If we were to set a handsome dinner table with cans and bottles of food, taking care that the shapes of the containers and the colors of the labels were arranged for hue and design, and then solemnly dub this arrangement “The American Dinner,” it would be a pretty silly thing.
To me, it seems just as silly that certain builders and interior decorators should now present to us a home yard turfed with concrete and accented with a few plants stuck in pots and boxes and herald it as “The American Garden.”
Stage Setting Of Garden
Builders and decorators have, I suspect, long hankered to get their orderly hands on what they seem to have thought a very messy and disorderly frame for their buildings — the borne grounds.
Certainly, they enjoy historical precedents. As Rose Standish Nichols recently noted in Horticulture, Sir Christopher Wren got his hands on several gardens.
In more recent times in Britain, Sir Edwin Lutyens extended his detailed specifications for garden walls, walks, ‘pools, and furniture to include all the trees and plants as well.
But gardens such as these were planned as frames and settings for structures. They were to enhance the architecture and the reputations of their owners.
But gardens such as these were planned as frames and settings for structures. They were to enhance the architecture and the reputations of their owners.
They were tea-party gardens, gardens that offered vistas, gardens merely to be admired as stage settings.
They were certainly not gardens for owner-gardeners. And they were (and are) terribly expensive to maintain.
They are impossible today for any except the very wealthy, as indeed they were in the days when they were conceived.
Equally impossible for the largest number of home gardeners, and I believe we can extend that to homeowners, is the sterile, cement-paved yard we are now asked to accept as “The American Garden.”
Act Of Gardening
Without more than noting the original high cost, much more important to me is the fact that such a “garden” airily ignores the real reason for a garden.
The essential delight in having a garden is in the continual act of gardening.
Since this new al fresco decorative scheme banishes that act, except for perfunctory housekeeping, whatever it may be — it cannot be a garden.
There is, in this scheme, no place for gardening. Everything in it is fixed, as in a preciously decorated room.
Designing the Garden
The plants have been chosen and positioned like sticks of furniture. It will do the owner no good to pore over the new spring catalogs, to want to try a new shrub or a new perennial.
This will only get him into trouble, like trying to change the color of his house, buying a new easy chair that doesn’t “go,” or hanging new draperies that will throw the decorator into immediate and perhaps fatal hysteria.
For what has been so carefully designed for our owner is merely a Room with a Plant, to paraphrase Mr. E. M. Forster.
Plants as Decoration
It won’t wet his feet (indeed, with its radiant-heated concrete mat, it may actually warm them), it may fry his hamburgers, and it can give him steam-room privacy.
It will even permit him a few decorator-selected plants to sniff and admire. But it will certainly not be a garden.
How could it be? The plants are forced into performing purely mechanical chores. They are geared into the efficient “machine for living.”
Nothing more is asked of them than to fulfill their static chores of providing unobtrusive background, accenting an architectural line, serving as a screen, and delivering a blob of color.
No one cares about them as living plants. It is their utilitarian function only that matters. They could just as well be made of papier-mache or colored aluminum.
From time to time, I suppose, the plant furnishings could be changed. This outdoor room, like the adjacent interiors, could be redecorated.
Then the plants could be ripped out, tossed away —let’s not give in to any sentimental nonsense in this day of efficient living — and a new set, decorator-approved, installed.
No Freedom In This Gardening
It is a final outrage, as I consider it, to call this pastiche the “American” garden. It is not American at all.
There is no freedom in it — no freedom for the endless doing of gardening. No freedom to divide, shift, multiply, or rearrange. None to make mistakes.
None for the continual experimenting that is among a gardener’s chief joys. None to worry about a stubborn or ailing plant. And, how can anything bereft of freedom possibly be American?
Worse, this new thing spurns the cherished tenet that a garden, in the whole sense of the word, holds more than smart shapes and colors.
It holds evocative meanings and mysteries, and for the man or woman whose hands it knows possesses powers to give inner peace and surcease from the jangle of the day.
New-Day Garden
Fixed, stationed, and placed just so, like the fake potted palm in the modern hotel lobby, this new-day garden has no need for a gardening person.
And if that be so, certainly there is no need for the owner to read a gardening magazine.
The magazine continually calls for doing, and there is nothing to do here but “live”— to sip one’s cocktail and discuss the latest debate in Congress.
But should the daring think of a new rose bed? Then he must call in the concrete breaker — if the designer will permit.
Does he tire of the hedge-piece? But the new shrubs he wants will grow too tall, or too wide, or flower in an impossible color — and so destroy the whole scheme.
Does he foolishly yearn for an old-fashioned fruit tree? But that calls for spray, and spray would ruin the furniture.
He can’t move the furniture because that would ruin the studied arrangement of his room for efficient living. And think what a mess windfalls would make!
No one advocates for today’s American home, the manicured estate gardens of yesterday’s Europe, or even the complicated, time-taking big gardens of America a generation or two ago.
Look-At Gardening For Smaller Houses
Everyone admits, with our smaller houses, that we can use less “look-at” gardening and more outdoor living space.
But I see no reason why this should call for a wild, patriotic leap onto concrete sod and fixed architectural plantings arranged as sparely and as cheerlessly as a room done by an avant-garde interior decorator.
Such a leap may indeed land us in a room. It may be a very efficient room, requiring only a short hose and a vacuum cleaner for maintenance. But it is not a garden.
44659 by Chester P. Holway