THE GARDEN IN EDEN

The narrative of the garden that I know begins in Eden, the Garden of Eden, and this garden, Eden, comes at the very end of creation, after Adam, before Eve, because she comes as a companion for Adam, not endemic to the garden at all, just as a companion for Adam as he enjoys the garden, and so it is so shocking that her presence itself leads to his being deprived of his enjoyment (I was having this thought one day in late September 1998, while walking on a winding, dusty road in Yunnan Province, China). And in this narrative with which I am familiar, this place called Eden is an ideal as a state of mind and an ideal as a place in which to live day after day after day; and Eden, in this text with which I am familiar, begins with pleasure and necessity, but then again the Tree of Life (which I think of as the vegetable garden, a need) comes before the Tree of Knowledge (which I think of as the plants for which I have no immediate use and grow only for an interest that is peculiar to me, and so this is the part of the garden which carries me into the world). In any case, Eden is tilled and generally looked after so that it can yield physical nourishment before it becomes a danger to Adam’s inner life. This is the garden! I said to myself, as I walked up and down the side of some mountains in southwestern China, this is the garden! I was thinking of the beginning of so many garden books I have read, I was thinking of the accounts of gardens by the many gardeners I have read, and I was thinking, Is this Eden, that thing that was banished, turned out into the world as I have come to know it—the world of discarding only to reclaim, of rejecting and then claiming again, the world of such longing that its end (death) is a relief?

But I was in southwestern China, walking up and down mountains, walking into forests of mostly rhododendrons, and then sometimes a small crop of paris or hydrangeas or enkianthus or maples or, coming out of the forest, on the edge of it, finding some apples or something so unfamiliar I would have to call Ron Pembroke (he is the person who removes or places trees in my part of Vermont) to remove things that looked to me like weeds.

The rhododendrons did not seem like weeds, but perhaps that was because they were familiar, I had paid money for the Rhododendron smirnowii, which is similar in leaf to the ones now before me (in China), each leaf covered with soft felt (indumentum) underneath, making the leaf appear silvery from afar or making the leaf seem puzzling (in a garden way) from afar. The irises, grassy-looking and growing thickly together, matted and tangled, also did not seem like a weed; and there were primroses and gentians and thalictrum and columbine (Aquilegia rockii) and all kinds of impatiens that I had never seen or heard of before, and rodgersia and ligularia (not exactly the ones I had been growing, I had been growing and had been exposed only to cultivars), and everything before me was familiar just the way I was seeing it (the primulas, the iris, the rodgersia) or in the form of a cultivar (the ligularia), and I had this not original thought that everything I saw before me was in a state of banishment, as was I (for I at that moment was without my family, my two children, my husband, the large house we had made habitable for ourselves), and so I thought (again) of the garden I had left at home, which was orderly, or meant to be orderly, and then I was reminded of the garden Eden, the garden to which all gardens must refer, whether they want to or not.

What turned wrong with Eden (from my point of view) is so familiar: the owner grew tired of the rigid upkeep of His creation (and I say His on purpose), of the rules that could guarantee its continued perfect existence, and most definitely tired of that design of the particular specimen (Tree of Life, Tree of Knowledge) as the focal point in the center and the other configurations (alleys, parterres, orchards, potageries; the cottage garden, which is really an illustration of making the best of deep social injustice, as the ha-ha, a part of the gardening landscape, is an illustration of making something beautiful out of yet another social cruelty. And the caretakers, the occupants (Adam and then Eve), too, seemed to have grown tired of the demands of the Gardener and most certainly of His ideas of what the garden ought to be, not so much how it ought to be arranged but whether its layout ought to remain intact, for this layout became boring to them after a while, this layout was not theirs, this layout (the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life at its center) had all the sadness that comes with satisfaction.

But gardeners (the owners of gardens, the occupants of them, which is to say, the people who work in them) are so restless, so irritable, so constantly vexed, so happy with their unhappiness, so pleased that they cannot really be satisfied; I can see how that narrative (the original one of Eden) would end and then evolve. Gardeners quarrel in their hearts loudly, vow to be without forgiveness, and then cannot help but share their just-found seedlings, clones, and favorable plots. It is so with the original gardener (I was thinking this while tramping around and over hill and dale and climbing up mountains and crossing furiously rushing streams): possessive, generous, temperamental, steadfast, single-minded, patient, quick to toss out, easy to make smile, slow to anger and then quick to anger, quick to make resolutions and then quick to break them. That gardener, any gardener, is not a stable being; that gardener, any gardener, is not a model of consistency. I was thinking all this in China, in the part of China, south-west Yunnan, in places called Napa Hai, Zhongdian, Deqen, Weixi, on the way to Beimashan, on the way to Emeishan, in Chengdu, in Kunming.

For all the years I had been a gardener, any rhododendron with felted leaves seemed so exotic (coming from far away, unfamiliar, rare, hard to come by—this is my own definition) and expensive, it always costs so much more; I can remember the time I first came across such a thing, a rhododendron with indumentum; it was in Mr. Carlson’s garden in Salem, New York. Mr. Carlson was a plantsman who specialized in rhododendrons and so he had many kinds, and just as I was leaving, just about to get into my car, he showed me some of his yak rhododendrons, and he very offhandedly showed me the felt on the underside of their leaves, and how surprised I was to see this and how pleased he was by my surprise and how pleased he looked when I wanted to buy some of these plants and he had none to sell to me. Mr. Carlson was such a nice man, and how sad it makes me to say that after that day I have never bought a thing from him, though he still sends me his catalogue. (I was thinking all this in China, in those places I have mentioned before, those places I will never forget so long as I am in the garden, so let me just mention them again: Napa Hai, Deqen, Weixi). And in China, as I walked up and down and across, I was often lost in forests of rhododendrons, and their leaves on the underside were covered with that substance, indumentum, and it was not rare, the indumentum, all the rhododendrons’ leaves were like that.

There have been so many times since I have become a gardener that I have brought my family to the brink of bankruptcy just to have growing in my garden some treasure (to me) or another, something I felt I could not live happily in the garden without; I could not live without the rhododendron ‘Jane Grant’ and the rhododendron ‘Anna H. Hall’; R. ‘Jane Grant’ in particular costs a lot, she is available only through the White Flower Farm nursery, but she (and I mean that, she) is very beautiful, for R. yakushimanum, the species with its felted leaves, is a part of her ancestry; R. ‘Anna H. Hall,’ also a descendant of R. yak, is not as rare, but it is costly anyway. R. smirnowii I bought from Dan; they were only six inches tall when I bought them. And when I was in China (in all those places with those names) in the forests with the rhododendrons of the felted leaves, I wondered (again, for I had thought of this many times before, even as I have thought of it many times since) if I was in the original garden (or a part of it, always a part of it), Eden, or something like it, only this time turned inside out, only this time (in China) the garden was in a state of banishment; I was in the wild, the garden had become the wild and I was in it (even though all the time I was really in China). I tried to bring everything back in, for I had (have) come to see that a garden, to make a garden, is partly an attempt to do that, to bring in from the wild as many things as can be appreciated, as many things as it is possible for a gardener to give meaning to, as many things as it is possible for the gardener to understand.

One day I was walking around in a very large garden in England, and this garden took up acres and acres of land and it was divided into many sections, the evergreen plants were in one place, the plants native to bare, high mountains were in one place, and then a whole enormous section of the garden was made to look like (or said to look like) a Himalayan glade. I do not now know a glade in the Himalayas, I have never been to the Himalayas; but whoever made this garden had an idea of it from actually having been there or had seen a picture of it. What would be in a real glade in the real Himalayas? What would such a thing look like? In that garden in England there were acres and acres devoted to rhododendrons, and rocks, huge bare rocks, and perhaps other things. When I saw the Himalayan glade in England, the rhododendrons were not in bloom, and if I had not known that it was meant to re-create a part of the landscape that makes up an uncultivated part of the surface of the earth that is the Himalayan Mountains, I would not have known what I was looking at, I would have thought that I was in an unkept part of this large estate. I walked around this part of the Himalayan glade for a long time, going over and over the same area, and then I was exhausted; I walked around the sides of mountains in China, never going over the same area twice, and then I was exhausted. In the Himalayan glade, in the mountains in China, both times I went home and, after eating a delicious supper, went to bed.

What exactly is the wild garden, then? I said these words to myself, once when I was sitting in a room; in this room are many books about the garden and one of these books is William Robinson’s The Wild Garden. I have seen his garden at Gravetye (in England, and on the very same day that I saw the attempt to re-create the Himalayan glade) and it is an arrangement of things carefully attended to, so that it (the garden at Gravetye) looks neglected, abandoned. What exactly is the wild garden, then?—and as I said these words to myself, as I asked myself this question, I was sitting in this room with many books about the garden, but I was not idle altogether, I was trying, with no success, to remove some randomly growing hairs from my chin (a sign of my age, I have noticed that old women have randomly placed strands of hair growing on their chins) and I was tugging at them just the way I would if they were weeds (I only think of this now, for I am tugging at them at this very minute). William Robinson said this in 1870 (The Wild Garden): “It has nothing to do with the idea of the ‘Wilderness.’ It does not mean the picturesque garden, for a garden may be highly picturesque, and yet in every part the result of ceaseless care.” And here again: “Some have thought of it as a garden run wild, or sowing annuals in a muddle; whereas it does not interfere with the regulation flower garden at all … I wish it to be kept distinct in the mind from the various sorts of hardy plant cultivation in groups, beds, and borders, in which good gardening and good taste may produce many happy effects.” And while this idea of the “Wild Garden” was very clear to William Robinson, the luxury of stating and enjoying the results of your own will, your own idea of how the things in front of you ought to be, to do what a God would do! But gods are so likely always to feel themselves so very misunderstood, for by the time a new edition of his book was issued in 1894, he said this in a new foreword: “Many of the reviewers of this book did not take the trouble necessary to see its true motive, and some of them confuse it with the picturesque garden, which may be formed in many costly ways, whereas the idea of the wild garden is placing plants of other countries, as hardy as our hardiest wild flowers, in places where they will flourish without further care or costs.”

And his idea of the Wild Garden is so interesting, for all the plants he lists that ought to be in it are ones that are very commonplace now. I mean, even I am familiar with them, and it is true that none of them, as far as I can tell, are native to Great Britain. In a chapter headed “Hardy Exotic Flowering Plants,” he lists sedum, marsh mallow, thalictrum, daylily, hens and chicks among many others; and almost everything mentioned I now know well, I now know some of them so well, I consider them a nuisance (the daylily) and often regret that I ever loved them in the first place.

And so again to Eden, and again to the sides of the mountains in Yunnan and Szechuan Provinces, China, and again to the Wild Garden and to the Himalayan glade. What does a gardener want? A gardener wants the garden to behave in the way she says, and when it does not, she will turn it out, abandon it, she will denounce the garden, not in general, only as it is particular to her, and we who come after will have to take some of what she loved and some of what she didn’t love, and accept that there are some things we cannot take because we just don’t understand them. The Himalayan glade seemed a parch, dusty wilderness to me; when I saw Gravetye, it was an Eden I loved so much, one from which I could not wait to escape. Gravetye is now an ideal luxurious inn; I had a delicious lunch in the dining room, and while eating I was struck with the desire to behead all of my fellow diners who were not traveling with me (Jill and Aunt Annie) because … because … because. Eden is like that, so rich in comfort, it tempts me to cause discomfort; I am in a state of constant discomfort and I like this state so much I would like to share it.