that when it comes to plants, I am already borderline obsessive. Already I write, teach, speak, and make my livelihood with horticulture and landscape. But in spring, my seemingly controlled curiosities turn into wild hysteria.

Remember how Bruce Banner transforms into the Hulk, right? It feels exactly like that, except without the muscles (could have used those . . .) Mild mannered landscape architect turns into raving plant lunatic. The other night, I awoke at four in the morning thinking about the soil in my garden. Did it have too much organic matter? Should I move some leaf mulch over against the house? Which edging should I use for the path I’m planning in the border? Fieldstone? Can I get it square enough? How would I set that so that it looks crisp? And what plant would work best with those brown colors in the stone? It needs to pop, so maybe orangish—no, that won’t work next to all those red blooming plants.

When Metaphor Fails

This year, my wife and I made a token attempt to start a garden. We managed to pull ourselves away from the home renovation long enough to carve a perennial border out of a piece of our side yard.

Right now, it looks like a tattered tapestry. Some perennials have established with athletic vigor, while others lie low, perhaps waiting till next year. I’ve seeded the holes in the border with summer annuals, which have quickly taken advantage of their slower to establish neighbors.  The riotous color and size of the annuals have eroded what bit of compositional clarity that initially existed. Weeds run rampant throughout.  Crabgrass, Bermuda grass, and Bindweed dominate the area where we plan to add a stone path and terrace. They control territory like a Mexican drug cartel.  With so little time for the garden, the weeds and I maintain an uneasy détente—they have their territory, and I have mine.

Already I’m making notes about what needs to be changed. Too many filler plants, not enough structural ones. Needs more upright spires. Dot in a few architectural shrubs. Add low, dark-leafed annuals along the edges for contrast. Too many thin, linear masses: re-mass perennials in block-ier, thicker masses. The list grows by the day.

August crushes my idealism. All winter and spring I made pretty pictures of the garden in the soft light of my mind. In May, these images felt almost attainable. But August is the ultimate judge; the glare of the midday sun bears upon me the inescapable force of reality. All prior imaging disappears with the dew. The garden is simply what it is.

Realism is the theme of my summer.  Last month my father went through a complicated open-heart surgery and began a miraculous recovery from a stroke. Seeing him suffer through an intense recovery has also confronted me with a jarring reality. With a recovery like his, nothing goes the way you expect. With every hurdle he overcomes, another battery of complications sprout up. He has faced his recovery with a strength and grace that is indescribable unless witnessed. The man I knew as the sweetest man on earth has proved to be one of the strongest.

Gardens and Memory



Photo of Reservation 232 taken in 1927 (photo courtesy of Historical Society of Washington)



Gardening for me is mostly a solitary activity.  But the last few months, I’ve been sharing my watering, weeding, and transplanting with my ten-month old. 

It gives my wife a few moments of peace, and it is a pleasant distraction for Jude, who would otherwise be tugging on an electric cord or grubbing dust balls from underneath the refrigerator.  Jude is fascinated with the ornery mockingbirds (“dta” while pointing), the cloud of bees over our perennials, and the raisiny fruit on our Serviceberry tree.  He often notices something that I do not.  Yesterday, he leaned over to grab the seed clusters of our Kousa Dogwood.  They had budded into these gorgeous emerald orbs.  “Huh,” I thought.  “That’s cool.”

Image by Fred Jeranes

To see the garden with my son changes the way I experience it.  The filter through which I see the garden is dislocated, and I not only see the garden in a new way, but see my son as well.  I get these glimpses into his precious mind, experiencing the world all fresh and new.

Moments like these make me think about other gardeners.  If I feel most like myself—most grounded—while I wander through my garden, then I want to know other gardeners as they are in their gardens.  How do they see their gardens differently than I do?  What do they care for and love? 

Kim Breneger

Several months ago, I was contacted by a woman who is working with a group to create a memorial garden for Kim Brenegar.  Kim was a garden designer who lived and practiced in the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Washington, D.C.  Kim died at the age of 49 in a tragic car accident.  Although I never knew Kim personally, her presence was everywhere in the neighborhood.  Friends of mine were her clients, and they raved about her.  Kim was passionate and colorful gardener and designer.  I only knew people who knew Kim, but her enthusiasm was infectious.  Her loss was not just for those who loved her, but the entire neighborhood and gardening community in Washington, D.C. 

Exile from the Garden

My wife and I recently bought and moved into our house.  It is a single story 1950’s rancher that does little to combat the idea that all post World War II architecture is crap.  The location is killer, and the house was incredibly priced.  After almost seven years of trying to get into the DC market, we made the plunge.  Of course, the house was incredibly priced precisely because it was so run down.  The previous owner had some issues with hoarding and an apparent aversion to maintenance.  The listing called the house “ignored not abused”—one of those euphemisms that only a realtor could spin.

Since we closed on the house in December, our lives have been absorbed by the enormity of the projects.  Every surface of every room needs to be replaced, re-covered, and re-done.   The bathrooms and kitchens must be scraped down to the studs and rebuilt.  The floors have to be refinished or replaced.  Every window, door, and heat register must be made new again.  It's not because we're perfectionists; the place was just nasty.  And because we dumped all of our savings on the down payment, we are doing the entire renovation ourselves.  Thanks to the epic kindness and patience of my father-in-law, who comes over almost every weekend to help us, we have been able to do things I never imagined doing myself.  But the scale of the project, combined with the care of a seven-month old baby, is overwhelming. 

We live in the midst of the construction.  The rituals of domesticity merge with our construction projects in confusing ways.  Our “kitchen table” is a piece of plywood set on two sawhorses.  The other day at dinner, I reached for my fork and picked up a wrench instead.   I brush my teeth and wash dishes in the same sink I clean my drywall knives and fill up the tile saw.   And I’m beginning to think of our Shop-Vac as our family pet (we call him Vacu-saurus, and he’s always at my side).

A Gardening Honeymoon by guest blogger Jeanette Ankoma-Sey

Honeymoon, noun: period of enthusiasm or goodwill.

As a gardener and designer, when we moved into our first home I had mixed feelings about starting my garden with my husband. It was August of 2007; it was a 100 sizzling degrees and when we pulled up to the corner unit we were surprised at the size of the yard that came with this tiny 1950's duplex. Yes, we knew the size and had walked the yard before we bought the house.  Living in an apartment with a shady balcony for 5 plus years, we always thought just a little more space would be nice, just a little bit more . . . So we committed to 4500 square feet of southern exposure (think zone 8b) and a wickedly sloping yard that begged for screening, greening, living. I warned my husband about the undertaking and ultimately we had no idea where to start with getting some green (and blues, oranges, pinks, purples) in our yard.

We are still miles away from having my yard the way I dream it could be. I envision a terraced heaven with a space to do yoga in the privacy of my lawn, amongst plenty of planted beds and garden rooms of sweet sounds, sights, tastes, and smells. Miles away I say.... BUT here is how we and a few clever plant/designer friends have fared with the budget garden challenge.

On Leaving a Garden Behind

Thoughts on Moving

My wife and I are preparing to move, and that has me thinking about the gardens I will leave behind.   Our new house is only six miles from where we currently live, but it feels like another world.  We are moving from a third-story flat in the shadow of the nation’s Capitol to a one story house with a yard across the river in Arlington, Virginia.  For the last seven years, my “gardens” have been my container garden on our third-story deck and the parsonage garden I designed and maintained for my church. 

Moving is bittersweet.  The pain of leaving behind a beloved neighborhood is muddled with my excitement about the new house.  I mourn leaving Capitol Hill and above all, I mourn leaving my garden.  How many hours did I spend envisioning that garden?  How many backbreaking ours did I spend with friends installing it?  How many hours did I spend watering, maintaining, and loving it?  Each hour you spend invests you deeper into the place.  Cultivation is just another word for commitment.  You think you are just pulling weeds, but what you are really doing is writing a love letter to a patch of dirt.   

 

"The Gates" by Christo & Jeanne Claude, 26 years
in the making, but lasted only 15 days.



The New Manliness: Machismo through Dirty Diapers and Gardening?

Just this week, I read an article in Newsweek that asked a very interesting question: “what’s the matter with men?”  For several years, the media has declared that men are “in decline.”  In 2000 Christina Hoff Sommers pronounced that there is a “war against boys,” claiming that the American education system puts down boys.  This summer, The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin bluntly stated that “The End of Men” is here.

The articles are a reaction to a slate of new research that shows men slipping on a variety of societal measures.  This year was the first time in U.S. history where women have become the majority of the workforce.  For every two men who get a college degree, there are three women who receive diplomas.  In big cities, single, young, childless women earn 8% more than men on average.  Those trends have been exacerbated by the Great Recession, which gutted male-dominated industries like construction and manufacturing.  The statistical areas where men clearly lead women—“alcoholism, suicide, homelessness, violence, criminality”—paint a grim picture of the modern man (Newsweek).   Hanna Rosin poses the profound question, “What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women?”

So what’s a guy to do?  Here I would like to present a few suggestions.  Of course, I am no sociologist, anthropologist, or minister—I have no particular qualifications to diagnose this malady.  And to be honest, no one has ever mistaken me for a lumberjack, an oil rigger, or a cowboy.   The only thing I can offer is a few reflections from my own recent life experience. I’ve discovered a resurgence of masculinity through two traditionally feminine arts: parenting and gardening. 

This month my wife and I had our first child, a son.  Like all new parents, our first month has been a flurry of dirty diapers, sleepless nights, endless feedings, and shattered schedules.  My life as I knew it four weeks ago has been flipped upside down, macerated, and then steamrolled by our own 8 pound wrecking ball.  But in the midst of this chaos, I’ve felt a curious resurgence of masculinity.  This was initially puzzling to me.  After all, my last month has been a litany of domestic chores: wiping bottoms, cooking meals, washing clothes, and generally keeping up the house.  As my wife recovers from a complicated delivery, my role at home has exploded, and I look a heck of a lot more like Mr. Mom than Mr. T.  If anything, I expected this new role to feel more feminine, a softer version of my former self.  Instead, I feel more like a dude than I’ve felt in years.  Why? 

At its heart, masculinity is really about utility, potency, resourcefulness, and controlled physicality.  In caring for my child, doing my job, and taking care of the home, I feel a renewed sense of vigor and usefulness that I have not felt before.  Earlier this week, I stood at the stove making a roux for a gumbo with one arm, and holding my infant with the other.  All the time I was completely aware that I had become a feminine stereotype.  Yet my son slept comfortably, and my gumbo was a total success.  Instead of feeling girly, I felt competent, creative, and handy. 

This revelation has made me somewhat skeptical of the resurgence of retro-manliness.  Advertising and entertainment has exploited modern man’s angst by returning to dusty old narratives of masculinity—the rugged outdoorsman (Marlboro Man), the urban gangster (hip hop music), the retro corporate guy (Don Draper)—but these images miss the point.  “The truth is, it’s not how men style themselves that will make them whole again—it’s what they do with their days,” says Newsweek writers Romano and Dokoupil. 

The goal of feminism was to gain equality for women by pushing them into roles traditionally reserved for men.  This has largely been successful.   And for the most part, women have not had to abandon femininity.  Why shouldn’t the same be true with men?  The path to the new manliness is not to retreat to the woods or hide inside one’s tool shed; instead, we should start by engaging in the home.  We need a definition of macho that includes home-making as well as home improvement projects.  This shouldn’t be too hard, as the expectation for fathers is still sadly low.  Just last week, my father-in-law came to town to visit the baby and remarked, “you’re a great dad” simply because I held the baby for about an hour.  Would he have come to the same conclusion if my wife were holding him at that moment?  I doubt it.  When it comes to the home, there’s much room for men to grow.

WWII poster promoting manly gardening. 
From the National Agricultural Library.

Like parenting, gardening is the other odd place I always feel like a dude.   Of course, this too is at odds with the traditional image.  Yard work (particularly anything involving power tools) was for men, while ornamental gardening typically is left to women.  My friend from college jokingly calls me a “pansy-ass flower guy” whenever he refers to my profession.  Yet my experience runs entirely counter to this stereotype.  Gardening to me is the most creative, physically engaging, and potent activities I know.  Breaking the ground, creating spaces, working outside . . . these activities are that perfect combination of physical and mental challenge. 

In essence, the point of rediscovering masculinity (or femininity for that matter) is not just about gender identity; it is an attempt to rediscover our humanity in a postmodern age.  For me, the antidote to the hundreds of hours a month I spend in a cubicle staring at a computer screen is engaging in my family or my garden.  These are the activities that make me feel not only masculine, but human.  My theologian friend reminds me that the etymology of the word “human” is the same as the word for “humus” or dirt.  We are meant to be in relationship with each other; we are meant to be in relationship with the earth.

Landscape Architecture versus The Garden

Between Two Worlds

I am a landscape architect by profession. It is a career I chose out of passion and calling. I love the nobility of the profession’s history. Frederick Law Olmsted’s sweeping democratic vision created parks that made America’s great cities habitable after the Industrial Revolution. I love the expansive scope of the profession. Landscape architects design almost any site under the open sky, including highways and bridges, water treatment plants and power lines, urban plazas and parks, green roofs and greenways. I love the breadth and diversity of projects. In the last two months, I spent one day wading through a woodland swamp, one day in the Library of Congress researching historic letters, one day sketching a plan for a three-acre urban park, and one day designing a high speed race track. Next month will be entirely different.

Yet despite my love for landscape architecture, it is the garden that I keep returning to. The garden speaks to my intellect, my emotion, and my spirit. I am beginning to understand why Spanish landscape architect Fernando Caruncho calls himself a ‘gardener’ rather than a landscape architect. “I say ‘gardener,’” says Caruncho, “because this mythical word belongs to mankind and contains memories of our purest origins, so full of resonance and touching aspects both elemental and fragile.”

What’s the difference between landscape architecture and gardening? Some have described the difference between the garden and landscape architect as a matter of scale. The garden is simply a more concentrated version of landscape architecture. Gardens are to landscape architecture what poetry is to prose. But I think the differences are more profound. Each discipline involves a different approach to land.

Corporate Headquarters, San Francisco.  OLIN.  Photo by Marion Brenner

Landscape architecture adopts an essentially rationalistic approach to analyzing land; after all, the profession emerges from a hybrid of architecture, engineering, horticulture, and ecology. The term landscape can be traced back to the Old English term landskip, which refers not to land but to a picture of land. Landscape architecture creates a concept of land, an idea of what land should be, and then executes it. Celebrated landscape architect James Corner writes, “Indeed, the development of landscape architecture as a modern profession derives, in large measure, from an impulse to reshape large areas of land according to prior imaging.” It is this imaging or conceptualization that is the hallmark of the practice.

Image from The Ministry for Food, 1941

Gardening, on the other hand, is essentially relational. It is not about a picture or an idea for a piece of land, but about a personal relationship with a piece of land. Literary critic and garden theorist John Dixon Hunt calls gardens a third nature. Resurrecting concepts from the golden age of Italian gardens, Hunt recounts that the First Nature is wilderness, an undomesticated wild that predates man; the Second Nature is man-made agriculture and towns. The garden resides between these two zones. Gardens are a third nature, a place where art and thought are in relationship with nature.

One of the themes of this blog is to advocate for gardening. Garden more, garden now, just get out there and garden. What we need now is not so much a new concept for re-shaping land, or a new image for landscape. What we need now more than ever is to be in relationship with land. The blessings that flow from this engagement are myriad and mighty. Be absorbed in a garden: I can think of no purer expression of the human condition.

On Dwelling: The Delight of Garden Structures

My most spectacular garden is the one I’m constantly creating and re-creating in my head. Where budget, space, and lack of time limit real gardens, these constraints vanish in my ever-evolving fantasy garden. The crowning feature of this fantasy garden is the artist’s retreat: a small architectural jewel mostly swallowed by jasmine vines, climbing roses, and pomegranates. As the sites for my fantasy garden vary—sometimes a small urban courtyard, other times a river valley in the Blue Ridge, or sometimes a high elevation conifer forest—the one constant in every garden is this retreat.

[Mark Twain in his writer's study at Quarry Farm, photo from Elmira College]

Often during quiet moments, I ruminate on the pleasure of inhabiting a small garden shed or retreat draped in vegetation.  Mark Twain’s writer’s study is one of the more delicious structures I've ever seen.  Built as a gift to Twain by his brother-in-law, the small octagonal structure used to overlook the Chemung River Valley.  Twain wrote much of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in this study.

[A view inside Twain's study; photo courtesy of Mike Paul]

“It is the loveliest study you ever saw," Twain wrote his friend William Dean Howells in 1874, "Octagonal with a peaked roof, each face filled with a spacious window...perched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills. It is a cozy nest and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four chairs, and when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the lighting flashes behind the hills beyond and the rain beats upon the roof over my head—imagine the luxury of it."

The romantic structure in the landscape has a rich intellectual heritage. Even before British Romantic poets exalted the crumbling hermitage tucked into the pastoral landscape, architectural ruins enlivened the imaginations of artists, poets, and gardeners since classical antiquity. Something about these beacons of shelter in otherwise wild landscapes appeals to us at an instinctual level. The British Romantics loved the stimulating effect they had on the imagination. These architectural ruins were an ontological fragment that, in their incompleteness, aroused the mind's eye. Ruins were potent symbols of both the permanence and transitory nature of man. [Image on left is Landscape with Draughtsman Sketching Ruins by Claude Lorrain, 1630]

One of my favorite blogs celebrates the lasting image of ruins.  Romantic Ruins: The Sweet Lure of Decay, Death, and Destruction is dedicated to the continuing power that the image of romantic ruins holds in the contemporary imagination. The blog is written under the mysterious moniker I.N. Vain, and cleverly shows how ruins still influence fashion shoots, movies, and advertising.

[A former storage shed is transformed into an art studio.  John Sutton Photography]

Even hard-edged, contemporary garden design sometimes succumbs to romantic impulses. A backyard terrace designed by San Fransisco-based Scott Lewis Landscape Architecture shows how a garden retreat can work elegantly in a compact urban space.  The firm transformed a former garden shed into a luscious art studio by adding windows and cladding the structure in a metal grid that allows ivy and vines to flourish on the facade.  The studio becomes the visual centerpiece for the garden.

[The angle of the terrace draws the eye to the shed and expands the perspective]

I struggle to identify what makes these garden structures so appealing.  My attraction to them feels primal--a deeply rooted human impulse that draws me to these beacons.  Perhaps we've evolved to to seek shelter in otherwise forboding landscapes; we are somehow wired to recognize these harbors of security to survive.  Or perhaps it is just the yearning of the modern man to restore a right relationship with nature--one in which our footprints fit inside the natural order rather than obliterate it altogether.  Or perhaps these structures speak to the essence of dwelling, the Heideggarian understanding ("poetically man dwells") of the way we relate both physically and spiritually to our environments.  Whatever the explanation, I continue to delight in the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual pleasure that these dwellings have over me. 

[A boat shed I sited among the schrub oaks and heath in Martha's Vineyard]

Salad Days: The Garden in June

June is the green month. The sharp spring hues of chartreuse and lime mellow into their summer fullness, adding depth and dimension to field and forest. In June green overwhelms all. The roadside thickets swell with elderberry, wineberry, and honeysuckle, puffing and billowing like smoke. Fields of fescues and wildrye crown themselves with wispy inflorescences, catching and holding the afternoon sun.

For the gardener, the green of June is difficult to combat. The gaudy late tulips and peonies of May have gone, and gardeners are left to counter the green onslaught with only daylilies or astilbes.  These bits of color are short lived, however. One would be better to try annuals, but even placing these vigorous bloomers in a garden is like throwing pebbles in a well. The green is ubiquitous and absolute.

And why shouldn’t the green rule in June? For plants, June is the peak of the year. The horticultural year climaxes in the summer solstice. The long days and warm temperatures allow plants to ripen to their perfect potency. Just after the solstice, many plants start their preparations for winter, triggered by the shortening days to store energy in bulbs and tubers. While the rest of us blithely eat ice cream and watch fireworks, our green brothers and sisters are already preparing for the end.

This is perhaps why June makes me contemplate my own ending. If I could script my final act, what better way to expire than in a garden in June? There are so many good endings. Perhaps I would be reaching for a mulberry atop a ladder, after picking clean all the lower branches. Why is it that the branch just above your reach is always the most laden with fruit? They would find me tossed in the tall grass with purple-stained lips and fingertips. Or perhaps I could go at the hands of one of the highly poisonous horticultural oddities I decided to grow in the desperation of winter. I would be hunched over in the cutting garden with Felco pruners in one hand, and the thorny stem of Jimsonweed (Datura stramonium) in the other.  [Mulberry Image on left from fruitcity.co.uk]

But these endings are enjoyable to me because they avoid a long demise of old age. The demise is inevitable, of course, and I suppose that a June garden is still the best setting for that as well. In this case, the thought that gives me comfort is not so much being in the garden when I decline, but actively cutting, potting, and digging. The act of gardening is the most human engagement I know, and I want to feel most fully like myself during the years that I lose myself. The green onslaught of June will ultimately come and erase any evidence of my garden, but my great hope is that I will be there at the end with trowel in hand to resist it.

Modern Naturalism: Artifice in the Natural Garden

For several weeks now, I have been extolling wildness and naturalism as a virtue in the design of landscapes. My claim is that man-made landscapes need to embrace “nature” in a more intentional and expressive way. In making those claims, I have been perhaps too dismissive of the importance of artifice in designed landscapes. A few thoughts about that here.
First, any designer that calls his or her work “naturalistic,” “sustainable,” or “ecological” cites nature as an authority to justify their designs. Obviously, many landscapes claim to be natural that are entirely different from each other. What is abundantly clear in the age of greenwashing is that terms like “natural,” “sustainable,” and “green” are human constructs, loose signifiers that can be applied to almost anything--particularly anything in a landscape. Ideas about nature ultimately reveal more about us than it does about the landscapes they describe.

“Nature is an abstraction,” writes Anne Whiston Spirn, professor of landscape architecture at MIT, “a set of ideas for which many cultures have no one name, ‘a singular name for the real multiplicity of things and living processes.’” In landscape design today, naturalism is a science (ecology), a moral calling, and an aesthetic. Designers sling these terms around without much thought or discussion about what they mean.

So in all my eager advocacy for naturalism, I too have been a bit loose with the terms. Anne Whiston Spirn writes that “nature is both given and constructed.” I believe in both of those realities: nature as outside of me and nature that is inside of me. The line between those two is a fuzzy one. This is not reason to despair; instead, we should celebrate this fuzziness.

For me, the myriad of meanings for what is natural is no reason to reject naturalistic design. Instead, it is an invitation to explore this conceptually fertile ground. The medium of our art is living, ever-changing elements of plants, water, light, and soil. Designers get the rare privilege of working with an ephemeral palette, of asserting our control and then losing it. Lately, I’ve gotten much more joy out of losing it.

That is why I am drawn to designed landscapes that celebrate the evanescent with bold artifice. Trying to erase the evidence of human intervention feels inauthentic to me, as flat and unconvincing as a trompe l’oeil. All true naturalism must first be a humanism. The landscapes that captivate me both intellectually and spiritually are those that blur the lines between natural and cultivated, between nature as other and nature as me. Artifice is not only acceptable in naturalistic designs, but necessary. It prevents plagiarism by forcing the designer to show her hand. The benefit of artifice is that is grants the designer sweet catharsis: it reveals to the world that this design, like all good landscape design, is a blessed forgery.

Are Gardens Natural?

The natural and sustainable gardening movement is all the rage the days, and for good reason. Gardens represent a golden opportunity to create ecologically productive areas in a time of great environmental decline. But all the talk about sustainability raises the question: are gardens ever really natural? And if not, what does that mean for gardeners trying to be sustainable?

The very idea of a garden implies human intrusion. No garden is natural in the pure sense of the word, because no garden is permanently self-sustaining. Even Beth Chatto’s revolutionary Gravel Garden—which has never been artificially watered —would disappear in 30 or even 100 years from now without human input (pictured above). Nature changes constantly. Left alone, most gardens in temperate zones would end up as woodland.

Gardens are time arrested. The very acts we perform while gardening—watering, pruning, weeding, replanting—are acts against time. All gardening is an attempt to halt ecological succession and freeze it at a point that pleases us aesthetically. Gardeners are like referees, preventing plants from engaging in the warfare they would wage if left alone. Our obsession with benign happy flowers has blinded us to the barbarous combat taking place outside our doors. Plants smother, steal, poison, and invade their neighbors. While we may be oblivious to this conflict, we are nonetheless a part of it: gardeners ultimately pick which side wins.

If gardens are not natural, should we despair? Martha Schwartz, the celebrated and controversial American landscape architect said at a recent lecture, “We view the landscape much as the Victorians viewed women: as either saints or whores.” In an essay called “I HATE NATURE,” Schwartz goes on to say that Americans still exalt a mythical wilderness out there somewhere (the saint) and denigrate any man-made landscape (the whore). This mythology means we don’t see the potential of man-made landscapes to create ecologically productive landscapes. Schwartz writes:

“Our American wilderness paradigm keeps us from developing a clear idea about how to resolve our human activity upon our landscape and how to develop an attitude that can resolve this dilemma constructively. The Dutch, possessing a culture that is clear-eyed about the fact that their native landscape is a man-made artifact, have a much more pragmatic approach to building and development, resulting in healthier and more sustainable environments.”

So what should we do? My suggestions are simple. First, we drop the mythology that nature exists “out there” in some national park and understand that the human landscapes we inhabit everyday—the parking lots, streets, cities, and suburbs—are really all the nature we have left. Once that dirty little truth sinks in, we can stop treating the man-made landscapes as something to hold our nose and pass by, and start repairing the natural systems within it. The same industrial drive that conquered and obliterated the wilderness can lay the groundwork for recreating it within human landscapes.

Second, we make peace with time. Gardening is ultimately a conversation with time. All of our pruning, mowing, weeding, and planting are acts of defiance against the march of time. My suggestion is not to stop gardening, but rather engage with the natural processes working within our garden. Loosen up that landscape. Allow a little self-seeding to happen. Connect with the seasons. Use plants that channel the ephemeral such as light catching grasses or perennials that emerge and die. Understanding the beauty of the ephemeral opens us to see ourselves in time rather than against it.

Loosen Up that Landscape!

An Earth Day Challenge to Gardeners and Designers

"Do gardens have to be so tame, so harnessed, so unfree? What's new about our New American Garden is what's new about America itself: it is vigorous and audacious, and it vividly blends the natural and the cultivated." James van Sweden

My former boss and mentor, James van Sweden was always quotably evangelistic about the need for American gardens to loosen up. Founder of the New American Garden style, James van Sweden and Wolfgang Oehme created a legacy of projects that presented a beautiful and lush alternative to the typical American garden scene: a sea of lawn with overgrown evergreens stuffed under foundations.

James van Sweden is hardly the first or only voice advocating for an alternative to the typical American yard. Organizations like Lawn Reform, writers like Rick Darke, and landscape architecture firms like Andropogon have all offered compelling alternatives to the typical American landscape. But forty years after the first Earth Day, I have to ask: has the American garden style really progressed?

For home gardens, there are small signs of progress. In the last two years, there has been an increase in vegetable gardening, a renewed interest in native plants, and the occasional person getting rid of their lawn. Despite these glimmers of hope, there is little indication that the style of gardening has actually changed. The basic ratio of lawn (~90%) to planting bed (~10%) remains the same. And what makes up the paltry planting beds are mostly stiff evergreens.

What’s worse is how many professional landscape architects or garden designers still perpetuate stiff and formulaic designs. In the name of modernism, how many urban plazas or institutional sites arrange evergreens in rigid stripes? Or how many self-trained garden designers fill backyards with uber-wavy lawns (because curves are natural!) only to dot in twelve perennials and four shrubs?

Instead, let me present a case for a radically different landscape, a departure from the traditional obsession with fixed forms. My humble advice to gardeners and designers for Earth Day is:

1. Invert the Relationship of Lawn to Planting Bed: Think of your lawn as an area rug, not as wall to wall carpeting. Lawns are best when they are defined on all sides by hardscape or planting beds. This gives them legibility and definition and gives you an opportunity to show off loose perennials, grasses, and shrubs around it. If you’re lawn is more than 50% of your yard, it’s probably too big.

2. Use a Majority of Plants that Change Seasonally: There’s nothing more satisfying in gardening than watching a landscape change through the seasons. Watching plants emerge out of the ground in spring, fill up in volume and color in summer, and then dry in winter connects you with the cycles of the seasons. Dedicate a large percentage of your yard (at least 1/3) to perennials, grasses, and deciduous shrubs—mostly native—and enjoy the drama of the seasons.

3. Think Winter Interest, not Just Evergreens: While every garden or landscape needs some evergreens, most American landscapes use far too many. Most ornamental and native grasses dry beautifully in the winter, and many perennials yield stately seedheads that look stunning in the snow. Include native deciduous shrubs like Itea virginica, Cornus alba, or Ilex verticillata for colorful stems and berries in the winter.

4. Bulk up that Biomass, especially for Pollinators: The amount of native biomass (the total mass of living matter in an area) is in severe decline thanks to development. But gardens represent one of the best opportunities to reclaim it. Carve out areas dedicated to wildness in your yard. Plant your borders with a loose mix of native shrubs; allow part of your lawn to convert to meadow; or let that low area become a rain garden or biofiltration zone. University of Delware professor Doug Tallamy has proven that native plants support an exponential number of more pollinators than do exotic plants. Plants that support butterflies, bees, and other insects invite birds and other wildlife into the garden. Check out Doug’s list of the most effective plants for Lepidoptera.

5. Have fun: One of the first reactions I get when I tell people I’m a landscape architect is an immediate moan about how terrible their yard is. People don’t know what to do and are overwhelmed by the maintenance required of mowing lawn and clipping shrubs. While I believe in principles of design, and in the need for landscape professionals, I believe more strongly in people having a joyous engagement with their garden. No matter what that looks like. So get out there, start with a manageable project, and create the change that loosens up your yard. Be daring, be bold, and have some fun, for crying out loud.

The Ugly Corner of Sod: Lessons from my First Garden

My first garden was a small corner of my parent’s backyard, the only flat piece of an otherwise sharply sloping back lawn. I was in the fourth grade, and one morning I woke with the idea to grow tomatoes. I shuffled through the garage and emerged with a shovel and pickaxe. I marked out a rectangle and then hacked and sacked through the sod and clay. The first tomatoes came months later, a slim crop of Better Boys and Early Girls.
I remember two things from that day. First, I vividly recall the raw power and effort it took to break into that ground. Each time I raised that pickaxe above my head, I pretended to be Pharaoh’s slave, or a prisoner on a chain gang. It was an immense effort that demanded back and hamstring, shoulder and wrist.

The second thing I remember was a feeling of deep satisfaction. At the end of that day, I felt like Jacob after successfully wrestling an angel for a blessing. Gardeners universally know this feeling. It’s not just the satisfaction of completing a job, but it is the feeling of connecting with a particular piece of earth.

To garden is to enter a relationship with a piece of ground. At its essence, all of our digging, weeding, tilling, and planting are not about control, but about knowing. Not about improving, but about listening. The human impulse to mark the earth with lines—a row of crops, the setting of a foundation, a hedgerow on the horizon—is primal and necessary. We strike the earth in order to live. We draw, dig, pull, push, cut, and stack lines upon the landscape. These lines connect us and our human activity to the earth. They are our roots.

I have long been an advocate for sustainable and natural gardening, but I above all, I am an advocate for gardening. If the act of gardening is a relationship, then low maintenance gardening is code for “let’s just be friends.” Or “I’m just not that into you.” Though I make my living designing gardens, I’d rather see one ugly, but beloved amateur garden than a hundred transcendent designer gardens with an owner who doesn’t care. They are like museums without visitors.

This year I’m not growing tomatoes. I have too little space and too many other plant infatuations. But I am digging and transplanting, weeding and mulching. Because it is not so much what I do, than the fact that I do. On a balmy day in April, I sink my hands into soil that has been warmed by the sun. It is loose and dark from years of gardening. I stand up and look across the overcrowded garden. And I wish for an ugly corner of sod to wrestle with.

April is the Cruellest Month

"April is the cruellest month . . . "

writes the poet. That line has confused me for years. Is it cruel? April is the springiest month, when elementary school teachers paste tulips and yellow galoshes to bulletin boards, and little old ladies dress up for church looking like pastel Easter eggs.

But the gardener understands the cruelty of April. The derivation of the word April can be traced as far back as Varro, where the etymology, omnia aperit, literally "it opens everything" which may be a reference to the opening of flowers and trees. I have been thinking about openings lately as I contemplate the seeds growing in every window sill of my apartment. Annuals, perennials, vegetables, and shrubs splay across every surface of my apartment. Today I ate my cereal with a tray of zinnias and three naranjillas. For the last few weeks I have been a witness to the openings of seeds. Birth is an act of violence. These dry brown seeds burst into life, ripping off their skins, splitting cotyledons, thrusting root into ground and stem to sky. Sometimes I lean in, expecting to hear the cries and wails of these infants. We enter this world in an act of violence, as if to test our mettle and prove our worthiness to cross the threshold.

April is the most lavish month . . .

March left us with mulch and daffodils. April starts with mostly bare ground and the few cherished heralds of spring, but ends cloaked in a gaudy quilt of greens. Chartreuse, viridian, lime, olive, jade, and celadon foam and froth across the ground. The poverty of March yields the extravagance of April.

Even the old, dying maple next to the church parsonage has engaged in a fit of fecundity. The tree blasts an armada of twirling, papery helicopters into the parsonage garden. A mini forest of maples has erupted in the garden, making it difficult for me to tell my annual seedlings from the young trees. They say plants approaching death often go to flower, a last effort at immortality. I look to the knobby old tree and then to his sea of babies. I'm not sure I have the heart to weed them.

April is the maddest month . . .

February stirred in me a restlessness to get outside and start digging in the dirt; by April, I am consumed with a howling lunacy. For weeks, the only planterly life I've seen are the seedlings in my window sill. Now April spews life in every form, across every surface. The eye has no place to rest. I move around the garden like an ant, delirious and distraught by the riotous explosion of leaf and limb.

April is the month for madness. We mark the first of April by acting like fools. In France, the "days of April" (journees d'avril) refers to a series of violent insurrections against the government in 1834. In England, they mark St. Mark's Eve (April 24) by sitting on the church porch to watch the ghosts of those who will die this year pass.

This month I am a fool, a rioter, a ghost. I enter into the garden and find not asylum, but bedlam; not harmony, but cacophony. The desperation of winter has blossomed into the desire of spring, and I pass the murderous tulips with a suspicious eye.