lost and found

In Situ, Redding, CT.

In this Indian summer, in which August and October are reversed, I'm making up for lost time.  Each weekend I visit a new landscape or an old favorite.  Autumn in the garden is almost as exciting as in early springtime, as plants (briefly) regain the high-drama colors that have been absent since the June flush.  Last weekend, when I mentioned my plans for an afternoon garden tour to a running friend, she responded, "Ah... Are garden tours" - and here she paused delicately - "an interesting crowd?"  We're a decade into the locavore trend, and garden tours still aren't cool.  They haven't shaken the stereotype of being musty, mediocre preserves of the middle-aged and the middle-aged-at-heart, the breeding ground of social reactionaries, ladies who lunch and plantsmen myopically focused on their floribundas.  And certainly both garden tours and flower shows run the gamut from well-intentioned but amateurish to flashy mass spectacle, along with the highbrow and high end.  But garden tours are critically important if you want to learn how to garden, not just to grow plants.  I have always said that gardening is my favorite art form, and I'm not kidding about the "art" part.  Just as painters or sculptors might visit museums or galleries or studios, gardeners need to educate their eyes: to understand the creation of spaces and the relationship between form and impact, and to appreciate the possibilities of a site.  And just as museums and galleries aren't the exclusive haunts of the artistic, neither should garden tours be limited to people with a working knowledge of Latin binomials.  I particularly love to visit designers' own gardens, as I will this weekend, to see creativity relatively untrammeled by compromise.

II. 
At night, I learn how to measure and convert, to use all the geometry that I'd ever forgotten that I knew, to read topographical maps and sketch site plans.  Our final project is to draft a site plan from start to finish: from initial measurements and notes on foot traffic, water, wind and sunlight, to a final design made on vellum.  I was recently asked to redesign an upstate yard to be lawnless, which sounds like the perfect project to me.  Accordingly, this afternoon, I found myself sketching ideas on a yellow legal pad: a dogwood or maybe a crape myrtle, nandina, viburnum, black lilyturf, ladyfern, flowering quince, sedum, baptisia, crocosmia 'Lucifer'...  It's a familiar form of list-making, and probably the part of gardening that I love the most: the assembling and positioning of plants.  I've made lists for gardens realized and for some only imagined: my own past apartments, a mountaintop California ranch where I never did live, various imagined brownstones, my sister's house, a bar in Boerum Hill, a first-floor apartment in Prospect Heights, and a roof deck in Fort Greene that wasn't. 

As I looked at the neighborhood on Google maps, I noticed lawn after lawn after lawn, some neatly trimmed, some shabby.  In class last night, our instructor showed us her plans for a California yard, of which half is already paved concrete.  "It seems to be what people do out there," she mused.  I think that lawns are the East Coast's answer to paved concrete, minus the concerns about water use.  It's the default, and, usually, the absence of thinking about what you might do with space.  Charles Birnbaum, founder of the Cultural Landscape Foundation (which is running this weekend's tour), explained the foundation's mission as teaching people how to really see the landscape around them, to understand how it acts on them, to appreciate what it offers them.  Each new project, each new site or garden, is a chance to find the possibilities in limitations.  What could be more interesting than that?