WHEN YOU LOOK AT ANY GARDEN, whether you realize it or not, you’re looking into the world of the people who made and care for that garden. Some of the clues gardeners leave are intentional: placing a modernist sculpture in a historical garden, hanging ceramic luminary pumpkins, using crushed oyster shell walkways, or “planting” a sparkly bottle tree—each tells you a story about that particular gardener. If you look more closely, you discern other things about the gardeners, their culture, taste, and history. Every decision tells a story: an apple tree with a clematis trained up it, the yew hedge sheared tightly, hoses left out on the path, and even the level of the walkways. You can read a garden, as you do a house, a painting, or fashion. Besides design choices, in every garden there’s a story of the biology of the place: rocks, wind, sun, mud, soil pathogens, and deer. Gardens are the story of two things: culture and biology. Gardeners are the storytellers.
A path through fields that have been planted with giant roses and small trees.
Gardening, for me, is a means of sharing an intense connection with the earth, of immersing myself in the dirt; it’s a creative process. Sometimes that might take an afternoon, sometimes a decade. Sometimes it’s just for me, for the pleasure of being in that moment, but usually I’m driven to tell a story. The story I’m most compelled to tell is the one that I’ve been telling in this book: that we are all part of a much larger process and in it together with a massive team of amazing creatures. It’s all there for us to experience: smell this flower; take off your shoes—experience this garden barefoot; look what this frog does at night—let’s see him under a blacklight; chew on this leaf; listen, that plant is whistling. Dirt, plants, and flowers are all sexual energy in a living mess of sensual pleasure. We’re innately drawn to it; how can we not be? We are it. We are flowers, fungi, bulbs, and birds.
I am attracted to gardens that tell stories and reveal the spirit of the gardener and the place. I want to see into the gardener’s soul. Though sometimes it’s not always the story that I want to hear. I’d rather see a garden that’s telling a freaky story, like the Tuileries Garden in France, which has been the site of flagellations, massacres, and revolution, than a landscape where plants are used as a way to dominate and make things look neat and tidy, a static picture imposed on the earth. Sometimes I see landscapes in the slow process of becoming gardens. Sometimes I see a muddled picture created by a gardener who just doesn’t have time to develop the story. People are often coming up to me at cocktail parties, or while pumping gas, or sending me emails saying, “I wanted this, but I have this. I wanted charming flowers, but I have a bunch of dead stuff. Or, I want to grow good stuff for my children to eat, but I’m not sure how.” They ask me, “How can I make my garden?” It’s a question I love to hear, because I can see that they’re dreaming, and I have the skills to help them become a storyteller, too.
This garden cascades through four different levels. Weeping plants tumble down the banks with the spirit of the land.
This was a construction site just two years before this photo. Old-fashioned annuals (Senna alata, center) as well as antique milk jugs and gourd bird houses capture the spirit of rural farms.
Once you get a handle on the basics of gardening, then you can focus on the dreaming, the fluffing, the telling of stories. Those stories need to be set up in the history of the site. I’m not talking about recreating anything, rather just recognizing what makes a certain place unique. Ask questions to find the spirit that comes from the natural history and the human impact of a place. Either or both may be majestic, sweet, harsh, or just plain boring, depending on what you learn. But that is the stage on which to tell our own stories.
The spirit of our old farm is in things like this set of wagon wheels that’s been a favorite toy for children since the early 1970s.
I was fascinated with these kinds of stories as a boy. Leaning against a truck, old men visiting daddy would joke, “You boys know they planted that Magnolia Lane a hundred years ago so the women could walk house to the house in the shade? They didn’t want the ladies to get tan back then.” Even at eleven, I wasn’t that gullible; a newly planted magnolia wouldn’t shade any ladies. But I got to play in the trees, and I learned the lesson that plants are a part of culture, history, and myth. I did wonder and still do wonder at the visionary who planted them so many years before. How did he decide on magnolias? Who helped him dig them from the woods? And, most of all, did his “ladies” ever get to walk in their shade? Whatever the answer to these questions, his lane is a garden, and it captures the history of the land and its spirit.
The Magnolia Lane at Redcliffe Plantation, South Carolina, planted in the 1840s. The seeds from this eventually took over nearby eroded farmlands, creating a magical Magnolia grandiflora forest.
In a world where the artificial divide between nature and us grows larger every minute, we need gardens more than landscapes. We need gardens in public plazas, in parking lots and suburb entrances, in giant containers and in drainage ditches. We need gardens to tell our awesome stories, even if they are a bit chaotic—especially if they are mythical, emotional stories of how we are dependent on and compelled to be stewards of the spirit of every place.
FRANCES PARKER AND DAVID HASKEL
Most gardeners possess some skills from both biology and art. I constantly seek advice from professionals in each field. In fact, sometimes I feel like I simply didn’t have the courage to make a career decision between the two, so I became a horticulturist, which combines the best of both worlds. Frances Parker is an intuitive garden designer. She lives on the romantic, powerful, marshy land of the barrier islands of South Carolina. David Haskel is a biologist and a professor in the awe-inspiring mountains surrounding Sewanee, Tennessee. I sought advice from both of them on how to go about finding the spirit of place, finding what’s crucial to making a garden that delights in the biology and the people that came before. Frances has been a mentor to me for decades, while David’s recent book, The Forest Unseen, taught me decades worth of biology. They both point out that all of our five senses, and some sensitivities we can’t easily explain, need to be engaged to make magical connections to the earth.
Frances Parker looking closely into her garden.
Frances Parker has the garden bug. She’s a compulsive rooter and plant collector who’s always saying things like, “I’m so happy to see those cuttings didn’t root, I had nowhere to put them if they’d made it.” Frances taught herself to design gardens when she and her husband, Milton, moved into an antebellum house in Beaufort, South Carolina. In the 1960s, theirs, like many of these once grand homes, had been divided into apartments. “We moved in because we needed a place, and Milton’s parents had this old house. But, also, sort of to save the house; nobody wanted old houses then.” Outside, the remnants of the original garden were still there because no one had bothered to get rid of them. This is a neighborhood infused with history. People wrote about it, drew it, and photographed it. The people who built it were rich, well educated, and into the cultural pursuits of the world’s elite—including gardening. It was even once occupied by the Federal Army during the Civil War. For all these reasons, it’s a well-documented place, so much so that Frances knows that one of the remnants in the garden, a bay hedge, was imported and plated by a Dr. Fuller in 1830. Leaving that intact, Frances amended, started indulging her plant passion, and pulling on farm roots; she grew most of their young family’s food. Their garden’s reputation grew, too. Soon people were asking if they could have their weddings in the garden. And many started to ask if she could design gardens for them. Frances kept gardening, and what started as her just sharing advice with friends and neighbors eventually grew into a full-fledged garden design and nursery business. But it never looked like a business: Frances Parker’s headquarters and renowned nursery were in an old dairy barn on the back marsh.
From the street looking into Frances’s garden, where you can immediately feel a balance of chaos and control.
The nursery was a ramble of little buildings off the beaten track. For plant lovers, it was a feverish place where you could always find one of these growing out of one of those; where you’d discover a treasure hidden behind an old pallet; where you’d be torn between exploring further and going back for a bigger wagon first. You could wander through paths of emerald potted palms, frizzy plants with leaves like silver threads, and purple orchids, and every once in a while on the ground you’d find a lemon yellow sphere that had fallen off some sort of citrus tree. There wasn’t a business sign from the road to tell you where to stop, just a little pull off barely large enough for three cars, with some sort of concrete rubble to keep you from going in too far. A greenhouse of sorts was added on, and further down a path, you’d find the little cottage, the house where Milton was born in the 1930s. There were plants everywhere: tiny topiaries in clay pots, and gingers, ferns, palms, and amaryllis in plastic—some for sale, some for garden installations. Her collections were always mixed in, too: seed-grown coleus and antique rose cuttings from old farms and cemeteries, all arranged beautifully around a circular swept yard, under a live oak. Gray Spanish moss framed views to khaki cordgrass in the marsh. This nursery was a garden. Anyone riding by would look at the shack, see the plants all jumbled up and spilling everywhere, and wonder what cool old lady lived there.
Frances’s nursery on the back marsh of the Beaufort River in South Carolina.
When I first came to find Frances, I assumed this was her house, her garden, her style—maybe it was the home of someone who had to sell plants simply because they couldn’t stop propagating. This was in the 1980s, before the Internet, before cellphones. A friend and I had set out on a road trip to seek out the infamously reclusive Frances Parker. You had to chase hands-on gardeners, nursery growers, and designers to find them in their gardens. We found Frances under that live oak. We became quick friends—she shared a load of plants, cuttings, and seeds all before 11:30 AM. It was hot out, and we’d been sitting in an old truck all morning and were tired—but Frances was just getting started. She had a cast on her left leg and a garden tour coming the next day. She said she’d buy us lunch and show us her other garden in town if we’d help her move potted lemons up the stairs.
So we left the little dairy cottage on the marsh, following her to the old part of town, locally called the Old Point. It’s a little neck of land that juts out into the Beaufort River so that you feel like you’re on an island. Early maps even label it “Beaufort Island.” Antebellum doctors and planters built classically styled showhomes here. To get to Frances’s town garden, we passed under a live oak limb with a “Clearance 9 feet” sign tacked up on it. An oxidized-orange Volvo wagon with moss growing on the bumper crowded the entry gate. Through a shaggy mock orange hedge, a grand white staircase descends into a parterre garden. This is when it struck me that Frances was more than a plant nut. She’d made two gardens: one like an old, poor woman’s cottage garden, and one a highbrow, show-off garden—shack and chic. Over the decades since, I’ve realized that her gardens cover an even broader range of styles.
Boxwood hedges line brick paths, and a giant lawn fronts the elevated house. Parterres are filled with tropicalesque perennials, potted topiaries line the porch, and that original bay hedge makes a wall, hiding the magic within. For me, at such an early point in my gardening career, this was a real treat; I had only just met her, but I was going to have the chance to work in her amazing garden. Four hours later, my friend, a curmudgeonly type prone to feeling slighted, rolled his eyes and said, “She saw two men and thought she could get us to do her work. And all we got for lunch was a Bojangles’ biscuit and unsweetened tea with a pale piece of lemon.” But I was getting so much more. I learned how perennials should overflow the parterre, flop out, and cover the walkway. I learned how to thin them just enough that they look untouched but don’t totally shade out the grass below. I came away with cuttings and an enduring friendship that later revealed some weird little 200-year-old connections with this land that’s been gardened by farmers since 1810.
I didn’t know at that time to ask the right questions: Who lived here before? How was this garden and land used in the past? But I’ve since learned that the answers to these questions can be crucial in your approach to designing your garden. And in the case of Frances’s formal garden, I learned years later that the answers to these questions, which then only seemed to relate to the history of her garden, helped me to better understand part of my own family’s history. From a cultural standpoint, those that have worked the land before us have left things behind that you have to work with—or consciously reject. Either choice reveals your mind and soul as a gardener. We can also look at this from a biology perspective, where those that came before might be rodents, fungi, giant live oaks, or tiny fiddler crabs. Their bodies, excrement, and lives make up the living layer, humus, and the plants. This is all your garden. There are so many questions to ask.
David Haskel reiterated this point to me recently. I asked him how we could see the garden unseen—by which I meant, how could we appreciate the biota? Given that he’s a biologist, who takes pictures of slugs in their own liquid crystal worlds under rotten stumps, I expected a science teacher’s answer about lichen, worms, or seeds that stick in between the split-toed hooves of deer. Instead he told me something that led to a question I should have asked Frances all those years ago:
We make connections by giving our attention to a place. That place does not have to be an exotic faraway land. It doesn’t have to have an obvious history…. A complementary way of finding the uniqueness of place is to seek out stories of the natural and cultural worlds. What was here one hundred years ago? One thousand years ago? At the time of my birth? How have people used this land and how has this changed the place?
Where there are centuries of history, architecture, roads, and myths in a place, such as Frances’s Beaufort, finding the spirit might seem easier. History and biology seem to swallow you up while walking in her neighborhood. Even walkways tell a story. A granite walkway looks out of place here. There are no rocks for miles. Time hasn’t really softened the few places you do see granite paths, but bricks soften as moss grows over them. So Frances only uses brick. The same thinking drives her choices of trellises, fences, and even the layout of gardens. As we walk, Frances points to a new trellis that sticks out like a sore thumb. We discuss how the angles differ from the rooflines of the homes and even how the color isn’t complementary to the existing architecture. Did that gardener choose to make a statement or did she just impose her modern trellis on this ancient landscape? Even without having studied architectural history, I can sense this. In a garden Frances is renovating, she’s searched the country to match the original, twisted wire fencing that was used here in the 1930s. Understanding how things fit in or do not fit in is one of those sensibilities that help us feel the spirit of a place.
In the Old Point neighborhood of Beaufort, all the gardens and houses line shady lanes. The lanes and houses are designed to catch the summer breeze. Even from a few blocks in, you often have long views onto a wide, marshy river. The biology of this place is awesome. The light is beautiful and energizing. Humidity, warm days, and short rains encourage Spanish moss. Muck from the marsh was used by early cotton planters to fertilize their fields. All these things made this place a growing bonanza for early farmers. With this biology, and with the help of their enslaved brothers, they became the richest of American farmers. But for gardeners today, it does pose some challenges. We want to tell edited stories. Spanish moss–draped crepe myrtles are cool, but you have to constantly pick the stuff up and put it on the street to be taken away—for which you’ll get red bug bites in the process. On full moons, the tide rolls in so far as to inundate front yards with salt water. “See why I use pittosporums?” Frances says, pointing to a huge pittosporum tree growing right in the salty muck. Pittosporums will tolerate those times when the neighborhood is flooded. Wind also barrels through, dictating what will thrive along the narrow streets. Lots of this land is filled-in marsh, so you never really know what the dirt is, where it came from, or what you might find below.
Where there are no stones or rocks, it’s difficult to use them in your garden.
On the outer islands, which are less protected from ocean winds than Beaufort is, new developers sometimes consciously consider the native landscape. Of the naturalistic gardens on Spring Island, Frances says, “I love trying to make a new house look like God just dropped it right in the middle of the woods and dunes, and nobody’s planted a thing.” Biology dictates. While past planters on the island saw domination of the biology as a way to make money, the new development values the biology; they use it as way to keep the place special, as well as a way to make money on real estate, attracting kayakers and wildlife visitors. Cultural values have shifted. Frances’s naturalistic gardens tell a new story by using plants that have evolved to survive the harsh biology of the islands. Some people refer to this style as gardening by reduction rather than addition. That is, taking out a few “ugly” things to help people see the beauty of what is naturally there.
The spirits of this land and those who’ve lived on it for tens of thousands of years meet in a garden that Frances cares for and improves in the neighboring town of Yemassee. The sublime Auldbrass Plantation was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who left 500 pages of notes about how the place should develop over time, including small areas for gardens, which Frances has since developed. Wright’s designs were inspired by dripping Spanish moss, leaning live oaks, and Indian arrowheads. Low-slung, cypress-clad buildings come into and out of view among the trees. Frances’s garden there is inspired by that history—the notes, and designated garden spaces of the Wright design—and the possibilities of what she doesn’t yet know that she can grow in the Lowcountry. Her gardening is inspired by Wright’s designs, not planted according to any exact plan. I ask if she ever draws complete, detailed plans, and Frances says, “I don’t do plans unless a contract requires it. How can you garden from a plan? There’s always a giant root in the way or the light is funny here; you have to plan, then lay out on site. I do drawings after.” This is gardening by the most pure dictates of biology.
As David Haskell says about the biology of a place, things that used to be there can be important references even in a brand new garden. Even if you are starting from bare ground, where topsoil has been scraped off and taken away, David advices that you look, listen, and try to get your head around what kind of habitat wants to be there. If everything has been scraped away, David says:
An easy way to start is by poking around the “waste” and abandoned places nearby. Or, even better, natural areas such as parks. Often these places will be partly overrun with privet and other exuberant escapees from cultivation. They have their place, but they tend to get a bit out of hand and smother the other plants. So it takes some discernment to figure out the local plant community. An experimental approach is the most natural. Nobody can know what will grow best in a particular place. So, take a page from Darwin’s book and allow many species to grow, then see which thrive. Those that do well will stay; those that wither will not. This sounds harsh and perhaps lazy, but I believe that planting a variety of plants and accepting that some will simply not make it is a big part of place-based gardening.
Smoothly shaped pillars, planted with jasmine and agave, elicit a desire to touch.
In finding the spirit, start with that historical perspective, whether it is cultural history or biological history. Then start building your garden to engage the senses.
For most of us, finding the spirit of a place is visual. Gardening is about seeing colors, textures, contrast, and forms. We’re drawn to the brilliant color of flower, or the vibrant yellow skin of a lemon that’s fallen onto a mossy path. But these days, Frances pays more attention to texture and contrast; she loves greens. She says, “I don’t look to flowers so much anymore. I’ve been through the matchy matchy and perennial gardening. It’s fun, and the visual aspects are what we pay most attention to.” But she achieves stunning impact with a completely green garden of 15-foot-tall, softly sculpted pillars of ebony green, fine-leaved jasmine, studded with pots of coarse agave, and crisscrossed by mossy brick walkways.
Another visual consideration is the play of light on a garden. How does the light change through the day? How do light and shade play out over the land and through the seasons? David wants to know this, too, when he’s looking deeply: to find the unseen in a piece of land and see what the visual textures of the place are at different scales. He suggests starting down low and looking closely at the soil, say from a dog’s perspective, then stand up and view it from your own, and finally get a “God’s-eye view” using satellite imagery. “But,” he says, “God dwells in the soil, so this metaphor is limited.” The point is the visual world is often richly variegated. But vision is not our strongest sense.
David says, “After the eyes have had their feasts, move on to the ears—soundscapes reveal so much.” How present is the hum of human activity? Is that a part of the garden, a part of the spirit of a place? Or is it something to be muted by garden design tricks? What bird or insect sounds are present? How does sound change throughout the day or throughout the week? The animal world makes itself known through sound; we hear thousands of crickets and birds, but see only a few.
We must care for the unseen animal world in order to have and enjoy their music. Pesticides to kill mosquitoes kill animals, too, but plants that provide food and shelter invite them in. When she wants to diminish the unwelcome sounds, Frances relies on a trick of mind that she demonstrates by taking me on a walk around the Old Point to see gardens she’s designed. It’s 5:00 pm, and even in little Beaufort, there’s traffic noise. At the end of the neighborhood, we enter a garden overlooking the swing bridge to Lady’s Island. The garden is beautiful, the rocking chairs inviting, but the traffic noise is really loud. But I quickly forget all of that and focus on the bridge. “See, it’s your focus,” she says. “You see the marsh and bridge; you’re enjoying the view; you focus and dismiss the sound.” Away from the view, other little things distract you and even cover the sound. Standing by a small fountain, the simple trickle captures your attention. It doesn’t drown out the traffic, but your focus shifts; you’re listening automatically.
Brick works as a walkway that allows diversity to grow in the garden. It’s important, as David Haskel says, to get down on your hands and knees to really see the garden.
The smell of a garden is as important to the spirit of the garden as sound. Frances drives this point home as we approach another garden through a long driveway. A sasanqua hedge separates the drive and back garden. It’s a beautiful, new variety full of big pink flowers, but they lack the wonderful cinnamon smell of old sasanquas, a winter fragrance that is part of the Lowcountry’s spirit. So Frances used a design trick to help people focus on the fragrance. At the place in the hedge where a walkway connects the driveway to house, she’s replaced the pink sasanqua with two specimens of an old variety, nestled right into the hedge. The leaves, the plants, and the hedge look uniform, but the smell at the walkway is intense. The spot where you pass most often smells great and recalls the spirit of old-timey sasanquas. Frances smells everything. She pulls a weed, a camphor tree seedling: “When they mature, the leaves of course smell of camphor, but the seedling’s leaves smell just like sassafras.” She scrapes the skin of every hanging citrus and smells: “This one has a skunky smell.” Then she tells me to squeeze a small, pale, plum-sized limequat. My hands are instantly coated in fragrant oil. She tells me to hold onto it, and I realized it’s the perfect size and firmness to roll around in my hands, like a palm massager. It’s such a tactile thing, resistant, squishy, and soft. There’s nothing like holding that ball of sweet brilliant yellow. It’s part of the spirit of this place.
I ask how many of these details she considers when designing a garden for a client. She says, “I consider all the details and share them with some clients who want to hear about them. Some want to discover them, and others never get it.” As a designer, we sometimes play on and use these smells, these things that most people are not aware of, to capture the spirit of a place, whether consciously perceived or not. I love that cutting magnolia roots releases a rich sassafras smell. For fun, I sometimes make up a list, a chain of things that smell like other things: magnolia roots smell like crushed camphor seedlings, which smell like sassafras. I know that not many clients would ever follow this trail with their noses, but if I tell them about it, they love that the smells and associations are all there to discover.
David reminds me that smell can be used in a totally different way. Not so much for pleasure, but as a reminder of things we cannot see:
We can’t see most of the microbiota that rule the world (bacteria, protists, fungi), but we can smell many of them. The rich smell of healthy soil is the smell of plant-friendly bacteria. These smells change radically with the seasons and with the amount of moisture. Garden smells transcend the obvious delights of flowers. Leaf mulch, wet leaves, dusty late-summer bark on trees: these odors form a frame around the rest of our sensory experience.
Like sound, we can learn to focus on smells; we can learn which smells represent decomposition or problems in the soil. For example, sour, rank-smelling soil in a container or in the ground can indicate too much water and, therefore, problems of root rot. We can use smells to help us learn about the unseen biology of a garden.
The fragrant oils of ‘Eustis’ limequat released by rubbing the skin of the fruits.
Both Frances and David, with two very different approaches, are acutely aware of all their senses. They are also aware of other perceptions that help them feel or see deeply into the land, calling on other processes not as easily understood. Sometimes these may be small signals like an old farmer’s trick of understanding that sour grass growing in a field means the soil pH is low; or knowing that a rancid smell in the dirt indicates lack of oxygen that will inhibit root growth; or how to divine water for picking a great space for plantings. If I smell the spicy, molasses scent of magnolia roots when I dig a hole, I know to move somewhere else, as those robbing roots will stunt whatever I want to plant. Sometimes it just comes down to being more open to look and observe slowly and deeply with the intent of understanding what’s going on between plants, soil, and other lives. Both Frances and David have spent a good portion of their lives learning to read between the lines and tell marvelous stories of the natural world.
Updates and Adaptations
Immerse yourself in this mystery. If there’s one message I want people to come away with when I make a garden, it’s that. Enjoy the mystery and get your hands dirty. Dreaming is one thing, but it’s the doing that matters most. Try to let go of your end goal for a certain prescribed look. In public gardens, city parks, balconies, yards, and on my own farm, the process is most important.
I’ve been lucky enough in my life and career to make public gardens that lots and lots of people get to see, along with little patio gardens that might be enjoyed by just one person. In every one, the first thought is of the plants. What can plants do here? How can they be spectacular? How can they make a magical space? Walkways, containers, seat covers, and decorations come later. Their style is important to telling the garden’s story, but their cost or trendiness is irrelevant. Gardens with spirit have everything to do with the natural resources of biology and creativity.
My ways of finding the spirit of a place pull together intense lessons from scientists in labs and equally important ones from old men in fishing boats. The basics of site analysis are science and procedure; these I can determine quickly as I walk over a bit of land. Some design tricks and understandings of how people respond to certain plants’ smells and textures come automatically, too. For me, it’s the artistic processes that have always been more challenging. Lots of people helped me nurture and embrace them. But I always, always try to challenge myself by forcing the question, how can I make this garden in a way that I wouldn’t easily, automatically make it? Even though I seem to always end up with overflowing, layered spaces of curving lines, disorder, and wildness, I sometimes make myself start a design with the formal, symmetrical, and expected. I question my design, draw over it, and push it around on sheets of paper. But whether I’m relying on curvy lines or straight ones, the fine-tuning of a garden happens on the ground. Before I dig anything, I like to lay out lines, spaces, and even specific plants in a mockup, using spray paint, string, sand, and even bales of hay to mark where things might go. Then I sit back and “live” with my choices for a while and change things as needed.
By working on some big-budget, splashy garden projects, where the ordinary and extraordinary mix together, I hope to stimulate all kinds of people to make their own gardens with what they have. The British filmmaker Derek Jarman made a garden of pulled-together, washed-up junk in the shadows of a nuclear power station in Kent. Pearl Fryar started his garden in Bishopville, South Carolina, by pruning discarded bushes to win the “yard of the month contest” and became an internationally recognized topiary artist. Bennett Baxely started with a jumble of farm sheds and sprigs from shrubs pulled from the swamp. In both big gardens with budgets and little gardens with none, the spirit of the place is always the main ingredient.
On our little farm, where there’s a lot of history to build on, finding the spirit might seem straightforward. It is, but sometimes embracing that spirit can be difficult. Our farm is a tad trashy, a little rusty and rough. The basic flow of it happened organically over centuries. Buildings, trees, and people came and went. For a while in the 1960s and 70s, the place was basically abandoned. A grove of paper mulberry edged into the barns; a banksia rose literally engulfed the two-story smokehouse; Carolina cherry laurel took over the fig patch; and a jujube tree colony lined the drive, everything running a bit wild. We roped things in, and my parents enhanced the spirit of a sustenance farm. No tarting up was allowed.
We use the old stuff, but we also add new stuff—we layer things to keep the spirit. Our crinum packing shed is in an old chicken house. We’ve made a little classroom in an old woodshed with rebuilt mud and horse hair walls and a digital projector. A smoke house, car park, troughs, and now solar panels determine the flow and are the focal points of the meandering garden. Crinum and other crops extend in the same lines as the old vegetable garden. As a child, I was dismissive of daddy’s vegetable style—a garden made with taut strings and tilled in super straight rows—but today, our nursery follows his rows. There’s a certain irony to it, because as a garden designer, I’m constantly complaining about too much formality and straight lines. But our fields elicit the history of small sustenance farms.
Part of the spirit of this farm is that it’s always been a gathering place. We cherish a 1900 photo of a group of African American men in the barren winter yard kicking back in kitchen chairs around a fire with a boiling kettle. A man who grew up here in the 1930s told me what a paradise for children it was—the halfway point on the dirt road where all his cousins lived. My parents made it a gathering place, too.
Today, serious plant lovers come for little gatherings and cocktails made from crinum tea. Old friends and young friends bring lawn chairs just to sit under the giant pecans. Garden clubs host their plant sales here. Gardeners are closer to the earth’s spirit no matter where they garden, town or suburbs, but sitting on a quiet farm under big trees, over thriving soil, and refreshed by the air of fields and magnolia forest is an immersion that even the most avid gardeners love.
In places with big histories and spectacular nature, finding the spirit of gardens seems easy. Oceans, mountains, rivers, and deserts tell their own stories. Finding the spirit of and telling a story on abandoned agricultural land or blighted urban blocks is more difficult. Sometimes you look deeply and realize the story needs enhancing. I was once asked to make a garden in a huge, enclosed museum courtyard. The ruined urban soil had been the foundation for an old hospital and later became the red clay construction staging site. New bleak, beige walls soared around three sides, and on one end, a massive, old brick wall ended the view. The job: “Can you bring life to this? Can you plan a garden that celebrates the working yards of poor Southerners and at the same time is a place for elegant parties?” Instead of getting it from the land, we found the spirit in the museum’s collections. The plants we selected share geographic origins with objects from the museum’s collection. African crinum lilies connect with the tribal carvings and ceremonial masks of West African slaves. Cypress and tupelo trees connect with the Carolina rice planters’ dugout canoes. In doing this, we’re finding the spirit of all the people and plants that had been part of the area’s history—we found the spirit of the place through diversity.
The bulb preparation area reflects the spirit and colors of the farm.
We are stewards of this diversity. Professionals, home gardeners, people who sit on tree-selection committees, and people who might become any of these have influence on how our world is planted. We have to select, plan, and plant things that thrive, that encourage more diversity without causing havoc. There are just too many great plants in the world for us to plant the same things over and over or to plant disease-prone monocultures. In some early American landscapes, the trees were diverse, in forests like canopies. Our forebears captured the spirit of that American forest in new American towns. But we’ve slowly moved toward monoculture: streets and parking lots are planted with just one type of tree, all genetically identical. Gardens of diversity are more resilient, survive threats of pests, and encourage other kinds of diversity. The mix makes for better gardens, gardens with more creativity and gardens that recognize the diversity of biology. David Haskell gives a mantra for gardeners, designers, and anyone choosing plants:
Life thrives on diversity. So a botanically mixed collection of plants will attract a wider range of creatures than a collection of just one or a few plants. Most animals only make use of a small range of plants, so a wide taxonomic palate in the garden will result in a wider range of animals. This is probably more important than lushness.
Still, many of us desire that lushness; we work hard in our gardens to achieve it by adding lots of water and fertilizer. But we can learn to see beauty in the diversity and read the stories told through our gardens. David’s a great teacher of this:
I’m a big believer in exercises that open the senses. We tend to be hasty “lookers” and, thereby, miss so much. Our minds, also, tend toward dissatisfaction with the present moment, always yearning for something better in the future. The advertising industry does a good job of exploiting that yearning and never letting it settle into acceptance of what we have. There is nothing wrong with planning for a better future, but unless we can find existing beauty in the now, we’re unlikely to be happy with the future.
We find wonder in unlikely places when we slow down and pay attention. This takes some practice. We have to decide to pay attention, then repeatedly return our attention to our place. The mind wanders—it is seldom content to remain in place, so we gently bring it back and literally come back to our senses.
It’s so easy to let your mind race ahead in the garden, missing those chances to ask pertinent questions, to learn the story of a place. In the early part of my career, I paid attention to almost nothing but plants and gardening. I took long road trips in trucks outfitted for plant collecting, forged great friendships, built dramatic gardens, and even stimulated the garden economy. Surrounded by plants, seeking those plant people, I built entire relationships based in the garden. On that first trip to see Frances Parker and on dozens of trips since, she and I have talked only about plants. If we ate, we ate lemons or nuts while we walked in gardens. Our conversations were of seeds, nurseries, and new plants. I saw her husband only once or twice. I never asked about the history of her house. I wasn’t asking the right questions, seeking the connections that David Haskel encouraged me to seek. Twenty years later, while writing this book, Frances’s husband Milton brought out a small history book from which he read a history of their house that ended with, “Built in 1810 by a Henry Tudor Farmer”—my sixth great grandfather.
That’s a cool connection. The fact that it took me twenty years to make it is a great reminder to slow down and try not to be such a hasty looker. Gardening can be so many things: industry, production, art, therapy, and grueling work. We need to wipe off our lenses so that we can see more clearly. In doing so, we can help others, with less time, less connection, to share in that focus. Look at this amazing world that we are a part of. We’re part of the process, part of the dirt, and part of the spirit. Everything we do in the garden, we do to others, our children, and ourselves. We garden to share this story with those who might be focused on other things. That’s our job as teachers, parents, and gardeners: put good stuff in and keep bad stuff out. We have a lot more to filter out these days. Remembering how we got to where we are today affects how we go forward. By focusing on the basic skills and the plants, we can meld the lessons of the old and lead ourselves to places we never knew existed.
My mother set the style and spirit of our farm. Over centuries of farm history, she wrote her own story by creating a place that is both inspiring and relaxing. She values the past, here holding her grandmother’s milk jug, but she lives in the present, today using that jug as a vase for crinum from our mail-order nursery.
When I began to settle into my adult life, I chose the region of the Southern Appalachians in Western North Carolina as my home. It was in these mountains that I discovered a passion for gardening and design. Soon after coming back, my mother said to me, “Let me tell you a story. Every year your grandmother and I would plant a garden together at her house. The year after you were born, I brought you with me. You were eleven months old and dressed in a bonnet and shorts. I placed you at the end of the row we were planting. I gave you a teaspoon, and you played in the soil all day. I should have known then that you would be working with the land when you grew up.”
The shared experience and oral history of my family created the foundation for my journey as a landscape designer. I’ve navigated and developed my career through mentors, formal education, and most importantly lots of time spent in the land.
One of the most important aspects of design is identifying the spirit of the place or the genius loci. Each garden space has inherent elements, which are tangible and intangible. The spirit of the place falls into the intangible category for me. I have developed ways to interpret the land and recognize the spirit of the place. In doing so, I am able to design a garden space that stitches the past to the present. What follows is my method for discovering the spirit of the place.
• Visit the space often and spend as much time as possible in it, making sure to include visits to the space at different times of the day and seasons.
• Investigate the history of the land; this includes gathering oral history and researching natural history of the land. Explore.
• Use your five senses to experience nature through both a macro and a micro lens.
• Share your thoughts and experiences with others, preferably in the space. Resonate.
• Create space and time for your experiences to settle in your mind and body.
• Recognize your role as an agent of change for the land, and use integrity as a guiding principle. Ultimately, my method filters down to connection. In order to experience or identify the spirit of the place, I think a designer should seek to connect with the space and the land, through exposure, exploration, and resonation.
Kelly is director of programs at Southern Highlands Reserve, a non-profit organization dedicated to sustaining the natural ecosystems of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She’s a landscape designer, an inspiring natural teacher, a woman who feels the land and is dedicated to passing on the traditions and forging a new vision of how we connect to, live with, and garden in this earth.
