on memory palaces and meat bunkers

I am torn between calling this "my Berlin garden" or, simply, "Maurice."

To combat insomnia, we are told, some people count sheep or turn on the television. To calm my mind, I mentally design spaces - floorplans, gardens.  As I child, I used to design floorplans for the imaginary houses of the characters in my stories (and often the floorplans came first; and often the characters were wealthy, so as to accommodate more floorplans).  As I got older, I wrote less, but I never stopped creating stories: except that now, rather than peopling them with invented characters, these were stories about my future.  Again, I suppose, some people have retirement funds, five-year career plans, resolutions to be married by thirty.  (As one particularly detestable girl demanded of me, during a very trying dinner, "What is your ten-year life plan?")  These were specific, often imaginary spaces in which I situated stories about myself, my life, the people I knew and loved, how I thought my future would be.  It was like a memory palace in reverse.  I would rearrange rooms, walls, windows, the placement of the trees and the orientation from north to south, until I fell asleep.  If it only ever was a fantasy, as I now realize, perhaps it was not more so than those other plans that people make for their careers and marriages and children.

While I was living in Rome, four or five winters ago, my sister and brother-in-law bought a house.  We had given up our Brooklyn apartment to move abroad: our cheap Ikea furniture was mostly sold on Craigslist, our clothes put in storage, my planters and outdoor table carried down the brownstone stairs and dumped in my parents' backyard.  I didn't know exactly when we would return to New York, but certainly permanence seemed less remote than it does now.  (Although: I could not then have planned for the year ahead of me, nor do I know now what will become of my current schemes.)  Even so, I was renting a furnished room in someone else's apartment in a foreign city and it was winter, which even in Rome is rainy and raw and a time of the year when I naturally turn to garden books, to memories and imaginary futures.  So I pulled up their new address on google maps, and imagined, from above, what they might do with their garden.





Of course this idea was ridiculous.  You can't know how best to plan a garden from a satellite image.  You have no idea of the views from the windows, of the sunlight, the shade, the soil, the slope of the land; you can't necessarily tell that nearly the entire back yard was paved with asphalt in some fit of 1950s barbarism.  You might get a sense of potential privacy issues from the basic dimensions of the lot, but that's about it.  What's more, I also had completely forgotten about the people who actually would live there.  Gardens exist for people, and not the other way around; and as it turns out, you cannot expect other people to willingly participate in your fantasy of what things should look like.  My brother-in-law, who disliked the florid messiness of the gardens he knew growing up in England, preferred a clean, austere yard full of the rocks and sculptural cedars that he had seen while living in Japan; he also wanted to cut down all the existing trees.  My sister crisply vetoed those ideas, but I realized, belatedly, that it wouldn't have been my decision to make.  I thought that I was designing a garden with them in mind, but of course I did not know what they actually wanted.  So my fantasizing, that winter in Rome, was just that: a fantasy, a way of rooting myself to a place at a moment in time.

This past spring, when my friend told me that she and her husband were looking to buy a brownstone in Brooklyn, I again began the process of imaginary (and unsolicited) garden design.  Befitting a couple who had spent so much time living abroad, it would have the qualities of a Mediterranean or North African city garden - a sense of enclosure and escape, a respite from heat and noise through water and walls and muted greenery.  New York, if different in climate, still rewards those who find these cool, calming places.  (Anyone who has ever arrived home from a summer commute by subway and street and felt the immediate urge to wash her feet will know what I mean by this.)  It could not be too formal or too tidy, I decided, after she and I visited a garden that she witheringly dismissed as "too WASPy."  I also began to think about how they might design the garden for the life they had planned together.  They both write, but they also, as I tell them, have the gift of friendship: they have scores of friends in cities all over the globe, and they have genuine, thoughtful relationships with each one of them.  So it would be a space, I thought to myself, that would require places for quiet contemplation, and for the sharing of food and wine with friends.  I imagined that the house would come with a long, narrow lot, such as you normally find in Brooklyn backyards.  To the left, at midpoint, I imagined a small tree, its branches splayed out horizontally: maybe a redbud, or a stewartia.  Underneath would be a sheltered bench for reading, softened with faded cushions.  I planted climbing hydrangea, my old favorite, behind the bench, along the fence, and let columbine self-seed in the gravel below.  And of course there would be water, a small, gurgling fountain, nothing large, just something to block out the sounds from next door.  Perhaps a rounded basin, or an amphora, water trickling down the sides, surrounded by bulbous boxwood, which would also screen the sight of the grill - or maybe a rhododendron, if it was shady (but I imagined it sun-blasted)...  A path of either gravel or flagstones, softened by creeping sedum or thyme, would lead back to a vine-smothered arbor over a long stone dining table, a place where my friend's husband could pound on the table with his pinkies (two hours into a meal with friends, one hour into a conversation on politics, ten minutes into a story about Pakistani buses).

When my friend showed me the house, a few months back, it wasn't anything like what I had imagined it to be.  A concrete bunker of an addition extended off the back, shortening the yard, which was already less deep than most brownstones.  It backed up against a gorgeous brick wall, rather than another neighbor's yard, offering an unexpected sense of privacy from the house; on the other hand, due to the irregular street grid, a cluster of houses loomed to the left.  Well, no matter: I went about mentally demolishing the concrete addition, which, I decided, added little usable floor space and sacrificed light in the kitchen; I extended a deck across the back, and installed a grill on it, and planted pots of herbs, and decided that a stewartia might be too big, but a redbud still might work...  I'd thought that I was designing their garden with them in mind, but listening to her as she walked around the house, pointing out where they hoped to open a wall or move a bathroom, I was reminded that, of course, this was their house and their future, not mine.  They will have needs I've not anticipated, and their own desire to express themselves creatively.  They might prefer to cover the ground with a deck, or to put in a lawn, or merely to acquire a table and chairs and to be done with it.  My friend's husband mentioned using the lower level of the bunker to cure meat.

Some people come to a space with no preconceptions, and are able first to see it for what it is before they determine what it could be; or they simply accept what it might be in someone else's hands.  I tend to measure spaces against what I've longed for them to be.  And yet it is so tempting, when you lack a garden of your own, to imagine, even if you do not know how to get there from here, what you will do when you arrive.