The Garden Gate

The violets are healthy and happy and spreading everywhere, and nothing that I or the deer can do will keep them back for long. All the same, I sometimes enjoy spending a few minutes, on a bright Sunday morning, in the back yard with a hand trowel and a galvanized bucket, digging up those little clusters of heart-shaped leaves. It may have rained the night before, in which case the air will be cool and fresh, and the sweet smells of earth and vegetation will be everywhere.

We have lived in this house for twenty years now, and during that time the garden in the back yard has become a genuine shade garden. In fact, when we go to the nursery to look at the plants, it’s largely an exercise in nostalgia. We wander among the lovely flowering plants and time and again, as we scrutinize a particular species or cultivar, our unspoken thought is, “We tried that one. It died.” “That one died.” “That one didn’t do so well.” Now it’s astilbes and hostas. Kirengishima, goatsbeard, Siberian bugloss. Clematis recta. Ligularia. I’ve been moving ferns over from the terraced garden under the window for quite a few years now.

On the other hand, weeds don’t grow very well in the garden either, and I find the variation in leaf pattern that we’ve established fairly engaging. We scatter impatiens here and there for a little color. A few daylilies bloom at the end of June. Some black-eyed susans show up in late July. As the painter and sometime gardener Robert Dash once put it, “I am predelicted toward shape, mass, and form, and have learned that the predominant color of all gardens is green....”

The great triumph of this gardening season has been the wrought iron arbor I bought recently to gather and make use of the wild grapes that thrive in the shade under the four Colorado blue spruce trees on the south east side of our yard. That portal is so handsome! Every time I walk through it I feel the freedom and ease of not having to brush aside all the vines and elderberry branches that used to crowd the path before I put that little archway in. It’s true, I don’t go that way very often, unless I’m pushing the lawn mower from the front yard to the back yard, in which case the magic of the moment is somewhat undercut by the loud noise of the machinery and the sensation of dead, dry pine needles flying at great speed against my unprotected ankles. All the same, I love that arch.

It may be wisdom or sheer laziness—I don’t know—but these days I take particular interest in noting the plants that just happen to show up in the garden. This is true, in particular, of that part of the back yard I refer to as “the woods.” We were originally attracted to the house, in part, because of this band of uncontrolled vegetation, which stretches along the back of the lot and varies in width from fifteen to twenty feet. When the neighbor kids were young they trashed it mercilessly, breaking off trees and trampling the woodland wildflowers that had been planted by the previous owner. I don’t blame them. I did the same myself when I was their age. But nature itself also had a part to play in thinning the screen that for many years had given us the impression we were living a long ways from town. Biologists call it “forest succession.” As the ash and box elder trees got taller, the leaf cover got higher, the understory got feebler, and the screen got thinner.

Meanwhile, as the trees got taller, the power company got more diligent in trimming back the branches that were threatening the powerlines that ran along the back of the lot. Two years ago they really went to town on our woods, trampling underbrush and severing tree-trunks at ground level. For the first time in twenty years, sunlight reached the forest floor.
Though saddened somewhat by the loss of privacy, I also saw this turn of events as a golden opportunity to plant a few species that would, with a little luck, become, in a few short years, thick bushes twenty feet wide but only fifteen feet tall, thus re-establishing the screen of green leaves without unduly threatening the powerlines. To that end I purchased and planted two nannyberry bushes, a gray dogwood, and a red-twigged dogwood. I watered them faithfully throughout the hot summer months. I watched weedy plants spring up on every side and eventually begin to steal the sunlight. I pondered the dense clay-like soil that I had removed while digging the holes for these sophisticated species. And throughout the winter months I looked forward to the day when they would sprout again, well-established, thrifty, secure, and ready to expand by leaps and bounds.

I don’t remember quite when it was I noticed the deer had eaten down the tasty branches of these young dormant bushes considerably. By May I had to admit that one of the four had died, and the other three were now smaller than when I bought them almost a year earlier. I crafted some chicken-wire tubes to keep the deer at bay. “And this summer,” I told myself, “they will really begin to show their worth.”

I took a stroll through the woods earlier this evening, to see how my babies were doing. Well, they’re still alive, though they don’t exactly stand out in the midst of all the verdure. I still have hope for them, but it’s also interesting to note who else has moved into the neighborhood. I see honeysuckles, mullen (!?) Virginia creeper, and some kind of mint that looks a lot like ragweed. There are low-lying jack-in-the-pulpit everywhere, box-elders, buckthorns, and one small tree that looks for all the world like an apricot. There are serviceberries here and there, and Canadian elderberry. And I spotted one hearty plant that looks like rhubarb, though it’s already five feet tall!

It’s fun to stroll through the woods after a long hard day at the office, then settle myself at the table on the deck, looking out at all the vegetation as it catches the late afternoon sun to form lush, complex layers of green and yellow and gold. If the woods were thicker, that luscious light would not be filtering through.

The word paradise comes from the Persian word for an enclosed park, or garden. And the garden (unlike the farm) has appeared throughout history as a locus of both romance and meditation. Gardens have springs, fountains, shade, peace, pleasant scents, and colorful accents. When we find ourselves in a garden, it’s difficult to resist the thought that this is what life ought to be like, all the time. Such sybaritic notions may be given a modicum of backbone by the acknowledgement that the pleasure of being in a garden is infinitely heightened by the awareness that in one way or another, we have designed and created the garden ourselves. And the pleasure of working that garden is inextricably bound up with that of enjoying it.

I recently came across a specimen of literary analysis along these lines that struck me as liberally sprinkled with insight, while at the same time remaining delightfully wrongheaded in its thrust. As is often the case, the scholar in question overlooked the simple but genuine significance of the phenomenon he was attempting to illuminate, in pursuit of bogus symbolic associations. The subject at hand is the garden, as it figures in Boccaccio’s Decameron.

“The place itself chosen by the youthful brigata for their salvation—and for the very setting of the Decameron—must retain our attention briefly for another important consideration as to its specific function. The villa in the countryside was a midpoint between sophisticated city life and the pastoral simplicity of the peasant’s world. The peculiar way of life in Boccaccio’s brigata during their retirement in the villa may appear to the present-day reader as a curious transposition of extraordinary rational discipline to a place where the senses and the imagination might be expected to have free play. We must, then, remember that in the Middle Ages the villa, the locus amoenus, or the garden are, indeed, an occasion for escape from the closed life of the walled city or the fortress-like house, but without quite plunging into the perturbing disorderliness, the ‘wildness’ of open nature. Places of this kind represent a compromise, a fusion of elements of city and wilderness, symbolical of a harmony between reason and the forces of the subconscious. A fitting climate, then, for naturalism as revaluation of instinctive life in a rational framework; or (to be more precise, if we deal with the Decameron in particular) an appropriate introduction for a gentle opening of the mind—without a direct, sudden, and drastic exposure—to those subterranean phenomena of life, those forces of matter and of the unconscious, which, in their full bloom, could but frighten and repel the medieval mind.”

Wow! What we learn here is that the garden is midway between civilization and wildness. True enough. According to this report, the garden also represents the midpoint between reason and the frightening forces of the subconscious. This supposition strikes me as somewhat more far-fetched. In fact, what the garden affords to Boccaccio, or any other writer or non-writer, medieval, ancient or modern, is a setting in which the heat of conversation, affection between friends, dalliance between unattached women and men, and moral reflections on causes and consequences as they are brought into view through narratives (in other words, art) become the focus of attention, while the otherwise almost unbearable stress, anxiety, and dolor of work—and even of family life, with its inescapable routines and obligations—dwindles into insignificance. All of this is made possible by the fact that “nature”—which, after all, provides us with the wherewithal to live—has become charming, agreeable, fruitful, and almost tame.

More closely considered, it seems to me that the relationship between reason and wildness of which this scholar speaks is less of a “compromise” than an abiding reality that accompanies us, taunts us, delights us, and challenges us, whether we be in the city, on the farm, in the garden, on the golf course, off in an upland pasture, or out in the bosom of wilderness itself. We bring an element of civility to the wilderness, simply by being in it. And there is no drawing room, garden, or church in the world, however refined, that doesn’t have an element of wildness to it, simply because we are there.


The American comedian Jerry Seinfeld once observed sagely that the pleasure we take in driving around in cars can be attributed to the fact that we are inside and outside, moving and stationary, all at the same time. It might similarly be pointed out that when we’re in a garden, we’re in the midst of wildness that has been somewhat tamed, tailored, and beautified by human effort. At the same time, we are clearly outside, yet protected by an enclosure of sorts, thus bringing another set of evident contradictions to life. Wild/tame-inside/outside. Philosophers have been struggling for centuries to reconcile, or to reason their way beyond, or to establish a hierarchy amid these and other interfaces between order and chaos. It can’t be done. And there is no point in pursuing that objective in any case. Everything raw and open and beautiful in life erupts from the midst of this cauldron of confusion. In fact, it may be that we feel “grounded” in life only to the degree that we can feel the tussle taking place within us, and have some idea of the direction we want to take it. We not only draw inspiration from that tussle, we shape our lives out of it.

The garden must certainly rank among the most pleasing end-results of such a personal drama. We retire to the deck, following our satisfying spell of work with the plants, and stare mindlessly off into the underbrush. We admire the curving branch of the volunteer buckeye tree for perhaps the fifteenth time, though we know we’ll have to cut it down soon, and find ourselves at home, in an inside/outside wild/tame environment that closely resembles, and in fact includes ourselves.

But make no mistake. The plants we cultivate and enjoy may become our friends, but they stand somewhat removed from us. Like us, they have elevated themselves considerably above the random molecular activity of the interstellar regions. Yet their habits, forms, and colors continue to startle and impress us, because we see in their visage creative achievements that we could never conceive of on our own, and will never match. The irregular pattern of a single nasturtium leaf, with its spoke-like ribs, may, on occasion, fill us with a child-like joy. As for the tender tissue of soft orange flower hiding underneath, it can sometimes be almost shocking in its sensual appeal.