Seven

ALL OUR MISSING PARTS: MONEY AND VIRTUE IN THE GO-GO YEARS

Landscaping makes an imaginary world come true, or, rather, appear to be true.

—MICHEL CONAN, INTRODUCTION TO Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture

That is our story here…of a little girl who never got over what life had never given her and wound up inventing for herself a past she had never known—a hologram of life so powerful that it not only convinced her personally but mesmerized the world. In this way, the quiet little girl from the house on Elm Place became, in time, the richest self-made businesswoman in America, by selling the world all her missing parts.

—CHRISTOPHER BYRON, Martha Inc.: The Incredible Story of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia

There she is in a scene from a video: Martha, with her trademark deep voice and charming smile, her blond hair looking lightly combed but not coiffed, clutching against her canvas jacket Vivaldi, a fat furball cat that wears a taciturn expression—“One of my favorite Himalayas,” she says admiringly. Martha is telling us how to plant lily bulbs, preparing us for the task; then she demonstrates the form: pushing each bulb deep into her lusciously prepared soil with her foot on a bulb planter. Next she shows us how to plant primroses: kneeling, in her informal but WASPy jeans and sweater, digging with her hands in the dark dirt. She explains how to do “early spring feeding,” throwing fertilizer; then she builds a trellis for sweet peas. Birds are chirping noticeably loudly in the background. She shows us how to prune fruit trees in her orchard, confidently nipping off branches with her loppers. She talks admiringly of the tools she uses. She is genial, familiar, sometimes confidential, always speaking directly to us. Of the herb garden she built she confides: “I always wanted a classic herb garden,” then explains how, at her Connecticut home in 1993, she had men dig out part of her driveway with a backhoe and bring in mounds of compost to make lovely, dark, loamy soil in which she planted fifteen varieties of basil. She is always sunny, with controlled enthusiasm: dividing hellebores on her TV show, she exclaims, “this is a very handsome clump!” And she often gives us the satisfaction, the payoff, of her labors, and our attention—she shows us how to cook up the fruits of the garden: a rhubarb crisp, a fontina and asparagus bruschetta. Delicious.

This is the Martha Stewart who is irresistible to millions. The Martha Stewart who rose from being just another blond Westport, Connecticut, housewife in the 1970s with a part-time catering business to straddling the pinnacle of American media, building an empire of lucrative books, magazines, videos, television shows, and a line of branded products sold nationwide. It was all based on her image, her personality, her name, Martha; when her company made an initial stock offering in October 1999, that name was valued by Wall Street at more than a billion dollars.¹ In the process she altered the taste, expectations, and buying patterns of millions of Americans. She fueled her cult by becoming the high priestess of class anxiety, spotlighting it where few were even aware it existed in them, provoking it where it didn’t, then assuaging it by showing her audience the example of her own confidence and success so that they might emulate her. For someone who makes her living off getting others to buy into her taste prescriptions, it is a brilliant strategy—like the firefighter who secretly starts a fire, then leaps into action to put it out and gets covered in glory for saving the day.

After building a successful catering company, initially in Westport but soon reaching into the world of New York media and business that many Westporters, her husband, Andy, included, commuted to daily, Martha made her own publishing play—beginning with the 1982 book Entertaining. Padded with recipes and photos of Martha, and propelled by her increasingly visible image, it was an improbable bestseller—the largest-selling cookbook since Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking came out in 1961. It was followed like a steady series of deadeye gunshots by Quick Cook in 1983, Hors d’Oeuvres in 1984, Pies & Tarts in 1985, Weddings in 1987, The Wedding Planner and Quick Cook Menus in 1988, and Martha Stewart’s Christmas in 1989, all of which she flacked with a relentless publicity schedule. Her talent for self-promotion was matched by her appeal: her talks and appearances attracted huge crowds of (mostly) women who wanted to see Martha. Her appeal was only burnished by her ever-increasing success, as she repeatedly exceeded the expectations of the (mostly) male business establishment. After her string of blockbuster books, she talked skeptical executives at Time Warner into paying for the launch of a glossy magazine, Martha Stewart Living, constructed around the unusual premise of a magazine all about Martha, all the time: she would be the editor, commentator, and subject all at once, framing each issue and each individual topic with reminiscences of her happy childhood and marriage, illustrated with pictures of her in action. Her face would even go on the cover. When the first issue hit the newsstands, in November 1990, the Time executives who had bankrolled half a million 130-page color copies held their breath. It was a huge hit, surprising them and nearly everyone else—but not surprising Martha.

Martha clearly had the touch: she understood that what a large slice of Americans (again, mostly women) wanted was advice and guidance in their home spheres: what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. Martha’s knowledge was encyclopedic—she knew how to do everything, from gardening to cooking, entertaining, and keeping house, and she delivered her lessons with a total, breezy self-assurance that instilled confidence in the most timid and inexperienced in the domestic realm. Her dicta were absolute, and absolutely cheerful: “A house is not a home until it is full of color,” she instructed.² She taught how to force hyacinths, polish silver, buy garden antiques, grow heirloom tomatoes, make seasonal drinks, pickle vegetables, and keep chickens—in case her 20th century middle-class but upwardly mobile suburban audience had forgotten the fine points of being a 19th century middle-class but upwardly mobile suburban wife. She invented, or at least popularized, a rubric, homekeeping, for all the disappearing but critical folk sciences of washing linens, removing stains, and the simultaneously efficient and aesthetically pleasing packing of suitcases. Her instructions were studiously, some would say relentlessly, practical. The pictures always showed Martha doing the job herself: guiding the rototiller, squeezing the pruner, climbing the ladder, kneeling in the dirt, shoveling. Martha with her hands in the dirt was her ubiquitous, signature image, featured and repeated over and over.

But Martha’s world was inescapably also not practical; instead it was an elaborate fantasy world that no normal woman or man without infinite time and resources on their hands could inhabit. The stage set for most of her photo shoots, her own house and garden in Westport, which she called Turkey Hill, was the picture of a homeowner and gardener’s afterlife: a prim white clapboard colonial house surrounded by a swimming pool, an orchard, a kitchen garden, and a seemingly endless perennial garden bursting with irises, poppies, peonies, roses, and clematis. She had three hundred varieties of roses in her garden; she demonstrated how to gild pumpkins with two baths of metallic paint for Halloween décor and how to make tiny, impossibly delicate chocolate flowers for Christmas; she went fly-fishing in Alaska by floatplane; she made the perfect burger. Fresh-cut bouquets of flowers were everywhere, captured in luscious close-up vignettes—a shameless flower porn that Martha perfected. Gamboling in an endless green garden with its owner, another, nearly identical blond woman, the two of them in white dresses, she threw a summer tea party and cut the crusts off the sandwiches. To many, Martha Stewart became something of a mysterious joke: Yes, Martha showed us how to do all these things, but who actually could, or would? To others she was seductive but maddening. Watching Martha do her thing on an appearance on the morning TV talk show Live with Regis and Kathy Lee, co-host Kathy Lee Gifford deadpanned to Regis Philbin, in simultaneous admiration and exasperation at Martha’s Stepford Wife–like performance: “She is Martha Stewart. And you’re not. And I’m not! And it makes me crazy.” People had strong opinions about Martha; many either loved or loathed her. But her success continued unabated, and her influence spread: knockoffs of her magazine sprouted like mushrooms after rain—Garden Design and a revived House & Garden, just to name two high-end competitors inspired by her. A parody volume titled Is Martha Stuart Living? appeared on newsstands in 1995, with feature stories: “How to Dominate a Tag Sale, Making Water from Scratch, Collecting Glue Guns, Stenciling the Driveway.”

The secret of her appeal was that, though few of her fans probably did much of what Martha showed them, they wanted to see how to do it, to have access to the knowledge, just in case. Martha understood this. In her editor’s introduction to the February/March 1992 issue of the magazine, she wrote: “I have finally found the right word to sum up what we are trying to accomplish here at the magazine. It’s demystification…. There are so many things in this complex world of ours that are intimidating simply because we don’t understand them.” By explaining not only how to do things, but which things to do, Martha gave her audience a form of empowerment well worth the cover price, even if it was made of a good dose of imaginary wish fulfillment and fantasy.

This is what Martha Stewart understood: desire. The night before her first, self-titled TV program debuted in 1993, the show’s producer, a hardened TV veteran named Richard Sheingold, was gripped with doubt: surely it would be a flop, since there was Martha, standing in her garden, earnestly advising her audience not to cut their roses in the heat of noon but in the evening, when the first dew appeared on the leaves, so that they would stay fresh-looking longer. He pointed out to her that the target audience markets were urban: “They’re working-class people. These people don’t even have gardens.” Martha answered him coolly: “Yes, but they want them.”³ The show, initially a weekly half-hour segment, quickly gained a national following and grew to one hour, then became daily, then added half-hour segments on weekends; soon Martha was also guesting on CBS’s The Early Show and starring in holiday TV specials. In some sense Martha invented modern reality TV. Not that she invented the genre of the domestic how-to show—Julia Child had perfected that two decades earlier—but Martha expanded from the kitchen counter to swallow the entire domestic universe, inside and outside, every nook and cranny expertly tamed by her ubiquitous personality. In 1995, New York magazine put her on the cover, pronouncing her “the definitive American woman of our time.” Martha had become a cult of vicarious perfection for “the” American woman of the time. She explained why to a reporter in 1998: “I am first and foremost a housewife with a home, with a garden, with everything that everybody wants.”⁴

What Martha Stewart was selling was a dream of a genteel, beautiful country house life, with all the supposed WASP trappings of the deep-rooted northeastern establishment. It was none other than the old dream of rural repose, retailed by poets and media personalities since at least Virgil, and updated for each century by some energetic, magnetic entrepreneur, whether Alexander Pope, Capability Brown, Andrew Jackson Downing, or Martha Stewart, née Martha Kostyra, born into a working-class family of eight in August 1941, in Jersey City, New Jersey, soon moving to 86 Elm Place in Nutley, New Jersey, a no-frills town near Newark. Her father, Eddie, was by all accounts an angry, alcoholic, and occasionally abusive man who held a succession of blue-collar jobs and seethed at the fact that he had not risen in life as high as he felt he should have. Martha graduated from Nutley High School in 1959, a year when the girls in the yearbook wore sweaters and pearls and shoulder-length hair and listed as their interests gardening, cooking, and homemaking. She began her rise then, getting a job as a clothes model at the Bonwit Teller department store in Manhattan, possibly on the strength of a photo portfolio her father took and printed of her. She got a place at Barnard College, uptown at 116th Street, the women’s school across Broadway from its then still all-male counterpart, Columbia University. For a time she held a job on Fifth Avenue on the wealthy Upper East Side, getting a stipend, room, and board in exchange for housework and cooking. It was to prove good training for a future business tycoon. In 1961, Glamour magazine listed Martha Kostyra as one of the “Best Dressed College Girls” of the year; she had submitted her own photos, wearing clothes she had made herself. As a Barnard freshman she’d met Andy Stewart, who seemed the perfect catch, from a family that by all appearances was WASP and old money. They were married in July 1961 and Martha put her career on hold to move to New Haven, Connecticut, while he went to Yale Law School. In short order there would be frustration: it turned out that Andy was not WASP after all, not rich, but instead from a Jewish family of failing fortunes. Martha would still have to make her own way in the world, and she kicked hard on the door: from 1968 to 1973 she worked on Wall Street for an upstart brokerage firm, one of few women on the Street selling stocks. She later recalled that she was a good seller, not incidentally because she wasn’t afraid to wear short skirts and leggings, deploying her long legs to good advantage.⁵

In the spring of 1971, she and Andy found an abandoned six-room farmhouse, at 48 Turkey Hill Road South, in Westport. Built in 1805,⁶ it was something of a wreck, but they could afford it at $33,750. (Christopher Byron, the author of an unauthorized biography, reported that he and his wife had also looked at the property and passed because of its state of disrepair.) The marriage was stressed, and soon, in 1973, Martha’s job vanished as the brokerage firm sank in the wake of stock market turmoil. She threw herself into renovations and started selling pies at a local gourmet food shop; when demand rose, she paid other women to make her “homemade” pies, which she then sold for up to twenty dollars a pop. Soon she started a catering company with a partner—whom she later came to alienate, in part by taking jobs on the side, and bought out of the company, according to Byron. Martha called it “The Uncatered Affair”—and marketed her prowess at delivering all the food, serving gear, and décor, then staging it and vanishing into the background so that a hostess might appear to have done it all herself. It set itself up to be exactly what it wasn’t, providing a lovely illusion to mask the stresses that many women in places like Westport, Connecticut, felt in the 1970s. Especially in upscale suburbs, the 1970s seemed an exaggerated pendulum swing back from the experimentation and questioning of traditional social roles of the 1960s—there was a renewed emphasis on home, family life, and the role of women as homemakers, though increasing numbers of them also needed or chose to work.

Here were the beginnings of the double bind of modern American womanhood: caught between the pincers of the women’s movement on one hand, with its rising demands of women’s career and earning parity with men, and on the other hand an antifeminist backlash that reinstated traditional social expectations that married women must fulfill the highest standards of their traditional gender role in tending the home and children. This was the era of triumphant women’s lib: think of tennis player Bobby Riggs challenging and losing to Billie Jean King; and of the pushback against it: think of the national campaign to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have outlawed gender discrimination, defeated by conservative forces led by Phyllis Schlafly. Add to that rising living standards among the social class Martha moved in and an attendant rising consumerism—the mid–1970s was the beginning of a pre-Yuppie suburban status escalation among the upwardly mobile middle and upper middle classes, as fondue replaced Hamburger Helper at the table and BMWs replaced Buicks in the driveway. By the 1980s the trend was national and moving down the tax bracket ladder: an appetite for mid-luxury trappings and a vision of a vaguely European, upper-class existence was encouraged by national ad campaigns: think of the TV commercial where one British gentleman in a Rolls-Royce stops another and asks, “Pardon me, would you have any Grey Poupon?”

The 1980s, for a certain social strata, namely white urban and suburban boomers, was the beginning of a stretch of good years. Money was being made in professional careers, houses in the tonier suburbs bought. They needed to be gardened, decorated, and entertained in. Few Americans in these circumstances could draw on family traditions or education to instruct them on the new standards being shown them in the media. Thus there was both appetite, and anxiety—what to do to show the world that you knew what to do with money, to show that, in essence, you belonged? Martha Stewart, herself a pure product of this wave of upward mobility and possibility of personal transformation, understood both the superb ironies of the situation and how to profit from it by working both angles: like her catering company name, she mastered a kind of double-speak that at the same time addressed the two forces pulling at so many American women—the feminist critique of homemaking and the practical and psychological necessities of it. “I consider myself one of the original feminists. I’m trying to help give women back a sense of pleasure and accomplishment in their homes,”⁷ she said. And she provided an entire thesis that seemed to lace the two separating poles back together:

What I try to do is bring back a way of life that we’ve forgotten. It began to change in the 1970s with the “Me Generation.” But now we’re looking for a balance with our career, homes, gardens, family and pets. I try to show a comfortable and gentle lifestyle from the moment you wake up until you go to bed in a very nice way that’s not expensive and from a woman’s way with the subject of life.⁸

Martha’s program was a replay of Downing’s: her message was a 20th century reprise, with electric glue guns and diesel backhoes, of the 19th century’s “playing farmer” in the genteel suburbs while the husband commutes on the train to his Manhattan office job. Like Downing (and Loudon, and Repton, and so on), she adroitly used the media to build a franchise based on personality, expertise, and authority as a taste maven to help the confused, unconfident upwardly mobile upper middle classes figure out how to comport themselves for others’ benefit. Like Downing, born in Newburgh, New York, just as the Hudson Valley and the major urban areas of the country saw a wave of suburbanization, Martha also saw success come about in part through being in the right place at the right time. Westport was then (and remains today) home to many people in New York publishing—people who knew and perhaps hired her as a caterer. Her husband, Andy, had ended up running, more or less by accident, the Random House publishing company imprint Harry N. Abrams, where he found himself with a surprise blockbuster on his hands with the American edition of a quirky Dutch children’s book called The Secret Book of Gnomes in 1977. It was Andy, suddenly a publishing genius, who passed Martha’s proposal for Entertaining to another Random House imprint, Crown Books—and the rest is history. And Martha’s flowery, nostalgic aesthetic was perfect for the era: it was an (appropriately stiffer and glossier) American variant on the British shabby chic phenomenon of replicating old, faded, cluttered country house elegance in more modest dwellings, and anticipated the gauzy romanticism of Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” TV ads of 1984, with their impressionistic, slow-motion scenes of Regular Joes going to work, brides in white wedding dresses, misty country roads, and bucolic fields. Martha’s world, where women kept a perfect, beautiful home, fit in beautifully with this mood of social and aesthetic retrenchment.

At the same time, her persona perfectly hit the notes of a new assertiveness in American business culture, in which women were beginning to participate in increasingly visible ways. Martha didn’t wear the boxy, padded-shoulder Armani suits that many professional women put on in the 1980s and ’90s (she preferred a no-nonsense WASP country weekend look of jeans and sweaters), but she embodied the all-business ethic they were meant to signal. In spite of her best efforts at making her activities seem effortless, Martha was obviously, strenuously, implacably about work. There was something awesome in the spectacle of her mastery and prodigious productivity—she was the überhousewife, though clearly more house master than mistress, subservient to no one (it is worth noting that in her perfect home, men were conspicuously absent, except as occasional helpers, running backhoes, for example). She not only ran her home like a well-oiled business machine, but ran a deadly serious business empire from her home. She had found a way to bridge the widening gulf between work and home, and in that was an impressive display of female empowerment. But for some people it came at too high a price of aggressiveness and overkill: she told her readers how to plan cocktails for twenty-five guests, and for fifty, and for two hundred, and how to whip up a midnight omelette “supper” for thirty—or sixty. How could one not feel intimidated, even a little bullied, by such prescriptions?

Newsweek magazine called Martha’s shtick “the art of showing off,” giving voice to many onlookers’ objections to Martha’s message and her success. It’s not surprising that when the press increasingly reported on accounts of Martha’s nastiness to neighbors in Westport and abusive behavior toward employees and business partners, the stories got wide play. She was reported to have cursed at people for driving too slowly and neighborhood kids for accidentally sending a ball into her yard. Behind the smile for the cameras she was said to have a hard edge that often turned to rage. At one of the nine houses she eventually owned,⁹ a modern house on the Hamptons’ exclusive Georgica Pond (designed by Gordon Bunshaft, Isamu Noguchi’s old collaborator), she became embroiled in a fight with her neighbor over the placement and height of hedges and blocked views, a spat that escalated in a tit-for-tat of midnight plantings and tearings out, of legal attacks and counterattacks, including a contretemps with a landscaper employed by the neighbor in which he accused Martha of cursing at him and running into him with her car (their dispute was settled out of court). Some former employees said that she often treated Andy Stewart with scorn. Behind the carefully crafted image of domestic bliss, Martha was acting like Eddie Kostyra had, controlling and lashing out at those around her.

None of this diminished her drive, or her success. She inked a deal with Kmart to sell a Martha Stewart line of home furnishings, and talked executives at Time Inc. into selling her the magazine business for what was calculated to be a cash commitment of only $2 million. That investment paid off in spectacularly improbable and typically Martha Stewart fashion when the public stock offering of her aptly named company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, returned a market valuation of $1 billion in 1999.¹⁰ If anything, Martha’s ruthlessness and business acumen gained her admirers, and she played her reputation to her own advantage. She told Oprah Winfrey in one appearance on Oprah’s show: “I can almost bend steel with my mind. I can bend anything if I try hard enough. I can make myself do almost anything.” And Oprah seemed to agree, telling an interviewer that “Martha and I are not in competition with each other because Martha is the queen of external creations, which I am not. I am really more interested in getting them to look inside themselves and to try to excavate, pull back the layers of their lives, and then fix up their house.”¹¹

Martha wasn’t interested in excavating the self, just in fixing up the house and showing it off with a big, lavish party designed to make her rivals squirm at their inadequacy. After being convicted of lying to investigators about money made on a stock sale, and serving five months in a federal prison, Martha staged a comeback in grand style: she went back on the air with The Martha Stewart Show and The Apprentice: Martha Stewart, a version of the popular TV series about working for difficult bosses that also featured Donald Trump; and she launched a new line of housewares with Macy’s department stores. The stock price of her company rose, and by 2006 it was profitable again, aided by a second magazine, Martha Stewart Weddings, and a new spate of books—three at last count. As icing on the cake—and the most delicious kind of irony, where real life perfectly mirrors a cartoon critique of it—she created a line of Martha Stewart signature suburban houses sold by national suburb builder KB Home, available in four color-coordinated configurations: “Katonah,” based on her houses in Westport and Katonah, New York, “Lily Pond,” based on her Shingle-style house in the Hamptons, “Skylands,” based on her house of that name on the Maine coast, and “Dunemere,” supposedly inspired by the Bahamas. The designs are offered in seven themed developments in five Sunbelt states, turnkey-ready so that the buyer can, if not actually be Martha, at least live a perfectly replicated Stepford Wife version of her life. It is life as reality TV: starring in one’s own Martha Stewart Show.

 

NONE OF MARTHA’S notoriety or business machinations can diminish the profound effect she has had on taste in America. She was by no means alone in selling home and garden style, nor did she invent or even contribute anything new to either, but she was the most prodigious popularizer of a pastiche aesthetic that has, with her help, become so ubiquitous in the United States as to be invisible: a kind of modernized, plushed-up version of the late Victorian Colonial Revival Style. Like Andrew Jackson Downing’s, Martha’s look is a domesticated form of Romantic naturalism, comforting and lavish at the same time, which aims to evoke an unstudied gentility and links to an imagined WASP cultural past. Next to its avatar, her Turkey Hill garden, the style is best exemplified in the garden she had restored at Skylands, near Seal Harbor, Maine, a woodland fantasy designed by Jens Jensen in 1925 for Edsel Ford. From Jensen’s plans, Martha replanted the woods, paths, and native rockwork with ferns and perennials and constructed a stone council circle (which is much more cleanly built than any of Jensen’s) with a fire pit in the center. Besides the plants, the sheer size of the property is the star of the show.

The garden at Skylands is a link to the Gilded Age, and it is appropriate that Martha Stewart—a Polish girl from working-class New Jersey who acquired a Scottish surname by marrying a Jew and became a self-made billionaire (for a while anyway, on paper) by selling a lifestyle she had never enjoyed herself until she seized it with sheer chutzpah—should have resurrected it. During her ascendancy gardens again became potent status symbols and markers of the arrival of new money. If the first Gilded Age’s hotbed of houses and gardens for newly minted millionaires was Newport, that of the second Gilded Age of the 1980s and ’90s and early 2000s was the Hamptons, on Long Island’s East End. Had he visited in this period, Henry James would have immediately recognized its hothouse mixture of architecture, gardens, money, and class anxiety, as the Hamptons were and are all about new money trying to simulate the patina of old money by making a fantasy version of WASP culture. Big, muscular houses copied from the Shingle style of McKim, Mead, and White are the thing, surrounded by big hedges, big flower borders, big lawns, and big, expensive specimen trees—an obsession about which Martha joked: “It’s pretty funny hearing so many wealthy guys bragging about the size of their weeping copper beeches and taxus yews. My theory is it’s about midlife crisis. I’ve noted that when they glimpse a rare tree and a pretty girl at the same time, they often look a lot more excited about the tree.”¹²

Especially in gardens in the northern tier of the United States, the past few decades have been marked by a focus on plants, less than on design, yielding a look that owes much to the Arts & Crafts garden, especially its William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll–influenced plantsmanship. One of the most impressive achievements of the era was Frank Cabot’s Les Quatre Vents, on the north shore of the Saint Lawrence River in Quebec, which became widely influential in the garden world, a kind of Mecca for garden fanciers lucky enough to make the pilgrimage. Cabot’s grandparents and parents began with a summerhouse in 1928, adding to it and transforming it over the years, including setting out an axial formal garden and a white garden in the 1930s, under the influence of Sissinghurst Castle Garden in England. Since 1975, Cabot and his wife, Anne, have gardened especially industriously, expanding out from the central formal pieces to create a sprawling Arts & Crafts–style masterpiece with curious echoes of the English picturesque. Surrounding the steep-roofed, French Colonial Revival house are allées, formal lawns, knot gardens, hedges, a rockery, terraces complete with circular steps copied from Lutyens and Jekyll, perennial borders, and a rose garden; beyond them are flowering meadows, pastures, and woodlands, here and there punctuated with follies that could have been built in the 18th century—a red lacquered Japanese-style bridge, a vaguely neoclassical music pavilion, a Chinese-style moon bridge over a meandering watercourse, Nepalese rope bridges across a small ravine,¹³ two exquisite Japanese wood and paper pavilions in their own Japanese garden complete with a pond, and a “pigeonnier” tower straddling a canal, which tower resembles a cross between a corner fallen off a French baroque château, a medieval water mill, a dovecote, and the Taj Mahal. Like a good garden anthologist, Frank made no apologies for copying things he and Anne liked: “plagiarism is the life’s blood,” he explained.¹⁴ And they copied with uncommon imagination and skill. The whole is utterly spectacular and would have made even a Vanderbilt or duPont jealous. What is most significant about the garden is not its scale but its plantsmanship: Les Quatre Vents is a sustained horticultural symphony, performed at the highest level. It has been widely admired for the Cabots’ collection of Asian rarities, including the blue Himalayan poppy, Meconopsis betonicifolia, a temperamental fetish object of gardeners in temperate zones worldwide that happens to like southern Quebec and propagates readily there. The same floral tour de force was on view at the Cabots’ smaller, twelve-acre garden in Cold Spring, New York, called Stonecrop, which became public in 1992. In the Gilded Age tradition, these residential gardens were in effect private botanical gardens, showcasing their owners’ skill, resources, and ambition, and comparing favorably with much bigger institutions like Longwood Gardens in Delaware or Wave Hill in the Bronx. Their influence on gardening style, especially in the East, has been enormous, reinforcing a general trend toward plant-driven design.

An even more visible and popularly influential garden was Lynden Miller’s resurrection of the 19th century Conservatory Garden in New York’s Central Park. In the 1980s, a friend of Miller’s involved with city planning suggested that the painter and weekend gardener spearhead the renovation of the dilapidated six-acre garden that stretches along the eastern edge of the park, with its entrance at Fifth Avenue and 105th Street. Originally the site of a huge greenhouse for Central Park plants, the garden had later been laid out as a triptych of formal schemes, nominally Italian, French, and English, featuring fountains with Arts & Crafts bronze figures, a curving wisteria arbor, a hedged lawn, and a double allée of twisted, spreading crab apple trees. By the late 1970s and early ’80s, with New York City suffering from high crime, white flight to the suburbs, and fiscal ruin, its international image of decline and chaos fixed by the Blackout of 1977 with its looting and arson, the garden had gone to rack and ruin and saw more hustlers and addicts than Sunday strollers. Miller, who in addition to being a redoubtable fund-raiser and navigator of the city bureaucracy was a gifted plantswoman and designer, transformed the sad place into a showplace worthy of Winterthur: restoring the knots, hedges, fountains, and bluestone paths and planting the beds to overflowing with rudbeckias, grasses, tulips, hydrangeas, and her signature plant, the purple smokebush, Cotinus. When she was through, the garden deserved the name again, offering a serene oasis apart from the rush and noise of Manhattan’s streets. It also needed to be fed: gardening like this is an expensive proposition, requiring constant inputs of soil, plants, and labor—and therefore, fund-raising. Like the giant pair of ornate iron gates that guard the entrance from Fifth Avenue (originally from the Vanderbilt Mansion at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street, which was demolished in 1927, and the gates moved here in 1939), the Conservatory Garden is redolent of the Gilded Age. In fact, its renovation signaled the advent of a new one and was a tangible manifestation of the restoration of New York City as a place the upper middle class and the truly rich could again be proud to call home. After its nadir and with the financial markets improving, the city’s elite began to take control of its public space again, applying the “broken windows” theory, published in the Atlantic in March 1982 by criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, to cleaning up the subways, fighting graffiti, arresting “squeegee men,” and, after Rudolph Giuliani was elected mayor in 1993, applying a “zero tolerance” policy to petty crime. Following Lynden Miller’s success in the Conservatory Garden, she and the privately funded Central Park Conservancy applied the treatment to the rest of the park. The transformation over the years was remarkable: in a given corner of the park—perhaps a scruffy, balding patch of lawn or a bed with a few anemic shrubs—little fences would appear, meant to keep people out, then Gardening would commence in earnest, with tulips and taxus planted and turf reseeded. Corner by corner, the park was turned into a garden. More police came with the perennials, and more people of the prosperous, orderly type began using the park, until today Central Park is filled with (mostly) law-abiding people, day and night, and is no longer the byword for muggings and rapes that it was for a generation. Little fences are still up, keeping the happy hordes in their places and out of the flower beds. Become something of a heroine, Miller was asked to work her magic on Bryant Park, Madison Square Park, part of the New York Botanical Garden, and Columbia and Princeton universities, among other projects.

This sort of horticultural splash and intensity as the prime directive of garden design was propagating by the early 1990s throughout the media that concerned itself with gardens, and not just in Martha Stewart Living. Ken Druse, a garden photographer and writer based in Brooklyn, spotlighted new plants in the New York Times and published a series of well-received books that amounted to a kind of flower porn for plant collectors: The Natural Garden (1989), The Natural Shade Garden (1992), The Natural Habitat Garden (1994), and The Collector’s Garden (1997). Druse’s books could have been designed by William Robinson, illustrated with luscious color photos: there were wildflowers, woods, brilliantly variegated leaves, and no end of hostas, ferns, columbines, trilliums, delphiniums, and clematis. The images offer a sense of infinite expanse, with views into unbroken woods and meadows, meandering paths, and a conspicuous absence of neighbors and buildings, save the occasional genteel, invariably cottagey-looking house. Yet the style appeared all over New York and other eastern cities: in pocket parks, in narrow beds in front of Park Avenue buildings, and in tiny Brooklyn backyards, like Druse’s own, each one becoming an evocation of a natural woodland harmony that must exist somewhere out there, in “nature.”

Conservatory Garden, Central Park. (Sookie Tex)

The repetition of the word natural in Druse’s titles was a sign of an increasingly focused awareness in the zeitgeist of environmental issues and the garden’s capacity—or, some thought, responsibility—to engage them. All over the map, even in the Hamptons, along the dunefront megamillion-dollar houses of Gin Lane and Further Lane, between the habitual opulence and the clipped hedges, a growing naturalism was on display, drawing on the look of the dunes and marshes, with their grasses, pines, and scrub oaks. This emerging aesthetic received a big push from the landscape architecture firm Oehme, van Sweden, based in Washington, D.C., which made a splash with what it called “the New American Garden”: sweeping curves, lawns edged with bermed beds with massed plantings of big, brightly colored textural plants like rudbeckias, cone-flowers, joe-pye weed, and tall ornamental grasses. The style had a naturalistic feel yet was manicured at the same time: nothing was clipped, nothing was straight, but the plantings were reassuringly controlled, like a meadow scene as composed by a color-field painter.

An irony of the New American Garden was that it, like Jens Jensen’s before it, had been imported from northern Europe, along with the grasses that were the signature progressive plants of the era. In Europe, they had become key to a resurgent naturalistic style reminiscent of the native plant movement in gardening of the early 20th century that had influenced the young Dane. This time the European immigrant who carried the movement to America was the nurseryman and designer Kurt Bluemel, and the epicenter was not Chicago, but Maryland. Born in 1933 in German Sudetenland (now part of the Czech Republic), young Kurt and his family were forced to flee to Germany after the war. As a young man he worked in the nursery trade, and came to the United States from Switzerland in 1960, to Monkton, Maryland, where he took a job at a nursery and moonlighted as a grave digger (which paid better). There he met the landscape architect Wolfgang Oehme, who had arrived from Germany three years earlier and shared his passion for plants. The two started their own nursery in 1964. Oehme sold his share to Bluemel two years later to go into a design partnership with James van Sweden, and the men began designing gardens using new perennials and grasses being imported by Bluemel from Germany and Switzerland. His most popular commercial introductions included various dramatic forms of Miscanthus sinensis, a tall Japanese silver grass with tufted flowers that wave like pompoms, the gray-green switchgrass Panicum virgatum “Heavy Metal,” and the little bluestem grass Schizachyrium scoparium “The Blues.” Oehme and Van Sweden combined loose plantings with fine materials like cut bluestone and cobbles, used for swimming pool copings, decks, paths, and walls, studded with crops of embedded boulders. The look was perfect for East Coast summerhouse climes: reminiscent of the dunes, sounds, estuaries, woods, and meadows of semirural second-home-urbia. In the Hamptons, successful society designers like Deborah Nevins and Edwina von Gal worked it into their repertoires of lawns and hedges, and the look became a backdrop for countless Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein clothing ads.

The naturalism creeping into the gardens of the summer colonies of the leisure class was part of a spectrum of ideas that reached all the way from progressive politics to conservation biology. It meshed with and fed on a growing critique of the American obsession with lawns, which was memorably expressed by author Michael Pollan in his book Second Nature as a doctrine of not imposing our will on nature, but interacting with the forces of nature to make gardens. Designer, nurseryman, and author John Greenlee in California searched for alternatives to traditional turf grass, instead making meadows using low sedges, buffalo grass, and other species needing less water and fertilizer and less or no mowing than a lawn. What Greenlee began practicing in people’s yards echoed on a small scale broader themes in landscape management and environmental theory. In figuring out how to remediate abused or polluted landscapes and redevelop abandoned industrial areas, known as “brownfields,” government planners worked with scientists and landscape architects to do ecological restoration. Conservation biologists began to point out the need to set aside large areas of remaining wild lands in North America and link them with restored corridors of “rewilded” lands in order to preserve the DNA of threatened plant and animal populations. They began drawing maps showing huge swaths of territory, hitherto occupied by towns, roads, and agriculture, put literally back to nature by large-scale landscape engineering—a kind of reverse settlement of the continent. This line of thinking had its most singularly elegant and controversial idea in the Buffalo Commons, a proposal put forth in 1987 by the academic couple Frank and Deborah Popper, arguing that conventional farming and ranching are unsustainable on the dry parts of the Great Plains, testified to by the depopulation of the region since the 1920s, and advocating the restoration of native prairie and bison herds on roughly 140,000 square miles of land in ten states. It would be “natural gardening” on a continental scale.

John Greenlee’s first grass garden, Pomona, California. (By Saxon Holt)

 

IN 1978, ON the corner of La Guardia Place and West Houston Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, at the intersection of landscape and art, a postage-stamp-sized precursor of the Buffalo Commons appeared. It was a dirt rectangle twenty-five feet by forty feet, circumscribed by concrete sidewalks, between an apartment complex and a market; the only indication that it was anything other than a weedy strip was a plaque explaining the intention of its creator, Alan Sonfist. Sonfist had grown up in the South Bronx near a section of the Bronx River that was still covered in forest, in which he played as a child. Then the authorities “decided it was dangerous and poured concrete over it,” according to him. He never got over it. He wanted it back. When he later studied to become an artist, it occurred to him that one might be able to peel away some of that concrete that buried New York and replant the childhood paradise—and call it art. In 1965, when he was twenty-one years old, Sonfist first proposed the idea behind Time Landscape, altering fifty sites in the city to re-create pre-European landscape conditions. Later, around 1968 or ’69, he met the artists Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark, both of whom had sketched out ideas for islands, covered in trees, floating off Manhattan—Matta-Clark’s was a series of barges anchored in the harbor, stationary, while Smithson’s was an island to be towed around Manhattan Island continually, like a piece of Central Park spun off into a satellite in orbit. Encouraged by members of the art world but stymied by city government, Sonfist did not find his vision achieved until 1978, and then only on the one Village site. He researched historical records for clues to the area’s pre-settlement state. An English document described a trout stream just off Broadway, and he learned that Canal Street was so named because the street was once a waterway. He determined that the location at La Guardia and Houston once would have supported a forest of beech trees on rocky ground and sandy hills covered in wildflowers and junipers, so that is what he planted. The trees were at first no more than three feet tall; some of the plantings were just a few inches high. By the late 1980s Time Landscape had grown into a dense thicket, fenced off from the homeless and peppered with blown trash. But its influence, and its status as a harbinger of a flood, were real.

Ecology and natural processes soon came to be dominant preoccupations of landscape architects, especially academics such as Harvard Graduate School of Design professor Michael Van Valkenburgh, whose work has become canonical, including the Ice Wall series at Radcliffe College (1988–90), made of metal screens sprayed with water in the winter months to form translucent sheets of ice along walkways, and Mill Race Park, in Columbus, Indiana (1989–93), a sequence of pools, sluices, and raised areas designed to dramatize the seasonal rise of the nearby White River that floods most of the park. Following earnestly in Isamu Noguchi’s contoured traces, the new, ecological landscape architecture was all about landform, about cutting and gouging to simulate nature. A fine example is George Hargreaves’s Guadalupe River Park, in San Jose, California, conceived in 1988 as a solution to another river flooding problem in a developed area. Alongside a stretch of channelized river, Hargreaves sculpted a series of crescent-shaped berms of “sediment,” with cuts in between them, mimicking a fluvial landscape of braided overflow paths on either side of the main channel. This one was manufactured with bulldozers. Appropriately, the forms are stylized, not meant to look precisely natural—rendering them a descendant of Halprin’s Portland fountains. But Hargreaves’s version of geomorphology is functional, replacing what would have been seventeen-foot-high concrete walls with a floodable park that allows water to safely spill over the banks during storms.

The San Jose park and hundreds of projects like it built since are visionary moves toward reclaiming natural processes in the built environment, allowing city and nature to better coexist. Most important, it was designed to allow for change over time, fulfilling Robert Smithson’s dictum that parks and landscapes ought not seek to be perfect, final, and unchanging: “Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal…. Nature is never finished…. Parks and gardens are pictorial in the origin—landscapes created with natural materials rather than paint. The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.”¹⁵ Post-Noguchi, landscape architecture works at mimicking nature, just as Capability Brown and Olmsted did—for aesthetic pleasure, but also for moral pleasure: righting the wrongs of industrial, engineered civilization that had committed crimes against nature. It promised living better through better-designed space.

Even at the other pole of the profession, among the conceptualists, stylized versions of ecology began to appear everywhere, such as Toronto’s Village of Yorkville Park, created from 1991 to 1996 by Martha Schwartz, Ken Smith, and David Meyer. On a one-acre site adjacent to a row of town houses, they designed a linear series of “boxes,” each one displaying the characteristic plants of seventeen different ecosystems that occur in the province of Ontario. On one end is an enormous, rounded rock outcrop on which people climb and sit, evoking the rocky landscape of Central Park. The Yorkville park has been described as an “ecological curio case,” a collection, as in a botanical garden, but one of “systems,” not specimens, referents to a supposed ecological balance that exists somewhere else. The idea is almost Victorian—a new, environmentalist anthology garden. Bringing native plants into the city here serves a moral purpose—naturalizing the city, putting us back in touch with nature, as Olmsted did—though what is being remediated in Toronto is not (only) the frazzled nerves of the city dweller, but his and her consciousness and conscience. The garden is lovely, relaxing, and didactic. In her design for the Minneapolis Federal Courthouse Plaza, built in 1998, Schwartz followed a similar procedure, using grass-covered berms, arrayed in a wave pattern, like Hargreaves’s, some with jack pines growing out of them, and silver-painted logs to conjure a stylized version of Minnesota’s historical landscape and lumbering economy.

 

SOME OF THE best syntheses of contemporary landscape design’s kit of parts—the ecological mimicry, naturalistic style, fields of grasses, and elaborate, self-conscious ground-shaping—are to be found in the work of Kathryn Gustafson and her partners. The first thing that strikes one about Gustafson’s gardens is the liveliness of the ground: it swoops, folds, and falls in mounds, banks, crevices, and sinuous curves. The landform is sometimes bare, with just a covering of close-mowed turf; sometimes it’s combined with sophisticated plans of intersecting panels of water, grass, and stone with trees and paths laid out in carefully modulated sine curves. At its most complex, in the Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park, opened in 2004, designed with Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf, known for ornamental grass landscapes, it is a virtuoso weaving of curving paths, lines of water, arcing stone walls, wildflower meadows, and bosques of trees set on an undulating ground plane that mimics a prairie landscape, though it is constructed over a giant parking garage.

The path Gustafson followed to her mature style is surprising. She grew up in Yakima, in eastern Washington state’s high desert plateau, where folded, tawny, grass-covered hills form a backdrop for a river curving through town—a tableau echoed in some form in many of her gardens. She first studied fashion design in New York City before moving to France at the age of twenty. Soon she found herself captivated by landscape making and enrolled in the Ecole Nationale Supérieure du Pay-sage at Versailles, site of André Le Nôtre’s monumental royal gardens surrounding the palace of King Louis XIV. Le Nôtre’s masterpiece had a big influence on the young American; it’s still her favorite garden, and she revisits it every year. What inspires her in it is not what it’s typically celebrated for—the gigantic, radial geometry, the stark rationality. Her take on it is novel: “I think that one of the most modern gardens in the world is Versailles, it’s fantastically contemporary,” she said, with “very subtle land movement, terracing, and scale changes that create totally different spaces. Mine may not be as rectilinear, but I think there are a lot of lessons from historical landscapes.”

Deciphering these lessons is central to her practice. By example, she asked: “Why do you like to walk down a canal in Europe? What are the three major elements of them?” She answers. One: “It’s linear, you know where you’re going; it has an edge that you can walk on.” Two: “It has trees that provide you shade and dappled light.” And three: “It has two different kinds of smell, vegetation and water.” The Lurie Garden is an example of all three: the edge being the water “seam” that represents the ghost of the old Chicago lakefront that was once right below it before the rail yard was built with landfill. The result is the ability to make visiting her gardens feel like taking a private journey in a public space.

Lurie Garden planting plan. (Courtesy of Gustafson Partners)

After receiving her diploma in 1979, she opened an office in Paris. Her first commissions were for government transportation projects: tunnel entrances, reservoir tailings, and expressway interstices—seemingly random, lifeless spots that she reworked into dramatic, flowing compositions of contoured, terraced, but still organic-seeming shaped grassy ground. These led to arresting work at corporate headquarters for L’Oréal, Shell, and Esso in France, with sweeping, undulating grassy surfaces edged and studded with concrete ribbons or slabs protruding from the ground, à la Richard Serra. They achieved an uncanny modulation between an organic feel, like hills or folds of flesh, and the intentionally contrived abstractions of artistic postminimalism. From there her career skyrocketed, with invitations to do public work all over: including the North End Parks in Boston, the Square of the Rights of Man in Evry, France, the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain in London’s Hyde Park, the Seattle Civic Center, the garden for the Ross Planetarium at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, a garden at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Lurie Garden. Today she splits her time between homes in Seattle and Paris and partner firms in Seattle and London. She is an American who holds French nationality and considers France “home”—a uniquely hybrid outlook that shapes her work. “The best way I can explain it is my moral education is American and my intellectual education is French,” she told me.

Kathryn Gustafson, Shell Oil headquarters, France. (Courtesy of Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Ltd)

The primacy of shaped ground in her work stems from the design process itself, which begins with models she hand-sculpts in clay (later they are translated into computer software to guide construction). The spirit of Noguchi is close in these models, as is that of Polish sculptor Igor Mitoraj, who first urged Gustafson to take her modeling seriously and gave her the actual sculpting tools to do it. The unadorned clay panels are in many ways the purest form of her vision: precise, perfectly smooth, monochrome reliefs that look as though they could be still photographs of rippled water, or human flesh. It’s more than an analogy: Gustafson is keenly aware of the relationship between landform and the body. “I think it’s because it is organic and we’re organic, we’re basically made of the same stuff. I think that part of my fascination with it is that it’s so connected to who we are,” she said. “Everybody touches the land, you walk on it, so it’s your immediate first connection. If somehow you can translate your concept through that connection, then the creating the space only gets heightened by the other objects,” such as trees, plants, and built features. And experience is at the heart of Gustafson’s design philosophy: she is interested in creating spaces that draw people to them and through them, in the process creating “ambiences,” in her words, “that make you feel a certain way or function a certain way.”

Working first in clay, not paper, the normal medium of landscape design, gives the gardens a thickness—call it fullness—that “thinking in section,” as she puts it, can give, where thinking only in plan can’t. The result is like Land Art, yet her version is more feminine, less interventionist, less about sticking things (like Cadillacs or rusting steel plates) into the ground or scraping it with bulldozers than in realizing the ground’s potential to evoke emotion in us as we walk across it. It feels like nature, though it might be built over a parking garage or a rail yard, as at Millennium Park. Seeing the maquettes shows the sophisticated interplay of “natural” organic form, curves, bumps, meanders, and gridding, though the grids are generally torqued and curved so that they’re not legible as such. Without benefit of the overhead plan view, moving through one of her gardens feels just like a walk in the park.

Kathryn Gustafson, Morbras model. (Courtesy of Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Ltd)

 

AND HERE IS the nexus point of contemporary American landscape design: the shaped landform, and, ironically, close-cropped grass. In spite of all the powerful environmental critiques of lawns promulgated from academia to the popular media, the American garden can’t escape from turf. Much of Kathryn Gustafson’s work is a more ethereal, feminine translation of Noguchi’s three-dimensional stone surfaces into lawn. At another aesthetic extreme, what might be called the postminimalist garden, supremely self-consciousness and referential, are the gardens made by the American postmodernist architectural theorist and landscape designer Charles Jencks, among them the turf-covered spiral mound called Landform Ueda at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh (1999–2002), and the Garden of Cosmic Speculation, also in Scotland, which he designed over several decades with his wife, Maggie Keswick (the author of an authoritative history of Chinese gardens), a truly eccentric and wonderful composition of spiral mounds and curving terraces, all in close-cut turf, intersecting with planes of water and swooping steel bands. Jencks’s work may be inspired by physics and mathematical chaos theory, but it is enabled by bulldozers and lawnmowers. As the anti-lawn movement complained, the perfect greensward remains stubbornly and deeply lodged in the American (and British) psyche.

While these examples of gardens are rarefied indeed, all touch and resemble the most mundane and ubiquitous product of American landscape architecture: the golf course. Rarely mentioned in the same breath as proper landscape architecture or gardens, golf courses nevertheless share the same physical and cultural space as those supposedly more legitimate and “artistic” activities. Like the bits and strips of designed and maintained greenery along roads, in medians, and in the borders between buildings, malls, freeways, parks, and schools, all share in the psychological and physical form of the American landscape; they are often no less intentional, and no less meaningful; often they are more functional and more visually satisfying than their more exalted cousins.

Charles Jencks, the Garden of Cosmic Speculation, Scotland. (Wikimedia Commons/GNU Free Documentation License)

English-speaking (and Scots-speaking) people have been designing golf courses for five hundred years, working out contour, texture, flow, sequence, planting, and maintenance in ever more sophisticated ways. Eighteenth century greenskeepers in Britain were functionally no different than Capability Brown, except in the social ecology of their professions. This status difference changed in the late 1960s, and due in good measure to the influence, personality, and visibility of one man: Jack Nicklaus, a prodigy golfer from Columbus, Ohio. In 1965, having already won the U.S. Open, the Masters, and the PGA Championship by the age of twenty-five, Nicklaus joined former amateur competitor Pete Dye to help design a course for the Golf Club in New Albany, Ohio. Eventually the two formed a partnership. Jack liked the work, and by the early 1970s was on his own, winning praise for course designs that “thought” the way good golfers did. Dye said of him that he was “a second-shot thinker,” convinced that the approach to the green, not the tee shot, ought to guide a golfer’s strategy and a course designer’s.¹⁶ Nicklaus used his experience as a competitor, having played on hundreds of courses all over the world, to think through the movement and flow of each hole, where trouble should lie and where safety, fitting the choreography of strokes into the topography. He became known for very prominent bunkers, and holes that “faded” from left to right (a shot he himself excelled at), and for remarkably beautiful courses that fit in with their surroundings. Known as the greatest professional golfer of all time, Nicklaus won seventy-three PGA tour events and eighteen major championships over a twenty-five-year career. It is less well known that he and his company have designed more than three hundred courses—roughly 1 percent of all the golf courses on earth.

When he approached a new design, he would “consider it from four angles,” asking himself these questions:

1. Who is going to play the course? Would they be predominantly pros or amateurs, women or men, old or young?

2. How sensitive is the environment? Nicklaus often has been called on to put courses on old dumps or mine tailings, and has developed real skills in ecological restoration.

3. How can I balance the demands on a player’s intelligence with demands on his strength? The designer’s challenge is putting enough variety in the course so that a smarter player has a fair chance against a longer hitter. In his book, Nicklaus by Design: Golf Course Strategy and Architecture, he explained: “One of the really overlooked battlegrounds in the war between power and placement is the driveable par-4,” naming the tenth hole at Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles as an example.¹⁷

4. How will it look? Here is Nicklaus’s philosophy: “It sounds basic, but a golf course has to be pretty.”

At the aesthetic level, Nicklaus has an unusually subtle understanding of fit and blending in—far greater than most landscape architects. Along with his prodigious output, this ought to make him one of the most important, and the most unheralded, landscape designers in history, one whose methods ought to be studied. “A well-designed course can’t be separated from its surroundings—it’s part of them,” he wrote. “In designing a golf course, it’s critically important to infuse the course with the surroundings and view. You have to look at the mountains, the vegetation, the lakes, the indigenous grasses—see what you’ve got and try to bring that through in the finished layout. That tying of what you might call the themes or rhythms of the land into the design is what separates an ordinary golf course from a beautiful one.

“If I’m working in a mountain setting, I’ll try to mirror the forms of the surrounding mountains in the mounding on the course. I’m not trying to replicate the mountains, and most players don’t even notice it on a conscious level, but it’s a technique that allows the course to fit in, to match. It’s not unlike matching a shirt and tie.” He will echo a distant line of treetops, or a texture, like that of palmettos in an adjacent savannah, or a shade of green, on the course. “Even in an area that has few cues, such as the desert, I try to bring the rhythm and flow of the land itself into the design.”¹⁸ A lovely example of this technique is visible at his PGA West course, at La Quinta, near Palm Springs, California, where the scalloped line of small grassy drop-offs on the side of the fairway repeats in miniature the contours of a line of hills in the desert beyond, catching sunlight and casting shadows in precisely the same way, so that the completely artificial foreground landscape seems of a piece with the natural backdrop. The balance between the naturalistic and manicured, the miniaturization, and the way the distance is pulled in with shakkei recall Japanese gardens, yet the modern golf course is a consummately American form.

All golf courses are beautiful in some way, because they are at the confluence of nature and the human mind; they are an edge, a pleasing contiguity between grass and trees, between the terrain we walk through that we make and the terrain beyond that we don’t. As Kathryn Gustafson noted about walking along a canal, the edge also provides a path to follow on our journey. The golf course, with its numbered chain of holes, makes a game of it. Golf course making and “serious” garden making are joined on the field of play: after his 1933 proposal Monument to the Plow, Noguchi’s first expressions of earth sculpting were his playgrounds, intended to make children feel closer to the earth. The first artist’s earthwork is generally recognized to be Herbert Bayer’s Grass Mound, made in 1955 at the Aspen Art Institute by the Bauhaus-era German architect who came to the United States in 1938, followed by his Anderson Park, also in Aspen, both of which look like a golf course and a Noguchi playground genetically spliced. A golf course and an earthwork are adult playscapes.

I can recall watching, in about 1992, bulldozers shape a field of hideously jagged black lava on the Big Island of Hawaii into what would become the softly contoured banks, bunkers, and fairways of the Hualalai course—one of Jack Nicklaus’s more dramatic creations: a Joan Miróesque tapestry of smooth green and white amoebas (fairways, greens, and sand traps) splattered across a black lava field as sharp as broken glass, laid alongside the deep blue waters off North Kona. The sight of the clanking machines performing this miracle was awesome and beautiful, and gratified some childish urge to shape the ground with one’s hands, like making sand castles on the beach. Earthmoving is the essence of the garden art form, because it precedes planting and prepares for it, taking land and making it more like “nature”: that is, like the mental image of nature specific to the imaginer and his cultural framework. This is what Olmsted did in Central Park, according to Robert Smithson: he “brought a Jeffersonian rural reality into the metropolis.”¹⁹ This too is what Nicklaus, Schwartz, and Gustafson are doing, each in their own way.

Golf, of course, has its social meaning, too, which can’t be separated from its physical forms. It has a well-deserved reputation for elitism, and historically, racism, due to its association with restricted-membership country clubs. From their earliest importation into this country, golf courses have been profitably attached to exclusive residential subdivisions, with the course serving as status marker—the owner’s share of a huge, quasi-communal Arcadian landscape—and a recreational and social amenity. A golf-course-centered enclave provides a paradoxical sort of town and society in a purely anti-urban and antisocial form. We Americans seem to carry with us an ancient British attachment to verdant green lawns wherever we go. It’s easy enough to re-create an approximation of England in rainy Pennsylvania or Ohio, but greenskeeping becomes more difficult as one moves west and the climate becomes more extreme, and drier. But we have never let that stop us: since the middle 19th century, the quintessential American form of settlement is the irrigation colony in the desert, repeated countless times by people fleeing the constricted realities of eastern cities. From the Mormon Zion that Brigham Young planted in the Utah desert in 1847, to the Union Colony at Greeley, Colorado, founded in 1869 as a Utopia for those of “high moral standards,” to the orange groves of a hundred thousand hobby farmers escaped to sunny Southern California, Americans have excelled at moving water from one place to another to overcome local conditions and re-create the ancestral greensward.

The irrigation colony’s contemporary form par excellence is the gated community built around a golf course (or two, or three) in the desert. Think of southern Arizona, whether Tucson, Scottsdale, or Phoenix, where Nicklaus developed one of his most visually arresting courses, the Cochise Course at Desert Mountain (named for the legendary Apache raider who bedeviled the U.S. Army for a decade), in the delightfully named wealthy suburb of Carefree. Or think of Southern California, especially Palm Springs, and its newer neighbor, Palm Desert, where square-mile-sized blocks of pristine desert have been transformed into what must be, from a certain perspective, the achievement of paradise on earth. In a typical upscale golf community, concrete walls a mile long, festooned with brightly flowering bougainvillea, wall off massive, empty, palm-lined boulevards and wall in a maze of serpentine streets lined with vaguely Spanish-style stucco houses, apparently only every tenth one occupied at any given time by owners and renters from far away. The curving rows of houses follow the DNA helixes of the fairways, onto which their living rooms and patios open, shaded by palms and misted by the overspray of the sprinklers that keep everything a lush, otherworldly Irish green. Down the middle of the fairways run streams, every so often burbling over rocky falls, the water circulating the length of two eighteen-hole courses before being pumped back up to the beginning to make the circuit again. The hiss of irrigation is mixed with the hum of electric golf carts and blotted out by the gas trimmers of Mexican gardeners tending the odd-shaped “meatballs” they have made of the variety of evergreen shrubs planted everywhere, free-form topiary. The gardeners, mostly poorly paid illegal immigrants, move in a businesslike hurry, like worker ants checking the aphids, their slightly desperate pace and purpose at odds with the stiff tranquility of the surroundings. When they move on, there can be stillness, and space to take in the views of distant mountains. The quiet might be interrupted by a sandstorm, turning the air yellow with grinding dust and blowing fallen palm fronds sideways, bouncing along the greens as if in a gale on a Pacific island. A sandstorm is a jarring reminder of how tenuous this privileged, perfected world is: the source of all this water, pumped out of the Colorado River east of here in the desert, is the Rocky Mountains, seven hundred miles away, and the river threatens to run dry from overuse and a drying climate. While it is real for now, Palm Desert is a fantasy world—bending the physical world to our will. It has existed for only a few decades, and it may not be sustainable.

Then again, we Americans are very good at this transportation: bringing a domesticated Jeffersonian rural fantasy to Central Park or to the Mojave Desert, bringing along everything settlers might need or want for implanting a new life in new worlds—hostile, unknown, arid, or tropical, it matters not, since we will re-create the world we want in any case. The Mayflower was such a transport vehicle, and the covered wagon; so is the armed fort of the English colonists or the U.S. Army cavalry that brought in Cochise and Geronimo. The irrigation settlement, the Panama Canal Zone, even Baghdad’s Green Zone (while not a garden, it is a walled ex-closure built on the site of the old Garden of Eden, just like it, to keep its inhabitants safe from the dangerous world outside) are all examples of American islands, private estates, gated havens. To this list should be added the Apollo missions, with their command modules, lunar landers, and return capsules—and golf clubs. Who can forget that the astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American in space and fifth man to walk on the moon as commander of the Apollo 14 mission, brought a six-iron with him and took two shots, one-handed because of his stiff spacesuit. The first fizzled, so he took a mulligan, dropped a second ball, and drove it a few hundred yards, setting the course record.

It is fitting that a spot in the Arizona desert outside ever-expanding Phoenix was chosen as the site for Biosphere 2, the $200 million glass vivarium built from 1987 to 1991, at 2.5 football fields long the largest closed system ever constructed. It was meant to be a veritable Garden of Eden, a self-contained habitat where a group of scientists could learn how to manage miniature scripts of Earth’s support systems. It had a living area, a farm, plus versions of nature, something of an anthology of ecosystems, not unlike Martha Schwartz and company’s Yorkville garden or the Huntington Gardens in Pasadena, with its Australian section, desert section, and New World tropics section. Biosphere 2 contained a rain forest, a coral reef, a mangrove forest, a savannah, and a fog desert. It was a sealed experiment, designed to teach how to colonize space, presumably the moon first. (It did not contain a golf course, but there were scores of them nearby.) Two immersions were carried out with a scientific team and a doctor: from 1991 to 1993, and a part of 1994. Scientific and financial troubles put an end to the project, but it was paradigmatic, in some sense the perfect American garden because perfectly autonomous, in theory. Appropriately, the surrounding 1,650-acre site was sold in 2007 by Biosphere 2’s receivers to pay its debt—to a developer planning to build a residential golf community and a resort hotel.

 

IN THE PROSPEROUS residential neighborhoods of coastal California in the 1970s, gardens tended to follow the later style of Thomas Church, who passed on in 1978 but whose ghost continued to design the region’s gardens well into the 1980s: open layouts of lawn with curved edges, expanses of brick or flagstone paving studded with raised planters for medium-size evergreen trees like the Melaleuca paperbarks, ficus, Brazilian peppers, and Queen palms, all bordered by beds filled with vaguely exotic shrubs like nandina, rhaphiolepis, ferns, and strap-leaved African corms like agapanthus and clivia, all of which could take the shade that had overtaken California’s suburban yards since their raw beginnings. The feel was a cross between a cleaned-up woods and the modernist diagram of curves, clumps, and masses, with a nod to the Spanish tradition thrown in by using brick hardscape.

By the late 1980s and early ’90s, a resurgence of more angular, sleek modern architecture in the Neutra vein nudged some garden designers toward a graphic, color-contrasting palette, inspired by the garden at Neutra’s Tremaine House and by Lotusland: heavy on succulents and strikingly colored plants, including many being introduced from New Zealand, with its phormiums, of which a rainbow of new cultivars appeared with names like Maori Princess and Dark Delight in intense hues and striped variegations, and a raft of variegated pittosporums, and from Australia, with its wonderfully bizarre Kangaroo Paws and Protea family oddities like banksias and grevilleas. Jay Griffiths in Venice, Pamela Burton in Los Angeles, and Isabel Greene (a granddaughter of Henry Greene of Greene & Greene, the Arts & Crafts architects in Pasadena) in Santa Barbara were prominent designers in this idiom, which mixed the by-then old modernist arsenal of concrete, metal, wood slats, and glass with a postmodern plant collector’s palette worthy of Dr. Seuss into a very unique and recognizable regional style to complement its ubiquitous modern architecture.

But because Californians had never stopped building in the Spanish Colonial and other revival flavors, the market for formal gardens never disappeared. In the same period, a renewed interest in the California classicism of the 1910s and ’20s was visible, relearning its melding of voluptuous horticulture and rigorous formal design, and rediscovering the genius of Lockwood de Forest, Bertram Goodhue, Paul Thiene, Edward Huntsman-Trout, Florence Yoch, and others. The standout on this historicist side of the equation was a conventionally untrained former interior designer, Nancy Goslee Power. Growing up on the eastern shore of Delaware in a small-town world that still preserved the culture of that northern outpost of the South, she made gardens from a young age, alongside a grandmother who grew mounds of delicious organic produce that fed the family and a mother who didn’t care to grow food but instead brought a perfectionist’s intensity to coddling her collection of rare and exotic plants. In college Power spent two transformative years in Florence, Italy, studying art and history and eagerly imbibing the formal framework of the region’s traditions and appreciating its relaxed, generous, gracious style of living. The experience transformed her into what she calls a “born-again Italian,” and it showed thereafter and still shows in the strong bones, loose, overflowing plantings, and emphasis on food and outdoor living that marks her work.

After her Italian sojourn, she had a thriving career as a decorator in New York City, before moving to Santa Monica with her small son and husband, who was in the movie business and wanted to be in Los Angeles. Before long she was making gardens again, now energized by the freedom afforded by the warm climate, endless plant palette, and Mediterranean style of much of the Los Angeles area’s architecture. One of her first, the garden around her small Spanish-style Santa Monica house, linked tiled patios, fountains, an outdoor fireplace, a sturdy, masonry-columned pergola, and a geometric kitchen garden into a series of walled garden rooms, planted with an Arts & Crafts–like profusion of plants common and rare. Like that tradition, Power’s work is built on interlocking rooms, deliberate transitions and sight lines, and carefully revealed surprises, all scaled to actual human dimensions, never too close for comfort nor too large for contact, whether the site is expansive or cramped.

As she explained it, “My goal is to make gardens and parks that are tranquil outdoor places apart from the chaotic, noisy, machine-driven environments where most of us work and live. Most of all I make beautiful places to be in love. I am a diehard romantic, but a practical one.” This could have been written by Gertrude Jekyll or Beatrix Farrand. Indeed, Power is their clear descendant, her work a synthesis of formal and naturalistic, intended to elicit sensory and emotional experience. Power’s is a new fin-de-siècle version of the Arts & Crafts apogee, historically conscious, especially when paired with revival architectures from that period. She has an unusual grasp of history, culled in part from a huge library that she consults with simultaneous respect and opportunism, not unlike Frank Cabot’s—copying a set of stairs from Dumbarton Oaks, a bed layout from de Forest, or a color scheme from Jekyll, always gratefully acknowledging her debt.

At the same time, Power’s style is very much engaged in the present, meshing in surprising ways with some of the most challenging modern architecture Southern California has produced. In the early 1990s she got an opportunity to work with her neighbor Frank Gehry, whom she knew because their kids played together. (I got the opportunity to work with her then, as a young associate in her office, learning the ropes of garden making on the job and from her extraordinary mentoring, as she had before from masters like the legendary Santa Monica plantsman Phil Chandler.) Gehry asked Nancy to help him with his own house, a characterless box that he had exploded, using off-the-shelf plywood, two-by-four studs, asphalt, and glass to reconfigure it with odd angles and volumes jutting out, creating more usable space and light for himself and his family. In the process he had horrified more conservative neighbors, who worried that the renegade architect’s alien efflorescence on their mundane block would ruin their property values, and had enthralled a growing tide of architecture tourists, including at least one busload of Japanese, who would pile out of their vehicles, walk right up to his windows—he hadn’t done any landscaping—and aim their cameras into his kitchen, sometimes getting him in the shot as a bonus. Power’s approach was first to look at what grew in the neighborhood, both in order to sew the unique house into the fabric of the area and to see what worked, in a Darwinian sense: what thrived in the soil, temperature, and light, one side of the house being deeply shaded by the deodar cedars that grow along the street. She discovered that many of the classic, “workhorse” Los Angeles plants—Aloe arborescens, soft Mexican agaves, and birds-of-paradise—did the trick and were texturally bold enough to respond to Gehry’s gestures if used in intentional, big ways. Planted on top and below the patio wall, they spill over in asymmetrical masses that echo the house’s fragmented volumes. Over time, and not quickly enough for Frank, the garden grew in, though the tourist traffic only increased—along with the property values, bolstered by the growing international fame of the 1990s’ first “starchitect.”

A few miles away, Gehry designed an involved, eccentric house for Rock and Marna Schnabel, constructed of stark white stucco, glass, exposed wood framing, and seamed, paneled metal roofs. Nancy knew that Gehry, like many modern architects, preferred minimal or no landscaping to obscure his buildings. Yet Marna told her that she wanted an “English” garden, full of flowers and colors. How to reconcile these mutually exclusive demands? Power’s inspiration came from a picture of a border included in a 1931 book, California Gardens, by Winifred Starr Dobyns, which she re-created along the house’s entrance walk complete with its old-fashioned cannas, but zinged into the late 20th century with spiky purple cordylines and dark New Zealand flax, black Aeonium succulents, and purple-flowered sea lavender. Elsewhere she furthered the effect by using blue agaves and silver Butia palms, whose sculptural forms answered Gehry’s. Vines and flowers climbed against the stucco and metal. Power’s solution had been to dip into the old California version of the Arts & Crafts style. What made it a perfect match was the fact that Frank Gehry’s architecture owes at least as much to the Arts & Crafts as it does to the Bauhaus—the Schnabel house is a modern Saracenic fantasy, with separate, asymmetrical pieces linked by catwalks, a tower, terraces, a bedroom set down in the middle of a lake, and a copper-domed pavilion that would have looked at home in British India. The house and garden worked beautifully together, each piece of Gehry’s quirky complex staged and only gradually revealed by the planting.

The very success of the pairing explains why modernism failed as a social reform project, and why the Arts & Crafts movement did before it—each for the same reason: both started with the intention of returning quality and distinctive design to the middle and working classes through mass production, but both quickly succumbed to market realities and became cottage industries purveying luxury craftsmanship, creating one-off status objects, not far removed from the making of fine jewelry. After the Schnabel house, Gehry went on to design a series of instantly famous works that are less like buildings than like huge jewels: the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles among them, resplendent in their urban settings, the big diamonds in tiaras. Most of them fail to acknowledge or incorporate anything of their specific contexts (only when touching others in a circumscribed urban situation, like his Fred & Ginger in Prague, are Gehry buildings not totally autonomous). Fittingly, he now designs a line of exquisite metal jewelry for Tiffany & Company that would have impressed William Morris—or Eva Marie Saint.

When Gehry was asked to renovate the galleries at Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum of Art in 1995, Power’s office was brought in as well. Again the results could not have been predicted, and were spectacular. What was there was unique, and uniquely challenging: a bizarrely shaped low building, completed in 1969 by the architects Thornton Ladd and John Kelsey, with a plan that can only be compared to a Klingon battlecruiser from Star Trek, and a nearly windowless exterior clad in rectangular dark brown tiles. The garden consisted of lawns with a few paired koelreuteria and ficus trees sitting in broad beds of ivy, a straight concrete entrance walk, and a long, straight, rectangular concrete pool in the back, something Dan Kiley might once have done had he been deeply uninspired or down with the flu. Gehry wisely left the unusual building largely alone, but punched out skylights and otherwise improved the lighting, replaced the walls and floors with brighter materials, and expanded some exhibition spaces. The effect was to light and lighten the corners, replacing the galleries’ earlier sense of gloom with a mood more suited to viewing the impressive art on display.

Nancy Goslee Power, Schnabel House. (Courtesy of the author)

Outside, Nancy pondered her share of the problem. She knew the pool had to go but needed to be replaced with another water feature. The late collector and philanthropist Norton Simon’s wife was the actress Jennifer Jones, a star of the 1940s and ’50s big screen who won an Academy Award for her role in The Song of Bernadette in 1943, and went on to play opposite most of Hollywood’s leading men: Humphrey Bogart, Montgomery Clift, Charlton Heston, William Holden, Gregory Peck, and Rock Hudson to name some. Jennifer told Nancy that she wanted the garden to look like Monet’s in Giverny. So Power gave her a California version of just that, with a winding lake draped with water lilies and bristling with cannas and rushes, overhung with Montezuma cypresses instead of weeping willows, and shaded by tulip trees and eucalyptus. In spite of its exotic species, the plantings re-create the exuberance of Monet’s garden, with a riot of color inspired by J. M. W. Turner’s watercolors and organized according to Gertrude Jekyll’s principle of grouping the hots in the center and moving toward the cooler colors at the periphery. Power and her team repositioned the museum’s sculpture collection along a meandering path, putting the pieces on chunks of rock they found in an old quarry in the Sierra foothills and tucking them behind trees and in hidden pockets, to transform the walk around the garden into a series of intimate surprises—appropriate, as Jones and Power had talked about how to make special places in the garden for trysting. Gehry had also designed a teahouse to go in the garden, colored peach like the negligee Jones wore in the 1946 film Duel in the Sun, but it never got built—which was just as well, as it left more room for plants. The new garden performed what might seem an impossible task—turning an irreducibly modern building and landscape into a magical world out of an Impressionist painting. Power’s bold moves succeeded in part because Ladd and Kelsey’s building, like Gehry’s, was already a kind of Arts & Crafts object, hiding in plain sight but invisible because it wore a reflexive modernist label.

Always curious, Power has traveled all over the world looking for inspiration, to the cores of many of the world’s great garden traditions: in the Mediterranean, to Spain, Italy, and the mother-garden culture, Iran; in Asia, to Bali, Java, Sri Lanka, and India; and the new worlds, to Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand. At her second house, also in Santa Monica, she made an intricate, welcoming garden inspired by a visit to the home of the Brazilian landscape designer and artist Roberto Burle Marx and brightened with the colors of Brazilian colonial towns. In her mature style, all of these influences may be thrown in, depending on the site, the building, and the client—the all-important client.

When I asked Nancy Power, “What do people want in their garden?” she responded immediately: men want big views and lots and lots of grass. And, if they can afford it, they want visibly fine craftsmanship and fine objects. The most traditional, and masculine, garden she has made in recent years is a Santa Barbara estate for the late New York financier Bruce Wasserstein. Wasserstein had purchased a Hope Ranch property with fabulous views to the Pacific, on fifteen acres of old, poorly maintained avocado and cherimoya orchards, and asked Power to design the gardens for him. She recommended architect Buzz Yudell, a principal in the Santa Monica firm Moore Ruble Yudell, cofounded by Charles Moore, to design a modern take on the client’s favorite style, the 1920s Spanish-style houses of Palm Beach, Florida, by Addison Mizner, who had built ornate, arch-windowed mansions for the investment titans of his day. She laid out a Mediterranean fantasy that would have dropped Bertram Goodhue’s jaw: the orchards were replanted and shot through with long allées of palms and olives, hiding intimate courts centered on fountains made of custom-fired tiles with agave motifs, a swimming pool with a view of the Channel Islands, and a hand-carved sandstone water staircase. There are stunning ocean views, yes, but also secret, shaded garden rooms, long walks flanked with aloes and agaves, intersecting at eccentric angles and terminating at an exquisite fountain or 18th century oil jar. It was a private Alhambra for a modern sultan, channeling the spirit of Madame Walska at Lotusland, though more masculine and magnificent. The owner rarely found time to come to his western domain, so Power’s staff would send figs and avocados from the garden to him in New York. For what those figs, finer and far fresher than any he could buy at Dean & DeLuca on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, actually cost him, he could buy Dean & DeLuca. Which just goes to show that there are other things at work in the way we make gardens than rational calculation—other passions, and other satisfactions.

By contrast, Power said that women often seek privacy and protection in a garden. They are less interested in seeing out of the garden, or in people seeing into theirs. Sometimes this reflects a desire to withdraw from the world, and some women, she said, suffer from the isolation they build into their worlds. In general they appreciate smaller spaces more than men do for their intimacy, understanding their sufficiency for most of the garden’s pleasures. Those with an active romantic bent see gardens like Jennifer Jones did: as places with the possibility of magic, the privacy serving the potential—for love, perhaps, or to evoke emotions and memories, to return us to that state of remembered or imagined bliss.

What I have found in my practice is that people want extensions of their own qualities in their gardens—especially their good qualities, or the qualities they would like to have, or wish they had, or delude themselves into thinking they had. A garden is often a good indicator of other things true of its maker, owner, inhabitant, or gardener. Practical people want practical things: a table and grill if they cook, a lawn for their kids to play on if they have them. Modest people resist ostentation. People who think themselves grand want their surroundings to mirror them. Slightly depressive people like lots of color. So do people who are very cheerful. Liking color is not diagnostic by itself of any personality state, but it is useful to know, if you are designing a garden for someone, which colors they like, since most people profess to not like or “hate” at least one color. No one ever cites a reason for this animosity. People who are bohemian like a few rough edges, some minor dishevelment, so that things won’t appear to be too perfect. People who want to save the world want their surroundings to show that commitment, and that vision: with drought-tolerant or low-maintenance plants, even if they can’t resist watering them liberally and their gardeners blast everything with gas-powered blowers anyway, at minimum they want to have the promise of such virtues. Gardens are expressions of self, and self-image, signals meant to be seen and understood. Most people are limited by the architecture of their house and their budget to one garden trope, unable to collect a pile of different gardens in one place, like a Huntington or a duPont.

Not so everyone. One entertainment industry personality, having become very successful, began to add properties around the house they owned in the hills, purchasing each additional one as it happened to come on the market, with no greater plan than acquisition. Each new house and its landscape was different, none very distinguished, so the task became linking all of them together and back to the original, central house, by means of gardens. Yet, absent a cohesive vision, idiom, or plan, a series of ideas for things that would “be cool to have,” grasped seemingly at random, like impulse buys on the way to the checkout, grew into another collection of garden styles: here was an Adirondack camp, with a wooden deck and pergola that were rusticated but somehow slick; there was a Spanish courtyard with a tiled fountain; in the center was a vast lawn around a bluestone-decked swimming pool that had an eastern country club quality to it; there, in a ravine, grew a tropical forest of palms and large-leaved plants, dense and dark, with sprinklers running all the time to keep it moist; and over there in another, more distant piece of ground was a theoretically drought-tolerant grass meadow. The whole aimed to be sunny, easygoing, and relaxing, but the effect was forced by the sheer expense and rush of it and the ways the pieces didn’t fit together properly, weren’t integrated. This lack of integration mirrored the owner’s personality: they tried mightily to be funny, cheery, and friendly, when not very far beneath that tanned, smiling exterior was a person controlling, anxious, distrustful to the point of being mildly paranoid, and not very happy, seemingly always overcaffeinated, and too busy, living life at too high a speed to actually relax and enjoy the amenities their success had purchased. Perhaps they were outrunning their demons and could not risk slowing down. In any event, it’s a common syndrome, or predicament, and struck me as both a diagnosis and a metaphor for our society in the last couple of decades.

What most people, myself included, want in the garden is what we remember from childhood; but now childhood goes on much longer than it used to, it seems. The cultural response of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to fears about industrialization and urbanization was withdrawal to fantasies of a premodern, agrarian childhood, where there were no adults around and we had furry animals for friends and a little house sized just for us. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, when it seems we have lost control of our shrinking world to globalized technologies and capital flows, our cultural response is to flee backward, but this time re-creating tableaux of an extended childhood, of teenagers and young adults: the ideal summertime of teenagers in the well-to-do suburbs, at the country club, the beach holiday, the lakeside resort, the sports camp. Maybe the place where we first fell in love, which might have been a garden—think of the refrain from the quintessential baby boomer Van Morrison’s song: “We felt the presence of the youth of eternal summers, in the garden…. In the garden, wet with rain.” The New York Times reported how a wealthy designer for Nike shoes built a getaway in Idaho modeled on a summer camp, complete with a mess hall for communal eating. I have noticed among my generation a noticeable number of families taking on the identities of their parents’ or even grandparents’ generation, “retiring” while still in their prime working life to the gated community, joining the country club, and wanting a bigger lawn at home.

For slightly more mature effects, some people seem to want to re-create a scene from an overseas vacation, before they had kids, perhaps where they fell in love the second time—if not with someone, then with some place. The major tropes, as they were in the first Gilded Age, are Italy and Japan. Since the beginning of American time, Italy has proved an irresistible image for many, and its magic hasn’t waned. All over upper-middle-class exurbia, patches of grapevines strung on wires have sprouted on backyard hillsides, sometimes ludicrously small, which doesn’t diminish the size of the ardor they display. New second-home developments are appearing all over the country centered around vineyards, replacing the golf course version of Arcadia with a Mediterranean viticultural one; instead of lining the fairways with Spanish or English colonial style houses, the contoured lines of vines are overlooked by Italian-themed mansionettes.

The influence of Japan continues as strong as ever, especially in a vein of modernist architecture that melds a Neutra-derived embedding and stacking of glass-walled boxes with rich, dark wood elements descended from the Craftsman bungalow. One can see the epitome of this style in the pages of Dwell magazine and along the streets of Venice, California, where the original tiny clapboard bungalows of this Italian-themed beach resort have been systematically replaced with hulking, two-story postmodern renditions full of polished concrete, smoked glass, and acres of “ironwood” horizontal slatting and flooring—referring to one of several types of tropical hardwoods that have come into the American market in the past decade and have become ubiquitous in high-toned design, inside and out. (Most are supposedly sustainably harvested, but how can one know for certain that rain forests aren’t being cleared somewhere in Borneo to build one’s new garden yoga platform?) More often than one might hope, there will be a Buddha’s head or torso placed in the garden. These remind us not so much of Japan as Bali, the Shangri-la of late 20th and early 21st century seekers of perfect surf and upscale spiritual discovery. (Many owners of these houses in Venice are in fact surfers, grown wealthy creating advertisements for new-economy clients like Apple Computer.) Almost as often, there will be a gas-flame fire element, green-yellow tongues of flame licking up immaculately and sootlessly from a bed of colored glass pebbles, for example. The aesthetic is a chicer update on the old South Seas tiki vibe. It owes as much to actual Balinese vacations, where one can soak up that island’s sexy Hindu-Buddhist iconography, intricate wooden architecture, and colorful, flower-decked offerings to the deities that adorn seemingly every sidewalk and fencepost, as it does to the luxe version spread to all corners of the world by “boutique” hotel chains like the Aman resorts and their imitators, with the more rustic Balinese elements laid onto a polished, minimalist architecture and attitude that seem to come from Japanese “Zen” but have nothing whatsoever to do with it in practice. Whether in hotels, where Buddha’s head and a dancing fire pit preside over bars serving twenty-dollar designer cocktails, or in the million-dollar bungalows of the surfer/creative elite, this new, accessorized Japanism appears to be less a conscious aesthetic choice than an assertion of mental and lifestyle hygiene: the simple, smooth surfaces seem to promise some kind of purity, honesty, or clarity; though their opulence points in the other direction. It is never an easy task to reconcile money and virtue.

Once again it is Martha Stewart who painted the perfect picture of what many of us want from a garden, in her case combining clichés from West and East and throwing in an improbable do-it-yourself project to show she’s still the boss. Asked, in a potted interview published in Vanity Fair in November 2009, “What is your idea of perfect happiness?” she answered (one hopes with her tongue firmly in her cheek): “A verdant landscape filled with beautiful animals of all kinds, harp music, cumulus clouds in a bright-blue sky, and happy people conversing pleasantly, sipping cold sake from homemade bamboo cups.”

 

THE SAME YEAR that Martha and Andy Stewart bought the run-down house at Turkey Hill Road, another revolution in American style and ideas marked its beginning: in 1971, in Berkeley, California, across the bay from San Francisco, Alice Waters, a woman in her late twenties, along with investors, opened the restaurant Chez Panisse, serving French food using unremarkable techniques but a completely unorthodox supply chain—for the postwar United States. Inspired by visits to France, Waters insisted on finding local producers of high-quality, organic food. She scoured farmers’ markets, and in some cases, had to talk farmers into growing what she sought. The result, dubbed “California cuisine,” was sensational: the food was bright and surprising; the menus were famously fluid, changing with the seasons and the producers’ rhythms, setbacks, and windfalls. Such a reversion to premodern, pre-agribusiness foodways was then unheard-of in the United States and defined a new gospel of production and consumption. It implied a strong critique of American society: we had become dependent, unhealthy, unaware of where our food came from and unconnected to the land and our own communities. Eating at Chez Panisse or one of its growing legions of imitators allowed us to regain part of our identity as Americans: agrarian, self-sufficient, modest, hardworking, productive—if only by supporting the idealistic, subaltern agriculture Chez Panisse rested on. Waters’s influence over the years grew to be incalculable, helping spark and guide a revolution among educated people, especially of a liberal bent, but by no means limited to them—Montana survivalists are just as likely as Berkeley professors to want to grow their own food.

Of course, vestiges of a prewar, precorporate food system have persisted here and there, in small farms and collectives, and in family-run stores and restaurants. But their days surely looked to be numbered in 1971, from the point of view of any conventional assessment of America’s trajectory. Agrarian ideals have defined a portion of America’s ideals since the dawn of European settlement on this continent, but their real-world fortunes have ebbed and flowed. Jefferson’s own career demonstrated this: an eloquent proselytizer for the faith and practitioner of integrated, organic gardening and gourmandizing of the highest caliber, he nevertheless suffered ultimate defeat in the face of an international system of debt finance and export (wheat) monoculture. At the high point of World War II, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s White House Victory Garden was just one of tens of millions, which together grew 40 percent of the nation’s produce. But once the war was won, the tide reversed radically and irresistibly, until, by 2009, 96 percent of our food was grown, shipped, marketed, sold, and distributed by Big Food, an agribusiness cartel fattened on the milk of interlocking government subsidies and supports—the tip of the iceberg being the annual behemoth farm bill, 2008’s weighing in at $286 billion—all of which encourages overproduction of soybeans and corn, much for animal feed, much for the high-fructose corn syrup that saturates our kids’ diets, and much of the rest now for corn-based ethanol, whose distortions of food markets ripples throughout the world, leading to food riots and starvation. Pollution from pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and hormones poisons our wells and our cells; nitrogen fertilizers kill our oceans, turning vast areas into dead zones. Today there are just 2.2 million farm owners, down from 6.3 million in 1940, and too many of our farmers are as dependent on workers living in abysmal conditions on starvation wages—now likely to be illegal immigrants—as was Jefferson on his slaves.

In opposition to this tide, a full-throated movement of organic agriculture has long labored on the sidelines, led by Jerome Rodale’s institute and publishing company, founded in Pennsylvania in the 1940s. The George W. Bush years gave the movement new cause for alarm and new conviction to fight for reform: the environmental consequences of big American agribusiness had become too large and damaging to ignore: massive air, water, and soil pollution, the uncontrolled spread of genetically modified, patent-protected seeds, monopolistic supply chains that drove small farms and distributors out of business, dependence on low-wage labor, and the ignominious end result of a population racked by childhood obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Books such as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and movies such as Supersize Me brought the critique to a wider audience. Gardeners and even garden designers began to get back to basics, returning agriculture to the center of domestic landscapes for the first time in nearly a century. Even the art world joined in: Fritz Haeg’s Edible Landscapes project encouraged homeowners to tear out their lawns and plant kitchen gardens, then report on the results as if they were a form of agitprop, with several of them published as a volume with the same name and the provocative subtitle Attack on the Front Lawn. (Like Alan Sonfist, Haeg had hit on the novel idea of planting something that once was guilelessly common but had disappeared, then calling it art.)

The subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 and the economic crash it kicked off in 2008 lent real urgency to calls for change. Change reached the White House grounds in April 2009, just months after Barack Obama took up residence there, as first lady Michelle Obama presided over the groundbreaking for a new Victory Garden. Planted for a reported two hundred dollars in seeds and supplies, growing fifty-five varieties and boasting two hives for honey, it measured in at 1,100 square feet—no rival to Jefferson’s, which covered eighty thousand square feet at its zenith. But the third president had to feed what was in effect a village, while the forty-fourth uses it to add a few meaningful beans and greens to otherwise market-bought White House luncheons. Michelle was reviving a long tradition. John Adams had planted a vegetable garden at the White House, since presidents then had to feed their own households. Woodrow Wilson had sheep grazing on the South Lawn during World War I to save on gas and rubber for mowing the grass, while first lady Edith had a kitchen garden first dubbed a Liberty Garden, then, when the Allies started winning, renamed a Victory Garden. Eleanor Roosevelt planted another in her time as economic depression and war came again. And the Obamas’ small patch wasn’t small potatoes: Michelle Obama was sending a powerful message when she told Oprah that “we want to use it as a point of education,” to link diet and health, diabetes and childhood obesity, and especially to reach out to kids—from her daughters and the fifth graders at Bancroft Elementary in Washington, D.C., who helped her pick seventy-three pounds of lettuce and twelve pounds of peas, to the millions who saw her on Sesame Street extolling the virtues of fresh vegetables.

The first lady was very adeptly picking up the baton from her predecessors, and her example may influence enough people to raise organic food’s market share from its basement, in 2010, of 4 percent nationally. But just as the wartime Victory Gardens gave way in the years of prosperity that followed to Big Food abundance—decades of Twinkies and Pepsi—so too can the current mood of national virtue and self-reliance fade. Yet this pendulum swing back to the pole of agrarian self-sufficiency feels no less deep and heartfelt than earlier ones: one can see it cropping up everywhere, from community gardens on reclaimed vacant lots, to school gardens, such as the Edible Schoolyard, started by Alice Waters in 1995 at Martin Luther King, Jr., middle school in Berkeley, California, a one-acre growing ground linked to the school’s classroom curriculum and lunch program, allowing urban children who have perhaps never seen a farm to participate in food production from seeds to table. Waters’s example has inspired hundreds of others around the country, as well as efforts to reform school lunch programs at the local, state, and federal levels. And interest in having kitchen gardens has reached all strata of American gardening culture, even in the estate gardens of the wealthy, who increasingly commission designers to integrate kitchen gardens into their grounds. Nancy Goslee Power has made it a specialty to design extensive, elegant kitchen gardens and orchards with formal plans that are at once beautiful and truly productive, in the tradition of Jefferson’s at Monticello.

Obama White House kitchen garden layout. (The White House Blog)

The movement is most visible in middle-class districts, and most tellingly in the inner-ring suburbs of our cities being revived in the past few decades by an extraordinary in-migration of young people. It is a new, pastoral urbanism: committed to greater self-reliance and minimum impact on the environment, often using organic methods, replacing traditional lawns with vegetable beds and fruit trees, berries, and vines, raising chickens and tending beehives, composting, and capturing rainwater in barrels—all within cities, often in their formerly abandoned cores. Such gardens are still sites of leisure and pleasure, but the pleasure their owners derive comes increasingly from productive, not just aesthetic, values—in pointed contrast to the conspicuous consumption of mainstream garden culture in the past several decades. (Of course, in the hands of some practitioners the drive toward virtue goes overboard, is too manifest, too much, verging on conspicuous production—a tactic of social positioning not so far removed from Martha Stewart’s do-it-yourself power-hostess-with-the-mostest program, even while it is clothed in more self-consciously progressive politics of environmental stewardship and jettisons the pantomime of traditional domesticity and gender roles.)

From a cynical point of view, and in view of the cyclical nature of American history, it would be wise to have doubts about the depth or longevity of such a phenomenon. After all, the Liberty and Victory gardens of World War I quickly gave way to unbridled opulence in the Roaring Twenties, and the Great Depression’s community gardens and the Victory Gardens of World War II gave way, when prosperity returned, to the biggest surge of middle-class suburbanization in history, with gardens mostly given over to the display of leisure as a style. The devotion to leisure worked against growing food in gardens, since it required more effort than driving to the supermarket and therefore seemed to be downwardly mobile. And the back-to-the-land movement of the late 1960s and ’70s, which its adherents trumpeted as a millennial calling, promising to change the world for good, gave way to almost four decades of bling and debt-leveraged personal indulgence, turning away from notions of community, sustainability, balance, or responsibility. This retrenchment, beginning in the late 1970s, found its outdoor expression in more and more ostentatious gardens, reflecting—even if, like Martha’s, they were draped in cryptoconservative colonial lace and old roses—the acquisitive, consumerist, solipsistic direction of late 20th century American society.

The late resurgence of edible gardens has been matched by an unprecedented naturalism in gardens and landscape. After three decades of proselytizing, John Greenlee, the grass and natural lawn guru, has seen his gospel accepted into more and more Americans’ hearts and meadows sown in place of their turf, including Hollywood bigwigs like Steven Spielberg, Ellen Degeneres, and Kathryn Bigelow—slowly (but hopefully, surely) reversing the march of the monocultural lawn launched by Loudon and Downing a century and a half before. In the heart of New York City, the naturalistic aesthetic has seen its most remarkable manifestation yet in the High Line Park, made by upgrading, at considerable cost, an abandoned elevated freight railroad that once ran through parts of Manhattan’s West Side into a chic aerial promenade. Long disused, rusting, and covered by trash, graffiti, and weeds, the tracks had run through a formerly industrial part of the city that had languished for decades as a refuge of meatpacking companies and warehouses by day and transvestite prostitutes and their acolytes by night. By the turn of the 21st century, the relentless gentrification of Manhattan had turned the former lead of decaying Chelsea and the West Village into real estate gold, and the improbable dream of a few aficionados and visionaries who had clambered on top of the decrepit elevated line soon after became an even more improbable reality: a narrow walkway raised above the surrounding streets, extending for a mile or so along the West Side through poetically wild-looking meadowscapes by the Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf (who had previously collaborated with Kathryn Gustafson on the Lurie Garden at Chicago’s Millennium Park), with stunning views of the Hudson River, the New Jersey skyline, and nearby buildings. Recent development has transformed the face of the area with glass mini-towers in the latest, signature architectural styles, including a triplex of utmost-luxury transparent condominium buildings along the riverfront by Richard Meier, a de Stijl façade of sequinlike windows by Jean Nouvel across the street from an incongruously curvy stack of frosted glass office boxes by Frank Gehry, and the two glass slabs of the Standard Hotel, one of which bridges out over the High Line itself—reportedly providing alert walkers with glimpses of the intimate doings of some uninhibited hotel guests. At least as much as the contemplation of plantings carefully designed to resemble the scrappy flora that the wind once blew in unaided, voyeurism of the lifestyles of the rich and hip is essential to the experience of the High Line. The New Yorker magazine architectural critic Paul Goldberger, in a March 2010 radio interview, admitted, somewhat defensively: “It’s a place that recognizes that the city is in part about looking at itself, and there’s nothing wrong with that. That a little bit of urban narcissism is not the worst thing in the world, as long as you can share it. It’s sort of democratic narcissism, I guess you could say.”²⁰

It is fitting that this new celebration of wild nature in the heart of the postindustrial city has been staged on a defunct railroad line, since the railroad is what allowed American cities to grow from compact, walkable centers up until the early 19th century into crowded metropolises with smoking factories and slums at their cores, and then in turn allowed the well-to-do to flee to new garden suburbs, followed by the middling orders of people, and then by industry, all evacuating the central cities in favor of peripheral sites closer to purifying nature, abandoning the grubby cores to immigrants, people of color, and economic devastation. Now, of course, several decades of public and private effort have paid off in reversing the outward tide, leading to the recolonization of the central cities by the middle and upper classes. The High Line is a jewel in that migration’s crown, no less than it is a consummate homage to the idea of nature—a nature celebrated by the park for its picturesque ability to recolonize the same decaying industrial real estate as its upwardly mobile creators, patrons, and visitors. In the “weedish” plantings (in Goldberger’s parlance), studiously curated amid the rusting rails left in place in parts of the park, 21st century New Yorkers, many of them also transplants, may see themselves in an optimistically romantic and yet still satisfyingly, if superficially, gritty setting. No less than Central and Prospect parks before it, not so many miles away, the High Line is a triumph of America’s urban culture—and “democratic narcissism.” The question is, is this new park just another bauble of gentrification, another amenity for the wealthy, as the reclaimed Conservatory Garden was before it?

Yet the new pastoral urbanism is also grounds for hope: that now, more than four hundred years into the experiment, we Americans have come close to reconciling the contradictions of our existence—living in cities in the midst of a tantalizing wildness, a garden of possibility that cannot be attained by continuously fleeing from civilization. What is different perhaps in this round of proto-agrarian earnestness is that it coincides with a real, sustained return to cities—the first in American experience—a recolonization, a reinvestment, one not limited to New York or Los Angeles, but taking place everywhere, multigenerational, multicultural, a deep current, building over several decades. This migration, this mind-set, is pro-urban and pro-nature—in sum, pro-garden. Our people, in Emerson’s phrase, are no longer “lighting out for the territory,” as Mark Twain’s Huck Finn did, but sticking, settling, and maybe, just maybe, coming to grips with the urban and capitalist nature of our actual cultural landscape and resolving to make it functional on its own terms, no longer fleeing for greener pastures, no longer turning real pastures into fake ones.

Thomas Jefferson would have understood—both the challenge, and the determination to stick it out and try to sow something beautiful in the midst of economic and philosophical difficulties, to stay true to our idealistic American values, even if they become compromised in the doing. He might have quoted the Frenchman Voltaire, whom he much admired, from the novel Candide: “when man was put into the garden of Eden, it was with an intent to dress it; and this proves that man was not born to be idle,” said Pangloss. Candide agreed, thus: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin”—We must cultivate our garden.