Gardens of the World : The Great Traditions

Why have the peoples of the world made pleasure gardens, and why have they made them in such different styles? All pleasure gardens derive their design inspiration from one of the world's six great gardening traditions - the Italian, the Islamic, the Chinese, the Japanese, the English flower garden, and the English park - and it is these that are the subject of this book. There are, of course, other countries where there is an individual style of gardening, but in all cases the roots of that style can be traced back to one of the great traditions. Rory Stuart has travelled from Buenos Aires to Vancouver, from Seattle to Cape Cod; from Ireland to India; to China, Japan and Australia, trying to understand the differences in garden styles and to account for them, approaching pleasure gardens as works of art, and placing them in their historical and cultural context.

THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT



At the end of The Great Gatsby the narrator imagines Long Island Sound as the original Dutch settlers might have seen it, "a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate with his capacity for wonder." The stupendous scale and physical beauty of this continent still amazes the first time visitor, particularly someone who has read only of American cities and their problems. There is so much space that the sense of possibility is overwhelming; there is room for everything and everyone, for new ideas and experiments in living differently. Such pristine freshness almost defies the past; here there seems to be only a future untrammelled by the conventions and manners of the homeland the immigrant has left. It is particularly easy to think like this if the invader/immigrant imagines the country to be empty, ignoring (or eliminating) those who were dwelling in this green paradise before he arrived.



In this great, green melting pot where so many of the world's cultures and traditions, prejudices and tastes meet, what new civilisation has emerged and with it what kind of gardens? Anything could have happened, gardens might have developed in ways history-soaked Europeans could never have imagined. The American garden style could have been revolutionary in thinking and execution: instead it remains a matter of debate whether there is such a thing as an American garden style. Perhaps while the melting pot still bubbles, and the population is still deciding what the word 'American' means, it is too much to expect an American style of garden. Where there is no national garden tradition, it is all too easy to borrow ideas from another country; this is particularly so, if you have just emigrated from that country and feel your cultural identity still depends on those foreign roots. This may account, to some extent, for the hesitant development of an American garden style.



If there is a disadvantage in the lack of a native-grown garden orthodoxy, there are also huge advantages. First, there is the freedom to rethink everything about a garden from scratch; you can do what you like, and there is the cash and space to think big. Secondly, you can express your own artistic personality to the full without obligatory nods in the direction of orthodox good taste; this may also be a treacherous temptation, since you may reveal more of yourself than you anticipated. At San Simeon the press baron William Randolph Hearst enjoyed to the full the freedom to do exactly what he wanted - and missed creating something beautiful by several million miles. Another advantage is that American imperialism has no garden tradition to impose on the world; Macdonalds and Walmart may follow the Stars and Stripes, but not the rose gardens and lawns that followed the Union Jack. The greatest advantage, however, is that their garden literature is much more diverse and more searching than in, for example, the United Kingdom. There are no assumptions about what a garden or a garden book should be, so the most fundamental questions are asked, and answered in interestingly original ways



It used to be almost traditional in the United States, particularly on the east coast, to praise British garden writing at the expense of their own native products. This seems to me entirely unjust: where in Britain can you find such wide-ranging, provocative and intelligent writing about gardens as that of Michael Pollan. He raises fundamental questions about what a garden is and what it should be, something which Britons know instinctively - or rather presume they know, and therefore don't need to discuss. Britons also think it more than a little pretentious to talk about the definition and purpose of a garden, since everyone knows what it is; an understanding and appreciation of gardens is bred in the bone, and so doesn't require definition, or indeed comment, let alone discussion. This kind of instinctive "knowledge" all too quickly and easily becomes narrow-minded and bone-headed. Thus in the United Kingdom you would rarely find a book called The Meaning of Gardens, whereas in the US there are at least two books with this title, each of which has interesting things to say about the cultural significance of gardens. Eleanor Perenyi's Green Thoughts is a classic of common gardening sense written in bracing, forthright prose. Jamaica Kincaid, the Antiguan writer, has become entangled with gardening in her adopted Vermont. In My Garden (book) she writes not of the peace her garden gives her, but of the constant state of creative anxiety she finds herself in. She is very alert to the politics of gardening and botany. For example, she tells the story of the Dahlia, a plant native to Mexico where it was known as 'cocoxochitl'; however, after it was introduced into Europe (Kincaid would probably say 'stolen'), the Swedish botanist Andreas Dahl got to work on it and thus we know the plant by his name. Gardens and botany can thus be seen as evidence of conquest and control. A reader, battling through the tangled brackets of her prose, may be fascinated or infuriated by her intelligent naivety; it is impossible not to find it stimulating. This book is typical of US garden writing in its originality, an originality that is almost obligatory since this is not a nation that gardens because it must, because gardening is a national pastime; each individual must work out his or her motive for taking up the trowel. And nothing can be taken for granted in a nation which, as Kincaid says, "is impatient with memory", usually preferring what is new to what is traditional. When they were writing the constitution, the fathers of the nation had to begin anew, everything could be worked out from first principles; so it is with the best American garden writers, every idea is re-examined, tested and perhaps modified before it can be accepted.



God arrived on the American continent in various forms: the Spanish in California brought the Catholic faith to the pagan native Indians; the Pilgrim Fathers in New England brought their severe, ascetic, perhaps arrogant Christianity, and the Jamestown settlers a flexible Protestantism which could accommodate their rampant capitalist ambitions. The United States remains a country riddled with religion. Is it by chance that they call autumn 'the fall'? Perhaps there is a suggestion that if Adam and Eve had never eaten the blessed apple, spring would have been eternal in God's own country. The early settlers in New England certainly felt that they had been singled out by divine providence, blessed in the way God had provided them with this new land in which they could found a perfect theocracy, based on the (they meant 'their') literal interpretation of the bible. And this sense that Americans are particularly blessed, indeed have some special relationship to God, persisted in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which justified their slaughter of the native American Indians who stood in the way of the white man's kind of better world.



What has all this to do with American gardens, you may be thinking. Religion and morality inform American thinking at the deepest level, and thus have inevitably affected the style of their gardens. Consider the burden of responsibility God has laid on the backs of his chosen people by endowing them with this paradise. They feel themselves under a divine obligation not to squander or misuse their inheritance. Moreover would not creating a pleasure garden, for the delight of the eyes and the nose, be a gross misuse of God's gifts? After all, a Puritan should find beauty in the simple and utilitarian, thus perhaps in vegetable gardens, not in flower gardens that serve only to delight the erring senses of fallen man and woman. Thomas Jefferson's greatest term of disparagement was to call something 'useless', and pleasure gardens are just that - unnecessary distractions from the work that needs to be done, and, worst of all, they even suggest that fallen humans can improve on God's handiwork. All these half-conscious feelings make for a kind of hesitancy in the American approach to gardens, a reluctance to commit oneself to them as works of art. And remember that the word 'garden' in the US refers only to the cultivated parts of 'the yard'. Pollan sums the matter up well when he discusses a certain reluctance in his compatriots to interfere with nature: "at least since the time of Thoreau, Americans have seemed more interested in the idea of bending themselves to nature's will, which might explain why this country has produced so many more great naturalists than great gardeners."



Then there is the wilderness, the God-given majesty of the great mountains, rivers and prairies which belittle the paltry attempts of humans to create their own garden compositions. Such a landscape offers a challenge to garden makers that is not only moral but also aesthetic. To give two examples: with the proceeds of her novel The House of Mirth Edith Wharton was finally able to create the house and garden she wanted. The garden had to be Italian in inspiration since these were the gardens she most admired and had written about. She and her husband chose a site in the Berkshire Hills at Lennox, Mass. which provided the slopes she needed, and set about laying out the garden; it has been expensively restored, and is now expensively open to the public. The layout could not be more simple: on the main terrace below the house, a flower garden on the left and a sunken 'giardino segreto' on the right are joined by a walk of pleached limes. The flower garden is flat and formally-patterned; behind it, dwarfing its proportions, towers the forest, dark and dreadful. And this was so in Wharton's day as we can see from contemporary photographs. What could she have done to avoid the sensation that the garden had been created in a clearing? Plant shrubs or even small trees in the flower garden to soften the boundary between the cultivated and the wild? Or thin the forest, removing it to a greater distance so that it no longer dwarfed the flower garden? But that would have been a kind of sacrilege; so the sharp division between forest and garden remains. The wilderness offered a challenge even to someone as wealthy as George W. Vanderbilt and his brilliant landscape designer, Frederick Law Olmsted, confessed "I am nervous, and this is because I am not quite at home when required to merge stately architecture with natural or naturalistic landscape work." When they came to lay out the grounds of the gigantic mansion, modestly named Biltmore House, in North Carolina, how could they compete with the majestic beauty of the forests, lakes and the Great Smoky Mountains? Olmsted's solution was brilliant: wisely shrinking from any attempt to compete with the natural landscape, he created a flat bowling green beside the house, from which the views are breathtaking; the formal garden he tucked away down the hill, behind a wall, so that its smaller scale beauties could be appreciated without competition.



After Independence, the young nation was determined to establish its separate identity, and the wilderness formed an important element in what distinguished the United States from Europe; European, especially British, landscapes were identified as beautiful while American landscapes were sublime. The difference lay in the effects produced: beauty creates mere aesthetic satisfaction, while the sublime arouses awe and rapture of an almost religious kind. From the first, sublime landscapes had aroused religious feelings; as early as 1739 the poet Thomas Gray describing in a letter the landscape of the Grande Chartreuse wrote, "not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry". Burke in his essay on the sublime and the beautiful, published in 1757, defined the sublime as "whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or operates in a manner analogous to terror". This led some landscapers of the Picturesque School into gross extravagances, such as gibbets and other instruments of torture, as we saw in the chapter on the English landscape park. But the major point about the sublime is that it is usually found, not created. And the bible-studying Americans would not have forgotten that awe in the face of God's handiwork is a way to deeper faith, "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom".



By the first half of the nineteenth century Americans were beginning to feel that the pristine quality of their sublime landscape was under threat. It was therefore the duty of the painters to record its beauty for posterity. Thomas Cole, the distinguished landscape painter, could claim "we are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is ignorance and folly". But J.F.Cropsey, reviewing some of Cole's pictures in 1847, took a less sanguine view: "the axe of civilisation is busy with our old forests, and artisan ingenuity is fast sweeping away the relics of our national infancy …. Yankee enterprise has little sympathy with the Picturesque." These writers were responding to the growth of industry in, for example, the beautiful Hudson valley, and their disquiet found an echo in government when in 1864 the Congress passed a bill giving Yosemite Park to the State of California "for public use, resort and recreation … inalienable for all time". This far-sighted decision, which was the beginning of what would become the National Parks movement, is made all the more remarkable when we realise that in 1864 the nation was suffering the trauma of civil war. So Yosemite, a place that the painter Albert Bierstadt called "the Garden of Eden" when he arrived there is 1863, was preserved and with it a portion of that God-given landscape which promised so much to the first colonisers of America.



But the wilderness was not all good, pristine and innocent. It was a place of literal and spiritual darkness where the enemy, the native American Indians, lived. It was a place of savagery and pagan rituals, in need of conversion by enlightened missionaries. And its forests and mountains, let alone their inhabitants, made the exploitation of the great spaces of the mid-west harder than it might have been. So the wilderness also offered a challenge to the colonists, both moral and practical. Yet deep in the American subconscious is buried the idea of the wilderness as a place of freedom and renewal, where innocence can still be preserved. Huck Finn at the end of his story famously reckons "I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilise (sic) me, and I can't stand it". He needs to cross the frontier, that most highly-charged element in American mythology, to a world that is purer, freer, less tame. It may be dangerous and uncomfortable, but the freedom to make of yourself what you will, to begin all over again, which can be found only in the emptiness of the wilderness, is intoxicating. And the wilderness has a similar ambiguity, beautiful but also dangerous, in that other great American myth, the Western film. The romantic heroes are the free-living cowboys who have no settled home, but pick up work where they can, and move cattle across the empty prairie to the railhead. The enemy is the farmer who wires off his land, impeding the freedom of movement that has been a traditional right of the cowboy. That is one side of the myth, showing the wicked settler carving out of the land, which should be a common good for all, an estate of his own, wiring off his boundaries so he can cultivate his land. The other is its opposite: the familiar scene of the circle of wagons in which a handful of gallant (often hymn-singing) settlers try to defend their womenfolk and their children from the whooping Indians who gallop in threatening circles round the camp. Here the evil, destructive, anarchic side of the wilderness is highlighted; it is the enemy of anyone who tries to tame it, to civilise it, to exploit it. It stands in the way of progress, moral and economic.



And the wilderness as the supreme place of freedom is not only some dusty myth. It offers a constant refuge to those who oppose the way American society is developing. In Montana they set up a free community that refused to pay any US government taxes, and patrolled the boundary of their independent community with rifles to keep the Feds at bay. The right to carry a rifle, defended to the last round by the National Rifle Association, is a vestige of this wilderness spirit; people should be self-reliant enough to defend themselves, not be dependent on a society's police force. In the 1960's those who opposed the Vietnam war, if they didn't flee to Canada to avoid the draft, would often set up alternative, hippie-style communes in the hills of California, the pastures of Montana or the woods of Maine - another kind of alternative to what they saw as the corrupt rule of corporate America. And to this day the alternative 4th of July celebrations in the remarkably named West Athens, Maine show that the anarchist spirit permitted, even fostered, by the wilderness is still alive and well in 2007.



The historian Perry Miller sees the youthful America projecting an image of itself as "Nature's nation", an innocent, self-sufficient, outdoors people, with the strong implication that if the people followed Nature's precepts they would be protected from artificiality. Emerson, to whom we will return, had a similar feeling about his country: "Separated from the contamination which infects all other civilised lands, this country has always boasted a great comparative purity." A pleasure garden is certainly not only artificial but also an interference with the natural beauty with which God endowed the country; what a departure it must mark from the purity of Nature's ways! Carrying this baggage of half-buried assumptions about the wilderness, how is the poor American gardener to proceed without feeling self-conscious, uneasy, even a little guilty? Yet there are beautiful gardens in the United States, and not all of them hidden away like the walled garden at Biltmore. Some of them take account of the wilderness, like the wonderful garden at Wave Hill in New York; looking across the Hudson to The Palisades with their severe horizontal line, the garden permits itself few vertical accents, in general the plantings are low and level. Or the American garden may turn its back on the wilderness completely, like the supremely theatrical and brilliant garden called Lotusland in Santa Barbara, California. What we seldom find in American gardens is the gentle transition from garden to the wild that is so familiar to an English eye. But then England has no wilderness; the whole countryside is so manicured that it might well be a garden. Remember Walpole's famous saying about Kent that "he leapt the fence and saw all nature was a garden." That might be true in England; it could not be less true in America. America has something much purer, more significant and noble than countryside; leap the fence (there probably isn't one) in most parts of the United States and you find yourself in thick forest, prairie or desert. And even if you live in a city the inhabitants of the wilderness may come to find you out. In Chappaqua, a dormitory suburb just north of New York City, bears rummage through the waste-bins; coyotes are invading the edges of several cities, and no American book about making a garden lacks its chapter on the battle with the woodchucks.