True Dirt

cats and kings at Wisley

The Royal Horticultural Society's garden at Wisley, unlike the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, immerses the visitor in the passion--you might say obsession--and eccentricity of the English gardener. It is a garden theme park for the plant person, largely unconcerned with landscape design but mad for the individual specimen. Arranged as a rambling series of "rooms" and clusters of glass houses, with ponds, a canal, massive perennial borders, and an alpine rock garden "stairway," it packs into one destination all the elements that an American gardener like myself identifies with my English counterpart--voluminous borders, miniature everythings, glass houses for vegetables, cunning espaliers, secret benches, hedges, alpine rock plant mania, fish ponds and ducks, and a feline tour guide.

The horticulture society may be royal but this garden is decidedly aimed at the small lot gardener. In fact, most of the exhibits, except for the canal and the alpine garden are contained in small spaces. The vegetable plots are a wonderland of space-saving devices, including small glass houses packed with massive tomato vines chock-a-block with gorgeous fruit. Melon vines are trained to compact trellises and the fabulous looking fruit hangs neatly in mesh bags. An entire miniature orchard is contained in four pots--the tiny trees with their full-size apples and pears espaliered on miniature trellises. Even the massive perennial border is a model of space efficiency. Each ten feet or so of the border contained a separate color palette that explored an amazing range of complementary hues as well as shapes and sizes of plants.

The garden at Wisley is full of ideas, though not the kind that inspires a resurfacing of your quarter acre with a backhoe and a ton of masonry. It made me think about how a bench might be placed under a fetching berry bush, or building myself a Rapunzelean glass tower for my harassed tomatoes. The perennial border is out of the question in my tiny square of a yard but the plant combos were enchanting and reproducible. In some cases there was too much of everything like in the sculpture garden with reflecting pond where seemingly a million plants vied for my attention.

Maybe the most surprising thing about Wisley was how many people were there on a Sunday afternoon. Whole families, blue-hairs and the fanny-pack set, young and old, long-hairs and the generously pierced, all peering at plants and generally enjoying the horticulture, royal or not. But to me the most English thing about Wisley was Timmy, a very large, very sanguine cat who appeared to be the only staff member on duty that Sunday. Happy to escort us as we wandered about the alpine rock gardens and glass houses, he obliges to sit for a leisurely photo op. And for those who might doubt his official capacity, a chain collar and engraved tag declare that he is "Timmy, Rock Department."

Nature in Paradise

If I have my etymology right, the place we call paradise--a biblical resting place or epitomy of all that is beautiful and peaceful--is from the Greek word for park or pleasure ground which the Greeks borrowed from the Persians' pairidaeza or an enclosure with walls. The question is, how did we get from paradise being a nice spot behind a wall (with a secure gate no doubt) to it being a pristine natural landscape untouched by human endeavor? Well, to the appearance of a natural landscape significantly rearranged by garden designers with the intention of merely improving nature. Ok. Nature 9.2.1 (without the bugs).

The fact is, our very concept of nature as a benevolent entity worthy of our protection owes much to the history of English gardens - and their designers. What in the middle ages had been geometrical arrangements of mostly useful plants with some pretty things thrown in gradually became a canvas for the estate designers of the rich and powerful bent on showing off. So ensued the picturesque and romantic pleasure gardens of the 18th and 19th century. Now we just had to have topiary, grottos, picturesque sheep (and attendant shepherdesses), hahas, mounts, fake ruins, artificial lakes, mowed lawns, gravel paths, glass houses, large urns, rock piles, standard roses, and perennial flower borders.This is pretty much the origin of latter day front lawns, ceramic gnomes, hybrid tea rose bushes, lily ponds, square hedges, round camellia bushes, ivy balls, and Cottage Gardens.

It was also English garden designers that invented the garden as a natural landscape or "park" where trees and shrubbery were artfully arranged to resemble something like nature but not. Nature itself became the decorative theme and the trees and flowers the garden's art objects. It did not take very long for the next phase, botanical collecting and display, to infect a new generation of gardeners with insatiable appetites for new and exotic plants from the soon-to-be discovered corners of the globe.

Walking the gardens of Kew brings this odd history to life: the meandering paths, clipped hedges, massive flower beds, glass houses crammed with exotic wonders, ponds, freshets, alpine crevices, towers, urns, bowers, and behemoth tree specimens all carefully displayed as natural elements of an entirely invented landscape. The strange thing is, I am not sure I will ever see Nature quite the same.

Kew revelations

England has always been Mecca for American gardeners. Though the charms of Mediterranean climates have inspired some garden creators, as have tropical and desert regions, it is the English garden that for more than two centuries provided Americans with a vision of what a garden should be. I refer to our lawns, our hedges, our flower borders, and the flowers themselves: the daffodils, blue bells, roses and lilacs that we insist on growing in our gardens and to some are nothing less than the essence of a garden but which are not native to our land and often unsuitable for our local climate and soils. England is America's idea of a garden. So we revere and imitate English gardens, English gardeners, and desire English plants. And the main repository and standard of all this garden Englishness is Kew. That is, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

With that sort of cultural, you might say colonial, baggage on my shoulder and yet thrilled to be visiting the shrine, I entered the garden gate, Victoria Gate, after walking the short distance from Kew Station. Soon I was standing at the edge of the great pond staring spellbound at the heavenly apparation of The Palm House. (Film buffs might recall that it was Heaven in the original "Bedazzled" movie). A lesser replica of this palatial Victorian glass house stands in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco but I am compelled to say that it never elicited in me the dumb-struck awe I felt upon seeing the original.

I was not going to take photos that day, thinking that it would distract me from some purer, less mechanized enjoyment of the holy landscape. Thank the gods I brought the camera anyway. I became a mere extension of the tiny machine. It was my eyes. My brain sort of went dormant for the duration. And then my eyes ran down all the AAA batteries we had on us and my mad desire to capture the place for all eternity (or the current lifetime of digital storage hardware) had to be extinguished. This moment occurred at the entrance to The Palm House, the last stop on our half-day tour.

The pictures record our (me, friend Lu and her sister-in-law Julie who lives nearby in Ealing Common) selective pathway through Kew, covering perhaps less than half of the 300 acres of gardens, glass houses, historic buildings, museums and miscellany. We particularly followed the route of the Dale Chilhuly art exhibit--a series of blown glass scultures embedded in the plant exhibits and landscapes and scattered throughout a large area of Kew.

Most curious to me is how the photographs - after several viewings - revealed things that I had not seen and probably could not have seen with my organic eyes. The photos also helped me to articulate what it was about the place that so enchanted me and also made me think more deeply about what these artificial gardens and landscapes mean to people and why we, as humans, as Americans, as gardeners respond the way we do to the botanical world about us.