Suddenly last summer

The last post in this blog dates from mid July, 4 months ago. The reader (if I have any), might conclude that after that date either my gardening, or my writing, or both, petered out. What the reader couldn't know is that something more dramatic had actually taken place a month earlier: while bicycling in Boston's Arnold Arboretum in June I was knocked over by a wayward runner, and suffered a fractured pelvis. I spent the next 10 weeks homebound, unable to put any weight on my left leg, and therefore largely immobilized. Those 10 weeks coincided with what was a particularly warm, sunny and pleasant growing season in which I couldn't participate.

I started my convalescence in reasonably good spirits, determined to make productive use of my time by writing more. I had a backlog of ideas for this blog. And so in the first weeks of confinement I added four additional posts here without mentioning my injury, since I didn't want my accident to be a distraction.

But of course while I was writing those pieces, I was no longer going outside to work in or look at the garden. I was gaining no new experiences, and no new insights. By July, when I uploaded my forth post-accident entry, I'd run out of steam. Before the accident I had planted a number of new plants, in keeping with my intention of creating a miniature landscape. Since I could no longer tend to, or even see those new plants, I wasn't ready to write about them. It would be late summer before I could get off the crutches and actually work in the garden, and by then all I could do was some weeding and bud-pinching. Knowing that my plans had been arrested mid-season I lacked the drive to write more.

The end of my confinement also coincided with other distractions. Watching the olympics was a pleasure, while getting swept up in the mounting drama of the presidential race was an energy-sink. And finally regaining my mobility meant resuming travel, and an effort to make up for lost time on my bicycle. All of which is to say that the writing didn't immediately resume with my healing.

Let this entry stand as a signal of my intention to start writing again. The waning autumn and coming winter may afford fewer opportunities to write about the garden, but I'll try to keep this thing going, with plans to go full bore in early spring as I complete the tasks I set for myself this past, lost summer.

The world writ small

A garden is never just one thing. It can contain multiple meanings both for the person who creates it and for the person who experiences it. In this post I'm writing about the ways we experience gardens. I'm using the verb experience to represent all of ways gardens work on our senses. Most obvioulsy a garden's appeal can be visual, but there are also smells and possibly sounds—from water, wind, birds or insects. And there is the kinesthetic experience of moving through the garden—the way the path feels under our feet, the way we brush up against foliage, the way perspectives shift as our vantage changes.

While the aesthetic experience of a garden can be particular to its design, its locations, and its features, it is also likely to move us by evoking other places both real and imagined. We can love a garden both for the way it situates us in the present and the ways it transports us far away. Depending on its design, a garden can evoke a forest, a meadow, a desert, a wetland, a jungle.

This evocation of other places can happen at different scales. In a large garden, a stand of trees might evoke a forest by enclosing us in dense foliage and shade. A patch of grasses or wildflowers might stand in for an even larger meadow. In these examples, full size plants are used to simulate themselves as seen in more expansive environments. These effects are enhanced if the garden modulates our exposure to different vistas as we move through it. We round a curve in the garden path and suddenly we find ourselves enclosed in a clearing in the woods, or a meadow suddenly stretches out before us.

But gardens can also work as models or miniatures, in which features do double duty, both representing themselves and something larger. By way of example, I call your attention to Tenshin-en, the Japanese garden on the grounds of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. It was created by Kinsaku Nakane and Julie Moir Messervy.

I have neither the space nor the knowledge to discuss all of the traditions and principals that underlie this design, but what I hope is clear from these pictures, is that the garden evokes a miniature landscape, with the raked pebbles representing water, the smaller rocks islands, the larger rocks mountains, and the shrubs wooded hillsides. The goal is not precise miniaturization (like a doll house), but rather an impressionistic representation. Viewing it we are transported to scenes we might have seen in Ukiyo-e prints or travel photos.

Of course there are also large trees in the garden acting to screen out the surrounding city, and adding their own beauty. The garden is not just a miniature landscape, but when the eye is drawn toward the center of the garden that miniature world is evoked. The magic is that we don't see this world as if it was shrunken and confined, as in a terrarium. Rather we become small, standing at the edge of a large, vista, as if we encountered this landscape while out on a hike. In the process the garden expands to feel much larger than its mere quater acre.

But again, this garden is not just a miniature landscape. If we turn away from that vista we also see a stone path that leads us into a forest glen. Working on a very different scale, this grouping of 3 or 4 full size trees become a larger forest. Rather than make us feel small on the edge of a large landscape, it encloses us, surrounding us with all the sense memories of walking in the woods.

In several earlier posts, I discussed my desire to create a miniature landscape in my small urban garden. Since mine is still a work in progress, I thought it would be easier to explain my approach by way of this example, much more brilliant than what I will ultimately produce. And since I'm just an amateur (as per my previous post) mine won't embody all the principals that the experienced landscape architects brought to Tenshin-en, nor the specifically Japanese traditions. But I nevertheless hope it will work.

My rationale for taking this approach is that my plot is very small, and most people will experience it from a single vantage point on the adjoining sidewalk. And so by creating the miniature landscape I hope to at least approximate the effect of Tenshin-en, bringing the viewer to the edge of a landscape as if they were much smaller, and the garden much larger.

As stated above, the garden is still a work in progress, but future posts will provide more details (including photos) to better illustrate what I have in mind.

In Defense of Amateurism

What I know about gardening I've learned largely from personal experience, informed by conversations with other gardeners and the occassional book or online article. I'd wager that the sum total of my horticultural knowledge is less than what one could acquire in a semester of graduate school. I am a rank amateur.

The internet is full of swaggering amateurs and know-nothings making ill-informed proclamations and confidenly asserting faleshoods. They give amateurism a bad name. And if my purpose in writing these posts was to offer practical suggestions about how to garden, I would be just as guilty. I want to make a case for amateurism, but not the kind that dominates our social media. You see, if we are overrun with amateurs, we also have a problem with experts.

To be more precise, we have a problem with how we deal with expertise. I'm actually all in favor of real expertise. As a society, we need to listen more to scientists, historians, philosophers, artists and poets. Our failure to give expertise its due is part of the same societal pathology that celebrates the know-nothings. But along with failing to listen to experts where it matters, we sometimes give experts too much credence in areas where it doesn't.

Where we could afford to listen less to expertise is in the myriad ways we conduct our personal lives. Too often, we automatically defer to experts rather than listen to our own guts, our own needs and desires. For example, most of us know parents who can't be spontaneous with their children because they're overwhelmed by the advice of books or mommy blogs. Or people who are too overwhelmed by the meals or interiors they see on HGTV to ever attempt serious cooking or redecorating on their own. We are collectively guilty of a learned helplessness in the face of these kinds of experts.

This learned helplessness serves capitalism well. If we don't trust our own abilities or take joy in our own efforts, we are far more likely to pay someone else to do our work or buy consumer products that are surrogates for our own creative invention. Only by embracing our amateurism and being willing to fail can we undertake the creative exploration through which life offers its greatest satisfactions.

My point in blogging about my garden is not to proclaim my abilities as a gardener—they're negligible. Nor is it to celebrate what is really a very ordinary garden plot. Rather it is to celebrate the effort itself, the joy that comes from intense engagement in a project that takes me outside of my own head and connects me to the abundant natural world in a tiny urban garden plot. If I was ashamed of my amateurism, I would be paralyzed by fear and doubt. By embracing it I can keep trying, keep failing forward, and ever so slowly trading little bits of amateurism for little bits of hard-won expertise. Even so, the expertise isn't the point. The journey is.