Esthetics of gardening

or the creations of form

A dear friend invited me to visit the gardens of my county, as a guest, in a tour organized by a well-known local garden club. It is a fashionable tour playing homage to some well known aesthetics, historical homes and gardens, some around my neighborhood.

We are going to visit images and gardens of people who are chosen by what I assume is the key to their success in life. We are visiting samples from the aesthetics of gardening that places humans as guardians and beauty at the center, plants as decorative art.

Medicinal spiderwort

One of my favorite authors is an Italian philosopher, Emanuele Coccia. His book “The life of plants” continues to move me, over the years. Once again, I read passages from it, and one more time the connections to different people and to new concepts pop out and force me to redirect.  

In the book he starts by introducing the premise that botany and plants are viewed as second rate to the first, more evolved world of zoology, that is, the world that includes us, humans at the top and then the animals. He then clearly challenges that idea and present us with a wealth of arguments bringing plant to the foreground. Well worth one read, or two or three reads…

Here he is talking about the book and about forms coming to life in an interview with Olivier Zahm, the editor of Purple magazine.

EMANUELE COCCIA — The problem with botany is that it’s essentially based on concepts drawn from animal life. Its methodology is built entirely on the animal – life point of view…

EMANUELE COCCIA — Actually, plants embody the aesthetic idea of a vitality of form. Life's ability to produce its own forms. Inversely, this illustrates that forms are nothing but living beings and that art is nothing but the sphere in which forms come to life.

and about the seed:

OLIVIER ZAHM — The essence of reason is the seed?

EMANUELE COCCIA — The idea is that reason is not the awareness of something but the capacity to transform, or fashion, the world. The example par excellence of a rational event is when an artisan takes a piece of matter and makes something of it, gives it a form or a function. That is rationality par excellence. If we adopt this perfectly reasonable point of view, then the seed is a force able to draw forth incredible forms from matter. But at that point, reason is no longer just a human or animal faculty; it’s a cosmic force.

and further down

…OLIVIER ZAHM — And when exactly did we forget this vision of reason?

EMANUELE COCCIA — It happened in the modern age, when we sought to reduce reason to a purely human force. As a result, we reduced rationality or mind to something spiritual or psychological, and thus belonging strictly to man. Even today’s genetics is a way to conceive of rationality on the material level, because a gene is nothing but a code, and thus an extremely rational structure, which allows for the production, from matter, of incredibly complex forms of life. In a way, genetics is nothing but the latest version of a pre-modern tradition that had tried to align reason and matter, mind and matter, reason and the seed.

 “Our world is a garden, but plants are not the content of the gardens, plants are the gardeners.” also says Coccia.

I urge you to read the book, and if not the book, at least the interview.

Mourning cloak on native pear blossom

I live in a plot of land that measures, according to surveys, three and a half acres… this is my home. When I moved here the land was bare, with a few nonnative conifers planted on the southern side, the center tightly mowed lawn and the north rich with tall willow and white oaks, sycamores, a sliver of loblollies and pioneer gum trees and locust forming a border to the east. a traditional semi suburban rendition of agricultural buffer zones for the land now labeled critical zone. My idea then was to build a native garden, I had plans and dreams, designs and even the notion of planetary astronomy stations where we could sit down at night, measure, sight and meditate on various constellations… appropriate poetry available, at each station of course.

I soon learned that the land was not a pristine new land – there were established pads for three greenhouses, yes , I could work with that, we could change the land designation back to agriculture, where it had been for the last four hundred years, with corn and soy, earlier with tobacco. Now with a newer vision  for the future – herbs, natives, better, better and better… we would utilize the space properly, make good usage of it all and present beauty as a result.

Bit by bit I worked on the inhospitable land, seeding and planting native grasses where there was only construction parking lot underlayment. A garden was seeded and transplanted before a wooden frame house was built in the company of people I hold forever dear. I stood guard to make sure the garden and the plants came first, before the automatic destruction of construction…I had some training as a master gardener with extensive courses and practice attached to the cooperative extension services of the university of Maryland. I also worked for quite a few years for a local native plant arboretum. Cumulative factual scientific knowledge, dreams and choices. I was all set.

Then, as time plays tricks, bit by bit I learned that I was not in charge, the plants were… I was not ever comfortable with the role of the good shepperd, the agent of salvation… the land shaper, the landscaper. The voices of the emperor forever playing harp music around my head, mostly deep on my left ear, sometimes chiming, telling me to comply. I am in awe of those who have been able to continue to produce art that moves my heart, that makes the voice of the emperor subside … but I digress…

The plants chose their spaces and places… invasives moved in and out. I learned about alternative theories that do not ride with science and horticulture. People who track and study invasive plants from the point of view of plants – where they are needed, that is where they go…

I remember a transition when I hired a landscaper to help me, many years ago. I was working full-time and had some spare money. The idea was that he would call me when he had an opening, and we would meet so that I could instruct him on what to do. Mistake and misunderstanding. He came by himself with three workers, left for another job, with instructions for the workers to do what they always did. Decimate, dig, cut, kill, and clear… then mulch. My saving grace, so many years later is that I had not authorized mulch…

I came home from work and knew something was wrong. Slowly then I also knew I had lost my garden, as planned. 

There would be no harvest for herbs, no waiting for the collection of seeds from anyone. No pesto, from basil or parsley, no santolina sweet carol, no place for the bees to nest and reconsider in the winter. No hiding for the bunnies who would eat my lettuce in the next cycle. The butterflies would not find remnants of nectar, the snakes had their nests revealed, how many turtles were mauled in the clearance?

But what happened then was a bit more disastrous – the thickly planted garden, now bare, was exposed to sunlight, suddenly, my carefully planned and planted full garden was stripped and the land exposed to bare sunlight. Winter came and in the next spring strange different creatures started to move in at a speedy sunny rate.

Invasive plants are dear to me because they remind me of immigrants. They many times remind me of distant childhood memories, what mother and what grandmother grew in their windowsills in Italy. Scientists remind me that the analogy is not true. There are many scientific reasons why invasives occupy the spaces of natives, and how pollinators, for example, do not favor, feed nor propagate with the invasives. It sounds incendiary, as I say it, but basically what might be missing here is the fact that the adaptation of species to certain plants, for example, in butterflies, has taken place over a long period of time.  All true.

Yet new form does not arise from smooth transitions, it arises, quite often from drastic encounters and transformations… Invasive plants are just that - an element of disruption and of change. When seen from a plant point of view and not a human one…

Spring is my time for meditative immersion. When the light is still soft, green is still pregnant with seed and flowers emerge in tandem with the flies and the bees. Before the notion of growth and expansion takes over, before fire explodes. Spring is almost like the virtual when multiple possibilities are choosing how to branch. Without any text or pretext to guide them.

web revealed

We may pay attention to plants but we are also heavily programmed for growth, and with growth comes maturity and decay. We are programmed for usage, fruit falls off the branch, we collect them before, sometimes from the ground and we eat them. Imagining all kinds of ways to escape death.

Plants, in all their forms, on the other hand, do not. They live inside and outside their form.

the bardo of the mango, the birth of butterfly

Most photos were taken in April, across a span of many years… some are creatures that are gone, most are here, once again, this season, some in new form.

native iris

iris grass

Enjoy the season.