The Meaninglessness of Gardens

Abstract

When gardening is art, what are its elements? With what elements do gardeners work when they are working as artists? And when I say elements, I do not mean The materials of the painter's art, for example, are such things as his brushes and paints, his palette knives, the can vas; the elements of the painter's art are the lines, shapes, tones, and colors that those instruments enable him to place on that canvas.1 It is from the elements that he makes his painting, not from his materials. (The materials are what he uses to make the painting, not what he makes it from.) And it is because things of that sort are his elements that what he makes is indeed a painting. Or take the art of choreography. Its materials are the dancers' costumed bodies, the dance floor, perhaps some props. In this case, unlike painting, the materials also include the finished product of a distinct art: music. The elements of choreography are, first and foremost, the dancers' rhythmic movements, but also their interaction with any props that there may be. The elements of an art are what get com posed into an artistic whole. What of gardening, then? What are its mate rials, what are its elements? About its materials there should not be much disagreement. Plants and trees, rocks and soil, walls and fences, foun tains, ponds, and streams, paths and patios to gether with the tools to place, construct, and con trol them. As with choreography, the products of other arts may be incorporated: statuary, ceram ics, bridges, and gazebos. (None of these, however, is as essential to gardening as music is to dance.) People disagree on the question of garden mate rials chiefly when wondering how few items from a conventional list they can use and still call the result a garden. Do rocks, white sand, and tem ple walls suffice? (I am thinking of the Japanese dry garden.) Can a place be a garden if it has no plants? Let us set these questions aside for now and think instead about the elements of gardening, where the disagreement is sharper and more fun damental. What is it that the gardener composes into the whole that is his artwork, the garden? Some answer: foliage and flower forms, their col ors, their contrasts and intervals. The gardener paints his landscape with plants. (Gertrude Jekyll is probably the most famous of garden artists as sociated with this view.)2 Others warn us not to focus on the plants but to focus instead on shap ing a space. Objects in the garden, living or not, are there, they say, to articulate a spatial enve lope. Those articulations are the elements that the gardener composes into a whole.3 And al though they are spatial, it is not the eye alone that discerns them. The sound of falling water heard from behind the trees, the scent of orange blos som wafting from one side: these too can delineate a space. The spatially oriented garden designer? this, rather than 'gardener,' becomes the natural term in this context?tends to think of his plants as plantings, clumping them together in thought, if not in the ground. A tumble of nasturtiums on the wall, a spread of lambs' ears by the side of the path, a sea of thyme around the stepping stones, a slope of pfitzers, a line of palms on the horizon? these are among his elements. He speaks of the plants as clothing the ground, and the clothes he means are formfitting; it is the body they re veal that counts. Or he thinks of them as speci mens, which mark their spot?the solitary pine on its little island, the group of cycads on a mound, the weeping willow rising from a sweep of grass.