gen(i)us

I.
Saturday afternoon, I went out to East Hampton to visit the garden of landscape architect Edwina von Gal.  The clouds over New York City cleared as I reached the east end of Long Island, and the day was surprisingly warm, with the crisp afternoon sunshine characteristic of early fall (just before we all are pitched forward and dumped into winter darkness).  Visitors walked past a compound of low-slung grey and brown buildings to find our host waiting for us under a modest, modernist house raised on stilts. 

On the street-side of the building, the previous owner's lawn had been given over to a meadow and a scattering of cherry blossom trees.  This was "design by neglect," von Gal said with a laugh, as she scrambled barefoot through the scrub to point out notable perennials. 

Here, the view was the thing.  We climbed up to a deck to look out across the marsh.  Long fingers of bright crimson glasswort (Salicornia) reached toward the river; to the north, a dark line of trees receded before the golden onslaught.  An osprey's nest punctured the horizon. 

II.
We do not have a history of treating our marshes with respect, either in this country or in others. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Prussians filled in their "wastelands" to make them inhabitable and arable, and shot their avian inhabitants by the millions.  Foreigners are likely to quip that Mussolini made the trains run on time; but far more popular among Italians was his plan, bonifica integrale, to drain the dreaded Pontine marshes (whose sole harvest, since Roman times, had been malaria).  Across Europe, cities have long attempted to tame and control their rivers by forcing them between embankments.  In Bombay, development constantly encroaches upon the mangrove swamps.  And more locally, the name given to the marshes southwest of New York City - the Meadowlands - suggests a place of great beauty; but of course, the Meadowlands became one of the most heavily polluted sites in the country, apparently thought suitable only for highways, industrial dumping grounds, and sports arenas.  Even now, near my hometown, neighborhoods still rise from (illegally) "reclaimed" marshland.

I looked out at bright reds and golds and thought of the many riverfront houses near my hometown, where artificially green lawns roll down toward the shoreline only to stop, abruptly, at wooden bulkheads.  There, the attitude toward the rivers is hard and antagonistic: water is something to be held back, restrained, kept from spoiling the grass. And when that water swells and rises, as it did during Sandy, it can only bring devastation to plants unable to absorb the salt and lawns too easily saturated.


III.
As with the house that rose on stilts above our heads, design and function were seamlessly interwoven through von Gal's landscapes.  Visitors gingerly crept along a muddy path out to the river; channels meant to breed the fish that eat mosquito larvae were cut sharply into the banks, and led to surprisingly formal vistas.  Seen up close, the glasswort resembled dyed seeweed (and it is, technically, edible).  Its bright, fleshy knobs formed joints like fingers.  It thrives in the salty water and requires no maintenance.

We turned back toward the street-side of the house, toward the vegetable beds.  White string bound around tree trunks formed fat, graphic ribbons of grey bark, and also prevented the deer from rutting.

The genius of this landscape is that the designer has recognized its genus (though I use that term loosely).  Here, von Gal's work suggests, not a narrowing of possibilities, but an understanding of the site as a series of systems as well as views.  It requires a change in the eye (favorable to glasswort and meadows rather than grass) and a redefinition, as she said, of "perfection."