THE POLITICS AND PASSIONS OF GARDENS
To see another’s garden may give us a keen perception of the richness or poverty of his personality, of his experiences and associations in life, and of his spiritual qualities.
—CHARLES DOWNING LAY, A Garden Book, 1924
This book is a history of gardens in America, from the colonial and revolutionary periods to the present. It is about the form, feel, and life of gardens and the lives of the people who make them, but also about much more. It starts from my conviction that our gardens are meaningful—that they say a lot, and that we can read in them stories, not only about their makers but about ourselves as a people—our people, in Emerson’s words: we Americans. It is informed by the several sides of my work: designing gardens, all over the country, for all kinds of people and all manner of situations; and studying and writing about America’s cultural and environmental history.
Though born of agriculture, gardens are not farms. One definition from 1839 serves reasonably well: a garden is “land…laid out as a pleasure ground…with a view to recreation and enjoyment, more than profit.”1 Its function is essentially social: a garden is in effect a miniature Utopia, a diorama of how its makers see themselves and the world. Anyone who creates a garden draws a map of their mind on the ground, whether consciously or not. If we take time to read them, carefully situating them in the matrix of architecture, art, literature, and social and economic circumstances in which they are embedded, gardens may tell us about the wealth, power, status, sex lives, ethnicity, religion, politics, passions, aspirations, delusions, illusions, and dreams of their creators. Always rooted in their time and place, even the most unique gardens are indicators and traces of the tensions and energies in a constantly changing society. They can express political theories, aesthetic preoccupations, scientific and religious ideas, cultural inheritances, and sheer force of personality. Thomas Jefferson’s layered landscape at Monticello in Virginia expressed all of these things and more, providing us with a map, not only of his deep engagement with the ideas and values of the Enlightenment, but of his own, often deeply conflicted mind as a statesman, businessman, slave owner, farmer, and lover. All his life he worked to reconcile his democratic ideals with his love of luxury and the trappings of aristocracy, and his vision of an egalitarian, agrarian society with the harsh realities of the economic system that underpinned his own status—plantation slavery. Inspired by new British styles in gardens as well as by new ideas about rights, government, and society coming from Great Britain, yet wanting no more to do with that mother country, he struggled to adapt them to the new nation that he contributed so much to conceiving. His garden, every bit as much as his celebrated writings, is a testament to this seminal work of creating something unprecedented: an American character, and an American landscape to go along with it.
Jefferson’s dilemmas are still with us: we love to ogle the ostentatious houses and gardens of come-lately billionaires; at the same time we take pride in Michelle Obama’s kitchen garden at the White House, planted by schoolchildren with two hundred dollars’ worth of supplies. As a people, and as individuals, we want to express our values and virtues, and our sense of responsibility to community and the natural environment, while allowing space for our dreams and aspirations to flower, and, for some of us, our wealth. We must reconcile life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as the founder described them in the Declaration of Independence. Like Jefferson, we look abroad, to Europe, Asia, or elsewhere for models and inspiration, and we seek to transform those borrowed styles into a distinctively American form. For some of us the preferred expression in the garden is no-holds-barred ostentation in imitation of European royalty, like George Washington Vanderbilt’s Biltmore Estate; for some it is a “Grandmother’s” humble cottage garden of flowers and vegetables; for most, though, it is an amalgam, a middle ground, that weaves the different, competing strands of our heritage into a cultural fabric that is generally middle-class but keeps one eye faithfully on an agricultural past and one, perhaps hopefully, on the dream of one day making it big. Just as Jefferson’s house and garden drove him deeply into debt as he built and rebuilt them obsessively until the end of his life, chasing the evolving image of perfection he held in his mind’s eye, our gardens reveal the economic volatility and dynamism that have fueled American social mobility, and attendant anxieties about class and status, from the beginning. In every age, old money and new, established social groups and ascendant ones, try to negotiate their shared spaces in part through questions of taste, style, display, and the narratives that are spun around them. What was true in Jefferson’s time was true in the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century and remains true in our era of Hamptons hedge fund billionaires and reality TV makeover shows. Martha Stewart has nothing on our Founding Gardener.
The musician Jack Johnson sings, “I’ve got a symbol in my driveway,” as a comment on how we use things like cars to speak for us, often assigning them certain lines in the play that we write about ourselves that we are hesitant to utter in our own voices. The drama of self-creation isn’t straightforward, but full of deviations, diversions, dodges, and impersonations. What makes gardens especially interesting (versus, say, buying cars, houses, clothes, art, companies, or sports teams to show the world who we are) is that making one constitutes the creation of a new world—our own world, often nearly from scratch, an Eden where outside stresses, failures, and compromises can’t enter (at least in theory).
The comparison to drama isn’t far-fetched: since ancient times gardens have been compared to stages and used as settings for plays, masked balls, and myriad entertainments; sibling arts, stage and garden are each dramatizations of life and lives. Like theater, our gardens also tell of deeper, personal stirrings: of romantic love, of nostalgia for lost times and places, certainties, dreams, securities, and especially for childhood, that place of refuge, real or imagined. American gardens frequently evoke Arcadian agrarian landscapes, expressing our yearnings for the supposedly simpler lives of a rural time past, even as we have inexorably become an urban people living in an industrialized world churned by war, economic and social upheaval, and the displacement of communities in the face of the constant movement our system voraciously feeds on.
Emerson liked to quote Saadi, the 12th century Persian traveler-poet who chronicled the people and gardens he met on his peregrinations through the Middle East, Central Asia, and India. The gardens Saadi wrote about descended from ancient Persia: the paradeiza, or walled kings’ hunting grounds, which passed into Greek as paradeisos, which was the model for the biblical Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis. Like ancient desert cities, gardens were walled to keep out the bad and shelter the good, in all senses. This is why, as Emerson said, one longed for the freedom of a garden: the keys, permission to enter the bounded refuge of a space apart—separate from other people’s lives, separate from the tumult of the city and the vicissitudes of nature alike, since a garden isn’t nature but rather an entwining of nature and culture in a highly promiscuous, productive pas de deux.
Every good garden is a window—into the individual mind or minds of its makers, owners, inheritors, or inhabitants, and, through their stories layered on top of one another, a window to the collective mind, our common experience. To recognize what is visible there we have to learn the language of gardens: the vocabulary consists of plants, stone, wood, and water, the syntax a series of conjunctions of parterres and topiary, woodlands and meadows, terraces and pergolas, sculptures and staircases, pools and fountains, hedges and borders, flowers and gravel, straight lines and curves, geometry and wildness, sunlight and shadow, wet places and dry ones. Like DNA, the message can be hard to follow, as it is often carried in a jumble of bits borrowed and retained from here and there, words and phrases from a mix of garden languages, foreign, ancient, and dead, strung together, some of it possibly meaning nothing, but much of it coding for bone structure, color, and character—the way gardens express people’s thoughts and statements about life, politics, aesthetics, and matters of the heart.
Yet, looking at the progress of our gardens through time, patterns emerge, and we can see that we share fundamental ambitions, dilemmas, and pleasures over four hundred years of making gardens in the part of North America that has become the United States. The story is one of borrowing, and from a dizzying mix of sources: England, France, Italy, Spain, Persia, China, Japan, India, Mexico, or the South Pacific. The ideas and forms borrowed seem incongruous, even ridiculous: aristocratic styles are adopted by egalitarian republicans, pagan by Christians, English by revolutionary Americans even during the fight for independence, Catholic by Protestants, medieval Gothic by 20th century industrialists, and ancient Asian religious ones by secular modernists. There are all manner of strange combinations, uneasy bedfellows, and improbable convergences. Yet over and over, by the prosaic alchemy of the American melting pot, which works on cultural memes as much as on race, ethnicity, or religion, all of these forms are eventually transformed into middle-class American ones—modest, suburban houses unself-consciously garbed as Greek temples, Scottish castles, storybook cottages, or futuristic space modules, surrounded by miniature versions of the gardens of Versailles, Blenheim Palace, the Villa Medici, or the temple of Ryoan-ji. It is this borrowing and recombining that accounts for the extraordinary visual variety of the American-built environment—so jumbled and outrageous in places that a visitor from elsewhere might think us a kind of house and garden cargo cult. But it also reveals our particular genius: by digesting pieces from all over the world we have created an American style—several, to be exact. At their best ours are looser, freer, more idealistic, and more optimistic than the originals, and unapologetically ecumenical, unafraid to mix and match: thus, in 1960s California, a new universal style was born by merging orthodox modernism, South Pacific pastiche, and the Mexican rancho. Repeatedly, seeming opposites, whether modernist and historicist or formal and picturesque, intermingle, cross-pollinate, and bear hybrid offspring. These mixings are not simply products of American naïveté—there is deep truth to them, since careful historical work reveals that each of these poles shares a common antecedent in the Western tradition—they are branches of the same tree, though with very different leaves and flowers; thus their affinity is a natural consequence of their common heredity. They are surface styles, and divergent ones at that, which nevertheless reveal common psychological and cultural topographies beneath them, just as clothes reveal the contours of the skin and body below.
The newest wave in the garden is in many ways also its oldest: a return to agriculture, as makers of gardens seek to put back some of the links to the farm that were lost as America became overwhelmingly urban and suburban—both aesthetically and in the actual, intensive growing of food. Along with a movement toward more natural and environmentally friendly designs and practices in the garden, these represent a renewed effort toward reintegrating the split parts of our world: on one hand, the Arcadian, agrarian dream of small-town or rural life, with its self-sufficiency, slower pace, and connection to the imagined simplicity of the past; and on the other, the breathless rush and stress of our exurban, postindustrial reality in the 21st century. Paradoxically, or unsurprisingly, depending on how you look at it, for all our sophistication and the distance we have fortunately traveled from the harsh realities of his era, we American gardeners still face the same basic quandaries and enjoy the same rewards and pleasures as Thomas Jefferson did in his own patch of earth.