Storming the Gates of Paradise (37 page)

Thoreau wrote with such wryness because, as an American romantic, he admired the unaltered landscape, and that admiration itself was the fruit of a long European history of garden evolution and the control of nature. Nature was sufficiently abundant, even overwhelming, throughout most of human history that it did not need to be referenced as an ideal, exactly. Some cultures assumed that nature was fine as it was, making gardens unnecessary; others thought that nature was fallen and yearned for an absent paradise whose parameters they sketched with herbs and flowers and walls or, in Asia, with pines and pools and stones. Usually they yearned for a more visibly ordered nature. Our horticultural ancestors the Romans had topiary and espaliered trees and neatly patterned beds; their ideal nature partook of geometry reminiscent of military formations. After them, one could say that nature relaxed into boudoirlike sanctuaries for all the senses until safety, wealth, and a returning preoccupation with geometrical order prompted the explosion of the formal garden in the seventeenth century. Gardens—aristocratic gardens, gardens of extraordinary expense—then reached a sort of Euclidean-Cartesian apogee of conical trees and long allées and managed fountains, and spread into the surroundings as they grew larger and larger: Versailles with its avenues to the horizon is the ultimate example, a garden that competes with the world. A 1712 English guide described part of an ideal garden’s layout:

two Squares, each having four Quarters, with Basons. It is terminated by a long Arbour, with three Cabinets facing the Walks and Pavilions. On the Right are Green-Plots cut, to answer the walks, having Water-works, as on the other Side. These are bounded by a double line of Cases and Yews, and behind, by green Niches for Seats and Figures. On the Side is a Parterre of Orange-Trees walled in, having Iron Grills against the Walks; and at the End is a Bason, with Cabinets and green Niches for Seats.

The notion that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction is as true of gardening as anything else: the English in the eighteenth century began to link the formality of such gardens to despotism and generated a notion of nature as ideal that is still with us. It was a tremendous reversal, full of its own contradictions.

The idea that unaltered nature might be worthy of contemplation as gardens was always slipping into the collective imagination in that century, and nature—or rather, Nature—became a goddess constantly invoked. A year after the above-cited garden manual, Alexander Pope effused, “There is certainly something in the amiable Simplicity of unadorned Nature, that spreads over the Mind a more noble sort of Tranquility, and a loftier Sensation of Pleasure, than can be raised from the nicer Scenes of Art.” All the garden geometry of paths and parterres and, particularly, topiary had come to seem obnoxiously or at least ridiculously
unnatural
, that new term of condemnation, and Pope condemned the last with famous verve in an imaginary catalogue of topiaries: “Adam and Eve in Yew; Adam a little shatter’d by the fall of the Tree of Knowledge in the Great Storm; Eve and the serpent very flourishing. St. George in Box; his Arm scarce long enough, but will be in a Condition to stick the Dragon by next April. A green Dragon on the same, with a Tail of Ground-Ivy for the present. N.B. These two not to be Sold separately,” and so on. The naturalistic garden known as the English garden evolved by degrees; parterres and topiary were done away with, and the gridded landscape gave way to serpentine paths and meanders, but sculpture and architecture still abounded until mid-century, when the inimitable Capability Brown began to do away with them as well.

Of course, the English garden was imitating a very particular notion of nature,
one that at least at first was found more in the paintings of Claude and Poussin and sometimes Salvator Rosa than in the countryside all around. So one of the great contradictions is that the English garden is imitating art in its attempt to imitate nature, and the nature it is willing to imitate is once again a very specific idealized thing, though at least it’s a flowing, complex thing. The radical idea was that nature was already orderly (an idea that cleared the way to start questioning the Fall or even to go with Rousseau and see it as a fall from natural innocence into civilized corruption). One thing led to another, as plenty of garden histories recount at length, and the culmination of this naturalizing process was that the surrounding landscape was by the 1770s found worthy of contemplation and suitable for strolling. Scenic-appreciation guidebooks by the likes of William Gilpin replaced garden-books as the manuals of appropriate aesthetic responsiveness.

To some extent, the world ever since has been regarded as once only gardens were. It’s a tremendous history, out of the garden and into the landscape, and from thence originate both the outdoor industries and the environmental movement, perhaps even the idea of the national park. It’s about a knight’s move toward democracy—first toward gardens that, if they required less maintenance, required more space: a thousand-acre garden is only so democratic. But it opened the way to regard the whole world as a garden, at which point one no longer needed privileged access: Hampstead Heath would do, or an excursion train, or a long walk away from the factory districts (the latter two assiduously utilized into the mid-twentieth century in England, though nature never achieved that kind of populist status in America, perhaps because too many populists were still busy fleeing the farm). It recalls a parallel evolution in the visual arts in the second half of the twentieth century, in which, as Robert Irwin put it long before he himself became a garden designer, “the object of art may be to seek the elimination of the necessity of it.”

The eighteenth-century dissolution of the garden into the landscape is a spectacular history that left only one unresolved question: what kinds of gardens were people going to have around their homes after that apotheosis of Nature? Christopher Thacker writes, “For several decades the nineteenth century had no distinctive garden style, but remained unsettled, eclectic and searching, as it did in
architectural form, in furniture and in clothing.” If the great eighteenth-century impulse came out of the growing control that human beings had over the world, a control that meant it was safe to let down the garden walls and satisfying to be occasionally overwhelmed by nature rather than to overwhelm it, then the nineteenth century came from very different impulses. Letting well enough alone was one of the few pastimes the Victorians never entertained. A new fussiness returned, as did the formalism of bright flowerbeds that no longer spoke of great Euclidian expanses of aristocratic order, just of the obsession with pattern and the bourgeois anxiety to sort it all out. And there was so much more to sort out. The Victorian garden comes perhaps from the botanical garden rather than the pleasure garden or landscape garden. And the botanical garden was less about the beauty of Eden per se than its symbolic and literal abundance. This is a shift in part from the garden as primarily a composition to the garden as a collection, and with that shift the garden regained its details—its flowers and unusual plants—that had been lost in the rush toward naturalism. (One of the peculiarities of garden history is how little it is plant history, particularly the landscape gardens, in which everything was meant to become pleasing composition at a suitable distance; flowers were banished in part because such gardens were not about details and close-ups and individual phenomena, and they were certainly not about brightness.)

Early botanical gardens were sometimes divided into quarters, echoing both the paradise garden of the Islamic world (with its central fountain and four streams echoing Eden’s own hydrological arrangements) and the idea that the world’s four continents were present as the four quarters of the garden. (Though the continents were eventually found to be less symmetrical in number, other, more practical versions of this order survive in, for example, Kew Gardens, with its greenhouses representing climates of varying degrees of intemperate pleasantness, or the Huntington Garden in California, with the continents reiterated as clusters amid the winding paths.) John Prest writes in his history of the botanical garden, “It was as though the creation was a jig-saw puzzle. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve had been introduced to the completed picture. When they sinned, God had put some of the pieces away in a cupboard—an American cupboard—to be released when mankind improved, or he saw fit.” This is part of why Thoreau was
uncomfortable with “making the earth say beans”: because America was already an Edenic garden in the rhetoric of his time, and because he took to an extreme the idea of noninterference implicit in the English landscape garden.

But the botanical garden was all about interference, eventually about the maximum interference of colonialism and conquest (these movements spread plants in all directions, so that apples and roses grew in the colonies, while chrysanthemums and maize and monkey puzzle trees came to Europe). Plants poured in from around the world in increasing profusion in the nineteenth century, helped along by the growing availability of glass for greenhouses, which allowed one to grow delicate and tropical plants in northern Europe and by, in the 1830s, the Wardian case (of which no less an authority than Thacker says, “The Wardian case is, with the ha-ha and the lawn-mower, one of the great inventions in garden history”). The Wardian case, which we nowadays might call a terrarium, was a sealed glass box or bottle that made it possible to keep plants alive for the arduous months on board ship from Australia or Brazil.

There was a sort of golden age of plant hunters (echoed by the rainforest plant hunting now conducted by pharmaceutical companies and resisted as biocolonialism by the residents of those forests). Orchids and other tropical flora were arriving in the first world, and their status as trophies of conquest, as prizes of the hunt, was well recognized, especially by Victorian gardeners. Such gardens were didactic and imperial, small local places about colonies and continents and expeditions far away. It’s hard to recapture the shock some plants, like the first giraffes and elephants, must have produced. The American explorer John Wesley Powell, on his first encounter with the flora of the southwestern deserts, exclaimed in what sounds close to horror, “The few plants are strangers to the dwellers in the temperate zone. On the mountains a few junipers and piñons are found, and cactuses, agave, and yuccas, low, fleshy plants with bayonets and thorns. The landscape of vegetal life is weird—no forests, no meadows, no green hills, no foliage, but clublike stems of plants armed with stilettos. Many of the plants bear gorgeous flowers.” The jungle was equally alarming to the temperate-adjusted, with its dense, humid landscape of vigorous life, vivid color, and perilous species.

Only over time did these plants become part of the standard vocabulary, just
as words like
jodhpur
and
raccoon
and
canyon
have. Almost no one thinks of Mexico when they look at dahlias (which the Aztecs called
cocoxochitl
). Marigolds and zinnias and rubber plants and bottlebrushes became standard nursery offerings. Only through this history did we arrive at the present ahistorical anything-goes moment of gardens, in which topiary and exotics and wildernesses and abundance and zen gardens and statuary all jostle each other. It is as though all the aesthetics, traditions, and regions have collapsed into an enormous polyglot vocabulary, a vocabulary in which anything may be said.

The United States was already wildly excessive and uninhibited on two fronts when it came time to make gardens. For one thing, the landscape itself was of a spectacularly un-European scale in its individual features, its Niagara Falls and Grand Canyons and ten-mile-long bison herds and mile-wide Mississippi and sequoias more like skyscrapers than other trees, and in its overall vastness and variety of mountains, deserts, prairies, forests, wetlands, and so forth. Second, within this expansive terrain, the Euro-Americans were living off largely introduced crops, though corn, squash, potatoes, and chilies had come over from Native agriculture, and life was already hybrid, jumbled, patchwork. The terrains, the climates, the hybrid populations and plantings all encouraged an un-orthodoxy that was harder to come by than in the old countries; the American lack of a past always made the future seem more available, and more wide open. The difference between Britain and America is the difference between Alice, daughter of a don, falling down a rabbit hole (a very expansive, peculiar rabbit hole, admittedly), and Dorothy, an orphan raised by Kansas farmers, taken up by a tornado. Alice wanders a dreamland of decorous delirium, with its playing-card chattels, its nervous small animals, rose gardens, tea parties, chessboards, railroads, and nursery rhyme characters. The landscape of the Wizard of Oz, with the angry apple trees, the endless expanse of poppies (sunflowers in the movie), live scarecrows, talking lions, witches, midgets, Emerald City, tornados—the scale of peculiarity, the available vocabulary of strangeness, the volatility is that much more vast. (American excess is evident, too, in the way L. Frank Baum spun the story of Oz out into more than a dozen books that other writers continued after his death, while Alice’s history has its Old Testament in Wonderland and its
New through the looking glass and no more.) English gardens are sometimes Wonderland, but American gardens easily slip into Oz.

Thomas Brayton, for example, acquired a seven-acre parcel of land in New England in 1872 and began a topiary garden, one whose scope would have dizzied even the sarcastic Alexander Pope. Though topiary was a strictly European tradition, Brayton’s Green Animals garden is a global menagerie with a topiary giraffe, bear, swan, ostrich, hippopotamus, and peacock (and a stray terrier, out of scale, of course, though not as out of scale as Jeff Koons’s). The peculiarity of the place is that it isn’t aspiring to the aim of the old topiary gardens, a kind of gracious harmony that made their makers seem an estimable part of the place. Rather, it’s a literal zoological garden, an eclectic collection of images from all over the world. This is a far more reckless revolt against good taste than all the garden gnomes in Northumbria could organize, one that isn’t merely kitschy but heroically preposterous. In Brayton’s time, county fairs were at their apogee, and they exhibited not only exemplary but extreme examples of local agriculture. (Giant pumpkins particularly are a hallowed American tradition going strong today; the iconic American children’s author Laura Ingalls Wilder tells a tale of her spouse in his youth exhibiting one at a New York county fair, in what must have been the 1850s or thereabouts, and the comic strip
Peanuts
featured a Great Pumpkin deity for Halloween akin to Santa and the Easter Bunny.) Brayton started out just as Buffalo Bill was becoming the performer whose theatrics would culminate in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, a sort of bioregional circus that toured North America and Europe. A couple of years later, P. T. Barnum’s efforts culminated in the founding of Barnum and Bailey’s circus, still touring today.