Review by New York Times Review
THE garden books we squirrel away for midwinter reading tend to satisfy one of two urges: they enrich our fantasy lives - "Ah, yes, this is the year I'll finally create that woodland path through the backyard" - or they enrich our mental encyclopedia "Indeed, Allium ostrowskianum and Phacelia campanularia would be wonderful companions for my Sideritis scardica. ..." Bookstore shelves are groaning with dense volumes about plant materials (as they are now called) and lavishly illustrated renderings of garden designs: What ground hasn't been covered? This year's offerings, with a couple of notable exceptions, seem more to do with thinking about gardens than with the act of gardening. And only a particular kind of gardener (one who has to survive a very long period of dormancy) will have the patience to tussle with the vexatious question on several writers' minds: What is a garden? The correct answer isn't "I know one when I'm in one." This is the year of gardening seriously. If your idea of a great gardening book is anything by the estimable Beverley Nichols, run for cover. Festival organizers must raise the question of what makes a garden in order to have ... garden festivals, which give rise to an entirely new category of gardens. To the cottage garden, the courtyard garden, the kitchen garden and the walled garden, we can now add the festival garden. In HYBRIDS: Reshaping the Contemporary Garden In Métis (Simply Read Books/blueimprint, paper, $34.95), edited by Lesley Johnstone, we learn that a contemporary garden "describes an aesthetic, conceptual, critical and political positioning. ... Its framework has recourse to phenomenology, philosophy, sociology, psychology, cultural geography, political inquiry, communications and cultural studies, as well as environmental and ecological concerns." Quite compacted soil in which to plant the seeds of an idea and expect a bloom of conversation. How far down this path must we go? "Hybrids" draws on the work of designers for an international festival that takes place every year on the banks of the St. Lawrence River in eastern Quebec. The text, with an introduction by Johnstone, the artistic director, is a compilation of the designers' musings on what makes a garden - which, by the way, to be politically correct must avoid elements like flower beds because "the whole conception of the garden as a little piece of nature is not only outdated, but has in fact always been false." (Take that, Gertrude Jekyll.) And while we're speaking of text, will someone please tell book designers not to drop masses of white print onto shiny black pages, which get streaked with fingerprints and are annoying to read. If plants aren't decorative, then words shouldn't be either. The garden materials on view in "Hybrids" tend to incorporate rubber, Mason jars, shoes, wash buckets, glass beads, rope, asphalt and steel. While I'd rather have a stamen or a pistil any day, it's highly entertaining to wonder what, exactly, a deer would make of the coils of black drainage pipe "re-creating a physical experience akin to being trapped in a web of roots and streams." Well, what is a deer if not a metaphor for the craven consumerism of our age? Still, almost in spite of themselves, some of the projects in "Hybrids" are breathtakingly beautiful (though beauty, too, is suspect). A garden called Modulations, by Philippe Coignet and David Serero, made of ferns and undulating screens of stainless steel bands, is a place I would want to return to in all seasons. Likewise for the "beautiful" (the author put the word in quotes -as if he were holding the whiff of the compost away from his text!) garden by the Cao/Perrot Studio featuring a grove of orange trees, iris, vetiver and an enormous Vietnamese lantern, into which the visitor can wander via steps of burnt log ends set across a pond. There are dozens of fascinating visual effects in "Hybrids," and it's useful to exercise the mind in argument with some of its contributors. "Is a garden closer to nature than a TV set and its technological halo?" asks one designer, adding, "The question remains open; ultimately, though, who cares?" Agreed. This is your book if you have a passion for the idea of the garden. I'm with the designer Hal Ingberg, whose garden is called Colored Reflections. "Because," he asks, "there seems to be a will to update and re-brand the image and definition of gardens, should we really call what in fact is an installation a garden? Do the terms sculpture garden or art in the garden not better reflect what these works really are? ... Factually speaking, my garden is not a garden." If you believe the world would be a better place if people stopped talking so much and just enjoyed themselves, then browse through the pictures. Now let's move on. But not so fast: we aren't getting away from that nagging question of what makes a garden. Next up is THE VERTICAL GARDEN: From Nature to the City (Norton, $60), by the French designer Patrick Blanc, for whom every blank wall is an opportunity, if you don't mind my saying so. This book is fascinating. Blanc is a scientist and researcher who has studied plant life all over the world. His mission is to create gardens that trail down the sides of buildings by "planting" them in rot-proof textiles bound to plastic boards, using an irrigation system to keep the roots moist. His gardening epiphany came when he "understood that everything I had learned in church ... and in school ... concerning 'nourishing soil' needed to be completely revisited." The book follows Blanc's explorations through caves and dark glens, forest understories, cliffs and karstic outcrops, where he finds inspiration for plant combinations, information about growth patterns and sources of unusual vegetation. The detailed chapter about installation procedures, showing the roots' growth through the irrigation cloths, is mind-boggling. We could do without the pictures of Blanc sprinkled liberally throughout - his green hair period is particularly vexing - but French designers seem to go in for that sort of promotion; when he isn't rebranding gardens, he's certainly branding himself. Blanc is best known for his work with the architect Jean Nouvel at the Cartier Foundation and the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. Are these gardens? You can't set foot in them; the plants don't rest in soil; they're "maintained" from the bucket of a cherry picker. And yet, you can be near them, inhale them, watch the play of a breeze across the leafy textures, admire the colorful tapestry of woven plants. Perhaps they are truly contemporary, defying gravity and horizontality. They're so unabashedly lush - and, in this Age of Carbon Anxiety, their effect on the environment is so felicitous - that there should be a vertical garden on every block of every city in the world, though that might deplete the vertical landscapes of Borneo and Chile. Garden or installation, who cares? They make their own case. JUST as we winter-bound gardeners are crazed to get our hands back in the dirt, along comes our reliable friend Ken Druse. The author of "The Natural Habitat Garden," "The Natural Shade Garden" and (along with Adam Levine) "Ken Druse: The Passion for Gardening" - all of which deserve a place on any gardener's shelf - can always be counted on for information and inspiration delivered in a warm, chatty manner, though I wish he would avoid being cute with the copy. Druse's latest book, the unfortunately titled PLANTHROPOLOGY: The Myths, Mysteries, and Miracles of My Garden Favorites (Clarkson Potter, $50), isn't his strongest. A compilation of "the stories of some of the plants I love," it seems to have been injected with the publishing equivalent of Miracle-Gro, for faster-blooming, brighter, bigger books. "Planthropology" even includes a once-over-lightly survey of plants in art. Still, as with any book by Druse, there's a wealth of fascinating material: descriptions of oak gall ink and bat pollination; a riff on skunk cabbage that will make you linger at the nearest swamp; a meditation on "plant blindness" that will send you out to spread the word on the pleasures of gardening. The true antidote for the garden made of asphalt is to be found in PLANT-DRIVEN DESIGN: Creating Gardens that Honor Plants, Place, and Spirit (Timber Press, $34.95), by Scott Ogden and Lauren Springer Ogden. This husband and wife tend their own gardens in Fort Collins, Colo., and Austin, Tex. I don't know which is harder, gardening in those climates or gardening as a couple, but the Ogdens seem to have mastered both. It probably helps that they're united in their rancor against academically trained landscape architects, with their "install and maintain" model of design. From the outset, the Ogdens are intent on pondering the "troublesome gap ... between those who tend gardens and those who design them." And they don't have any uncertainty about what makes a garden (or a garden book, for that matter.) "A garden," they write in a chapter called "Putting Plants First," "engages the senses with beauty; it also nurtures a person's fascination with the green world. A landscape that doesn't allow plants to do this can hardly be called a garden." You can see them shaking their trowels at the festival gardeners when they rail against "the ultimate tyranny of style" and "exercises in exterior decor." If we aren't careful, someone is going to get hurt, and that would never do in anyone's garden. Once the Ogdens calmed down, their book sent me to my notepad to scribble lists of things I wanted to order for next spring, in combinations that were particularly appealing. The Ogdens' approach is to put plants first, and what a tonic it is to enter their garden gates. The pictures, taken mostly by Lauren Ogden, are both arresting and informative; my single quibble is with the captions, which could have been more precise about what was what. The writing is thoughtful and at times provocative, the subjects well chosen. This is the must-have (old school) garden book of the season. On the question of what it means to be in a garden, two books take opposite tacks, but end up in the same place. OPEN SPACES SACRED PLACES: Stories of How Nature Heals and Unifies (TKF Foundation, paper, $30), by Tom Stoner and Carolyn Rapp, describes the efforts of a group called the TKF Foundation to create gardens around the Chesapeake Bay. Those "sacred spaces" were so successful that the foundation expanded its mission into other areas in the mid-Atlantic region. Over a hundred spaces have been created in the last dozen years. The gardens are designed and built locally; in fact, their success as healing places is partly due to the sense of ownership the community has in the garden. "Parallaxe Boogie-Woogie," top, a conceptual planting from "Hybrids." Above, Patrick Blanc's work at the Quai Branly Museum, from "The Vertical Garden." One project in East Baltimore, the Amazing Port Street Sacred Commons, was in a rough, drug-ridden neighborhood. "One day this summer, about 15 members of a local gang came to the labyrinth we built," Pastor Karen Brau recalls. "One of the members of their gang had been shot. ... These kids knew - they felt on some level - that the labyrinth was sacred space, and in their suffering they came to it." Thanks to the garden and the efforts of the surrounding community, Brau adds, "We are transforming this neighborhood in the face of what seems impossible. And we're not giving up." This book is a testament to the power that can be generated when generous hearts and wise minds are brought to the garden. "I often felt like a human doing," writes the project's founder Tom Stoner. "I often yearned for that special place in nature where I could be a human being again." The year's most thought-provoking, original and weighty garden book (though the lightest in heft) is GARDENS: An Essay on the Human Condition (University of Chicago, $24), by Robert Pogue Harrison. Here the author of "Forests: The Shadow of Civilization" and "The Dominion of the Dead," a book about cemeteries and burial practices, turns his thoughts to the garden as "sanctuary of repose." Making a garden fulfills, as Harrison puts it, "a distinctly human need, as opposed to shelter, which is a distinctly animal need." Burrowing into a more refined issue than what makes a garden, he meditates on why we garden. It's impossible to summarize the answer, overflowing as his book is with eccentric connections and voracious readings, ranging over centuries and across continents. Part of what makes it exciting is the way Harrison sets up surprise encounters with unexpected writers, who spring up as though self-seeded among the perennials. Who knew Camus had something to say about gardens? In a chapter called "Sympathetic Miracles," Harrison wonders "how can a garden made of plants, water and stone resemble a state of the soul?" His exploration takes us through readings of Shirley Hazzard and Michel Tournier and Patrick Lane, one of Canada's leading poets, a former drug and alcohol addict whose autobiography "tells the story of how he entrusted a shattered state of mind and a battered body to the healing powers of his half-acre garden on Vancouver Island." "Gardens" sent me to the bookstore more than once, to buy something by Patrick Lane and Eleanor Wilner's book of poems, "The Girl With Bees in Her Hair"; to research the Italian feminist Adriana Cavarero; to reread Pablo Neruda's "Ode to the Gardener." In a chapter called "On the Lost Art of Seeing," which draws on Rilke, Marvell and Calvino, Harrison argues that we have lost "a willingness to linger and a readiness for thought that our present frenzy finds abhorrent. There is not enough serenity in the age for gardens to become fully visible to us." What other writer could bring Malcolm Lowry's dazzling, heart-heavy novel, "Under the Volcano," to bear on the subject of gardens? Reading Harrison's book is like strolling down a path through a well cultivated, richly sown, light-dappled woodland. There's no point of arrival, though there may be resting places here and there. Just as in the making of a garden, there's no end to the wonder; the journey is everything. You don't have to be a gardener to love this book, but by the end you'll be asking yourself why on earth you aren't. 'Making a garden fulfills a distinctly human need, as opposed to shelter, which is a distinctly animal need.' Dominique Browning's most recent book is "Around the House and in the Garden: A Memoir of Heartbreak, Healing, and Home Improvement."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
In the gardening world, there are those who believe design should rule and those who are besotted by plants. The Ogdens eschew spaces that are overdesigned and promote a focus on plants as a meaningful way of connecting with one's garden. A trove of stunning photographs, mainly the work of Lauren Springer Ogden, complements eloquent discussions of native and introduced species; relationships between Asian and North American plants; communities of congenial plants for sun, woodland, dry grassland, and alpine settings; and appropriate planting for various soil types. Infused with a love of wild flora and the good toil of backyard horticulture, the Ogdens provide excellent instructions for selecting specimens well suited to one's environment and for creating a garden that emphasizes the unique character of each plant. With a wealth of plant lists and recommendations for a wide range of appealing trees and shrubs, and specimens to add lovely and surprising effects in the garden, this is a must-have volume.--Joyce, Alice Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
