Adam and Eve were born in a garden, and gardens are still where people go to renew themselves by meeting creation. In that encounter gardeners have a particular advantage, because they see much more than meets the ordinary eye. The garden that is hedged, fountained, sheltered by ancient trees may take many years to realize, but I am in a garden as soon as I pick up my hoe. The garden one meets when one participates in its making is vivid and alive, and casts a sweet green shade of its own. The distinction between those two gardens, the finished one and the one being made, is seldom clear-cut. Sometimes this leads to confusion and the confusion to discontent. Ten years ago I had a job writing a gardening column in the local newspaper. I never had trouble thinking what to write about, just happily recorded the changes in the season as they came and the tasks in my garden that went with them. Now I see that because I so much enjoyed that emerging garden, the columns gave the impression that I was on to something worth having. The difficulty came when the readers wanted to see what it was. Acquaintances I ran into at the post office began to ask if they could come and see my garden. "It must be wonderful!" "Oh, it is," I would agree and invite them over. Some of these visits were a success; two even led to lasting friendships. The visitors and I would wave our arms over almost empty beds declaiming about the flowers and vegetables that would fill them one day, admire the compost pile, the microscopic seedlings that had at last come up at the site of the future rock garden, the young home orchard. Then they would hurry home to get on with their gardens and I would go back to mine. But more often, the encounters were discordant and bewildering, and sometimes I felt I was losing my grip on the garden I loved. I would begin by pointing out the mixed hedgerow of holly, hazel, cedar, and lilac, the Gardiner's Island peach tree (which produces delicious white-fleshed peaches with skins that are shriveled and green) that grew from a pit, the glacial rock overhung by the exquisite pale yellow honey-scented native azalea. But soon I would hear my explaining voice trailing into lack of conviction, unnerved by the disappointment in my visitors' eyes. Through their perplexity I began to see another garden: undeniably present, but sparse, incomplete, and littered with the equipment of everyday life: pajamas on the clothes line, rusty tractor parts dwarfing the rock-and-azalea configuration, trucks and cars rumbling and flashing through the gaps between the knee-high hedgerow plantings. The young apple trees--mere whips, never very visible in the gray spring air--could, in a certain light, disappear altogether. The visitors and I would part, embarrassed. Had I deluded them, or perhaps myself? Was the wonderful garden something I had only imagined? I would make dejected efforts to move a tricycle, cut the grass. Or I would go listlessly indoors, unable to face so much emptiness. Then a little time would pass, perhaps one night. In the morning a small red bud would appear on a gray, thorny rose stump, or some thyme seeds sprout, primroses open. Before my eyes the garden burgeoned again green, compelling, no fantasy at all. And I would go to work in it. Over the years, the garden in my imagination and the one outside the kitchen windows have drawn closer together. Now the buds on the narrow apple whips are branches loaded with fruit. People bump their heads on them. Boundaries are defined, no more gaps in the hedge: birds nest there and children hide, and the road seems far away, even though it is not. The flower beds are thick with peony, phlox, lavender, bees. The backhoe is gone, so the rock and azalea are sculpted against sky and distant water. There is a gate, and anyone who passes through knows they have arrived, where once they might not have been quite sure. Though all this brings great pleasure, I do remember that to me, the gardener, the fragile early garden--partly tangible, part imagined--was as satisfying as this present substantial one. Imagination is not fantasy, but active interest. "I feel," wrote William Blake, "that a Man can be happy in This World. And I know that This World Is a World of Imagination and vision . . . . The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a Green thing which stands in the way. " Gardeners step into this world of imagination as soon as they begin to garden. They cannot plant a dry seed without awareness of the flame of life inside it, or prune a bare branch without sensing clustered blossoms and leaves. Following the earth No two of the gardens I have visited and loved have been alike. They have been formal and austere or wild and abundant, rural and expansive or tiny and pristine. But each has evoked, through but beyond the personality of the gardener who made it, a distillation of its place on the earth. This is why I cannot bring myself to say, as some books do, "Before picking up your spade take out graph paper and ruler and plan your garden." Or, "Study photographs of gardens you admire and reproduce them where you live." The danger is that in starting with a picture of what should be, a gardener may lose sight of what is. A great garden says, "This is where you are." It is as though the gardener's work was not so much to impose as to make visible, by artistry, something already there in the rocks, trees, and breezes of that locality, the spirit under the ground and in the air. I think all gardeners keep this idea somewhere in their minds, but the Taoist gardeners and garden poets of ancient China took it as their essential calling. Their gardens, whether vast palace grounds or tiny plots outside hermits' huts, were intended as revelations of the flow of chi or life spirit as it manifested in a particular place. According to the accounts of travelers in ancient China, not only gardens but a cultivated rural landscape of surpassing beauty arose from this consciousness. It was among contemplative Taoist monks at least two thousand years ago that the art or science of feng shui, or geomancy, originated. Certain monks became adept at determining the flow of chi on any site. As dowsers look for water, the feng shui masters charted the sources and sinks of spiritual energy in a given place and thereby uncovered its essential genius. To this day the Chinese of Taiwan and Hong Kong (perhaps covertly also on the mainland) call in a feng shui master before embarking on work at any building site or garden. Sometimes this process is crudely conceived as a matter of good or bad luck--get it wrong and your company stock will fall, get it right and you prosper. But it originates in the more subtle and profound recognition that the places in which one feels truly well--close to God, restored to oneself--are those made in harmony with the spirit of earth and cosmos. In the sixth century BCE, Lao Tzu wrote in his book of the way ( Tao Te Ching ): Man follows the earth The earth follows the universe The universe follows the Tao The Tao follows only itself. Gardeners, I think, can become geomancers of their own gardens when they work in them with love and imagination. They notice how the soil is; they follow the course of water, where it puddles, where it flows; they plant a little of this and a little of that, discover what fails, what thrives, and how and where a plant turns toward the sun. Gardeners are also geomancers when they put down their hoes and find the places where they love to linger and where they are inspired to move on, where and when light filters through flower petals, where the cold winds come from, where the sunny shelters are, where the comforting shade, where birds nest. From a thousand homely parts a picture slowly arises that becomes more than their sum. This kind of knowledge takes time to acquire. While it is accumulating, gardeners endure (or perhaps enjoy, depending on their temperaments) a certain amount of tenuousness and lack of form. The garden may not "look like anything" even while there is much for the imagination to see. But I do not think there is a better way to ensure that when the garden does take shape, its forms, hues, and scents will be rooted in the place where it is. Excerpted from Bringing a Garden to Life by Carol Williams. Copyright (c) 1997 by Carol Williams. Excerpted by permission of Bantam Books, a division of the Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpted from Bringing a Garden to Life by Carol Williams All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
