Memory, menorahs, roses

That I currently lack my own garden only has increased my hunger to visit other people’s gardens.  I’m back in Berlin for a couple of months, and, if I meet my writing deadlines, I would like to visit the gardens in Dessau as a reward.  (Although: last night I asked a German woman about Dessau, and she sniffed, "Dessau is completely uninteresting unless you are interested in gardens or Bauhaus."  "I'm interested in gardens and Bauhaus," I said.  "Ah," she said dismissively, and turned back to her spargel.)  Also on the list to visit, perhaps on a sunny Sunday when I don't have to work, is Viktoriapark in Kreuzberg; while biking home yesterday, I took a wrong turn off Potsdamer Platz and suddenly came upon the waterfall that tumbles dramatically toward Grossbeerenstrasse, with Schinkel's monument jutting above.  My dream list of gardens to visit includes Sissinghurst, Tintinhull, Hidcote, and the Beth Chatto gardens in England; the Chase Garden in Washington State; the Ruth Bancroft garden in Walnut Creek, CA; Suzhou's Garden for Lingering; and in Italy, the gardens of Ninfa.

While all of these gardens are famous for conveying the creative visions of individuals, they also reveal something about the communities which chose to preserve or neglect or change them.  For personal and professional reasons, I’ve traveled a lot in the past decade, and the two things that I've done almost everywhere that I've gone – in Atlanta, Austin, Caserta, London, Delhi, Florence, Berlin, Charleston, Mumbai, Kalisz and Krakow – are to hit up the local parks to go for a run, and to see if I can find open gardens.  I've been thinking about the gardens that I have visited.

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For years, I planned to visit Rome's municipal rose garden, but I was never in the city at exactly the right time.  It opens to the public only for the two months when the roses are in bloom, then closes with the heat of July until the next spring.  For the first time in many visits, then, I was able to visit it last May. 

As I said, I’d wanted to see it for years, because I had imagined that it must be beautiful: it slopes down the Aventine hill toward the Circus Maximus, and is bisected by a road, the via di Valle Murcia, lined with the tall stone pine trees which, more than any other plant, to me symbolize Rome.  It is surrounded by a tall iron gate, which, as you know, only increased the allure.

My visit, then, came as a disappointment.  

Let me be blunt: I did not think it a beautiful garden.  Many of the roses were sickly and sullen in the humidity, and the beds were not well-maintained. Then there is the fact that it is, after all, a rose garden.  Single-plant botanical gardens are a tricky thing.  The mandate of such gardens is to collect and inform, which can make it difficult to design.  Here, the urge to include every species in the genus Rosa often led to a clash of colors and to a sense of alienation between plants: each individual rose bush seemed to squat alone on the ground, with little interplay of color or shape.  It was no wonder that the garden was open only when the roses were in bloom; without the color, there simply wasn't anything interesting about the design.  

Well.  That is not quite true; the design was, indeed, interesting.  The hill had been the site of the old cemetery of the Roman Jews, until, in 1934, the Fascist regime seized the land to build via di Valle Murcia.  After the war, when they built this garden, municipal authorities decided to lay out the beds in the shape of a menorah.  I don’t know whether the Roman Jewish community acceded to this plan (I imagine them accepting it with a degree of embarrassment), but I found the design to be kitschy, cringe-inducing, a belated and halfhearted gesture toward ethical behavior.  “Sorry about your cemetery thing,” I imagined the politicians muttering.  “Here’s something Jewish to go in its place.”

Men and women posed together for photographs under the rose arbor; old people leaned down deliberately to sniff the flowers, and parents scolded children for playing too close to the thorns.  As anticipated, the view northwards was stunning.  I was the only grump in the crowd: “I waited three years to see this?”  Then the thunder growled with me, and I looked up to see black clouds.

It was like the moment before a crash, when you say to yourself, “This is going to hurt.”  Then the skies opened, and those people who had cars rushed to them, and those of us who came on foot ran along the narrow sidewalk down to the Via della Greca, hoping to catch a bus or taxi.  Some tourists tried to hide under the pruned sycamores lining the Lungotevere, but I could tell from the way that their clothes stuck to their bodies that the branches didn’t offer much protection.  I ducked into the vestibule of an old, Fascist-era building, pressing my back against the wall, and found myself alongside a clamorous scrum of teenaged American boys with peachfuzz cheeks and dirty mouths.  Eventually I gave up on waiting out the storm, and walked home in the rain.