Gardens Au Natural

A couple of weeks ago, we went to visit two gardens: one in Vancouver, belonging to and designed by a recently-deceased famous Canadian architect (Arthur Erickson), the other belonging to and designed by a Point Roberts neighbor. Both gardens were very beautiful, very similar, and very different, and they put me to thinking about the nature of gardens and what we are doing with them.

There’s a goofy old movie with Michael Caine and Robert Duvall called ‘Old Lions,’ in which these two old bulls have retired from a life of crime and spying and moved to a farm in Texas where they have taken up gardening. This is being done because, as Michael Caine explains to Duvall, ‘they are now old and that’s what old people do.’ A lot of gardening is done by the ‘old’ and retired, by those who no longer have kids nor jobs to tend to, and, I think, who have taken to gardening as a way of creating something special. Now vegetable gardening is a very different matter. I’m thinking about landscape gardening, flower gardening. Up here in B.C., cottage gardens continue to loom large, but down in Point Roberts, not so much. There, there seems much more sense of design, as evidenced by the (usually) annual Garden Club Tour.

Anyway, the two gardens we visited: both were relatively small, enclosed gardens with a pond. Ed took the photo above, which is from the Erickson garden and is looking down into the pool from the ‘moon viewing deck’ immediately in front of the house. Each of these gardens has a small house at one end, with the rest of the yard devoted to garden, a garden whose structure is determined not by their water features but by their small number of trees. As if the trees were the skeletal structure.

Erickson’s house/garden was apparently used for parties (one of his former students told me about being invited there at the end of the term for a party). And, as a party setting, it is a fairly open garden with a small variety of native plants and areas where people could walk about or stand in small groups. By contrast, the P.R. garden was very close, with pretty much every inch of land not covered by pathway filled with carefully selected plants. It was much more a 'looking' garden for a solitary viewer. Neither had ‘lawn’ in the usual sense of the word. Both gardens were ‘natural’ (as contrasted with ‘formal’) gardens, but their naturalness was entirely unnatural, of course. Erickson’s native plants are contained in 2 lots in the middle of Vancouver (in Kitsalano, I think) and I’d judge there hasn’t been any salal growing naturally in that neighborhood for a very long time. In a similar way, the P.R. garden was ‘unnatural’ in that the density of planting and the intentionally narrow color range would not occur in nature.

As I thought about this, I eventually realized that landscape gardening, itself, is inherently an unnatural activity. It is, pretty much, a human-dominated activity. Creative, beautiful, and all that, but it is yet another way in which we attempt to impose our sense of ‘order’ on the world we live in. And then I came to some tentative conclusions about why I always feel a lack of commonality with other gardeners. It’s because I’m not a gardener. What I am is something more like a grounds manager. A grounds manager with a theory and a plan, however, which I will explicate more fully as soon as I am able to drag it out into my conscious understanding.

What a surprise! I'd always thought I was a gardener