what you can and cannot change

In late April and early May of this year, I visited some Open Days gardens in New York.  On the first tour, which I took with my good friend N., we saw two gardens in Westchester, quite dissimilar to one another.

I should preface this post by noting that not all of the Garden Conservancy tours are of tremendously expensive estates; some are far more modest.  These particular gardens were located in affluent towns, so that skews the discussion somewhat.  The real joy of garden tours is not (just) in seeing how the one percent lives: it’s appreciating the art of gardening, and the art of gardening is everywhere different, and therefore, paradoxically, always the same.  What makes these gardens relatable and important to the average gardener is that they all pose specific challenges, to which you, the visitor, get to see the creative and botanical solutions.  But the solution is always unique to the site, a matter of compromise and creative vision.

When I was a kid, my mother and I used to order roses from Jackson and Perkins, whose catalogues advertised “Gardens by the Numbers.”  An illustration would portray “A Sunny Border,” the diagram underneath would show you where to plant the coreopsis and nepeta and rudbeckia, and then, conveniently, you could order all the necessary plants from J&P.  I guess this sort of thing – gardening made easy! Middlebrow taste, no guesswork!– could be useful if you were just starting out and wondering what plants, exactly, would do well in full sun; but it’s one thing to take a list of suggestions, and another to apply a design template to your yard.  It seems like a particularly joyless and uncreative approach, for one thing, and it ignores entirely the first principle of really good garden design: that you engage, in some way, with the site you have, even as you transform it.  

Neither of the two gardens that I saw with N. had the stereotypically perfect (sunny, flat, fertile) yards.  The first, which I admired for its design and loved for its copper beech, forged a series of terraces and rooms out of what would otherwise have been a steep hill above a stream.  The second, N.’s favorite, opened with a long walk down a winding, heavily wooded driveway, which then passed a pond and led up a hill to the pavilion-style house.  It was this heavily wooded area of many acres that impressed us.

In neither case would Gardening by Numbers have served you particularly well.  In the case of the first garden, what was special about it was precisely the relationship of the “rooms” to the house, and to each other.  So a long vista was slightly off-center in relation to the house as a whole, but perfectly aligned with the views from the living room.  What might have been merely a large, grassy yard, oriented on the diagonal and virtually unusable, was broken up into discrete spaces, first square, then circular, then loaf-shaped, all lined with boxwood to accentuate the shapes.  What kept the spaces from feeling confining or choppy was the long vista which, extending from the window of the house through the center of each garden room, was accented by a fountain placed against the wall, and in alignment with the cupola and weathervane of the red barn beyond.  And, in the spirit of many Italian gardens, where no space is wasted, the gardening was vertical as well as horizontal.  Vines were trained alongside the stone terrace and tumbled up and over the wall by the fountain, softening the sharp edges; moss and ferns had been tucked into stone walls in the front, and yellow sedum sprawled across the cracks in the stone steps leading up to the pool.  Around the pool was a Japanese-style garden, another concession to the character of the existing site.  More aggressive gardeners might have opted to plant such a garden next to the house, a white-painted Greek revival - a mistake which would have shown neither house nor garden to its best advantage.  The solution to put it at slight remove – a plane above the level of the house, partly visible but not in its direct sightline – allowed it to exist as a discrete room, and to be appreciated on its own merits.

In the case of the second garden, I imagine that some people might have cut down every single tree, filled it in with grass, and, for privacy, stuck some Leyland cypresses in a line around the perimeter.  Or they might simply treat the woods as a space to drive through to get to the "real" gardens in the sunny interior.  But the owners recognized it as a potentially creative space in its own right.  Because of the early spring, we’d missed the display of thousands of daffodils for which the garden is renowned, but I think that what we saw was equally impressive.  Scattered through the trees were scores of boulders, large and small, irregularly shaped, solid and unmoving, like punctuation points against the swells of feathery-leafed, lime-green ferns.  It felt at once active and serene, as when you watch the ocean from the shore.  Irregular paths snaked out in every direction, woven through the green and the stone.  Built as a circular room around one tree was an adult treehouse, a sort of screened-in porch in the branches.  No one who visited this space could have doubted that this was the most special part of the garden, the place to which you would retire to find quiet.

Despite the fact that these were obviously gardens of means, I think that there’s something to be learned from them, no matter if you have a terrace, a city roof, a suburban quarter-acre - or if, like me, your garden grows only in your head.  The best gardeners know how to marry vision with compromise: when to change things, and when to work with the situation that they have.  These gardeners accepted the imperfections of the land, and worked within those parameters to make those sites the best versions they could be.  A slope is a slope is a slope: it will never be entirely flat.  But one steep slope can be three mostly-flat levels.  A heavily wooded site is not a place to grow roses; but that doesn’t mean that you can grow nothing.  There is always something to do, always some way to transform.  You have to appreciate the possibilities of imperfection.