Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Art, Community

Torture Gardens

Mark Scroggin's poems are whiplashing back and forth inside my skull.  He calls them, in his new book, Torture Garden, "Naked City Pastorelles."  (Buy Mark's book here, via Small Press Distribution.)  They are perfectly shaped, formally elegant little explosions of violence, despair, wit, and observation, each contained within a strict stanza of seven four-to-six beat lines.  The idiom within each poem ranges from overheard conversation to French philosophy, from feces and spit to classical music.  This strategy, in which dark, energetic expression is confined within strict bounds, alludes to Naked City, John Zorn's experimental jazz/thrashcore band from the early 1990s,

especially their album Torture Garden. 

The "hardcore miniatures" on this album are, like Scroggins' poems (with whom they share many titles), tiny explosions of chaos, some only 30 seconds long, combining genres as disparate as jazz, classical, country, grindcore and punk.  In this the Naked City album is itself paying homage to an earlier Torture Garden, an 1899 French Decadent novel by Octave Mirbeau.  A satirical attack on the Dreyfus Affair, the book combines found text from several different sources and features a sadist/hysteric named Clara who achieves orgasm by watching scenes of torture in a beautiful garden.  Allegory, bien sûr:

"Ah, yes! the Torture Garden! Passions, appetites, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering."

[Auguste Rodin's illustration for Le jarden des supplices (Torture Garden).]

This is a tradition that's all about pushing the limits, shocking us out of sentimental illusion into Enlightenment forms of disappointed knowledge.  Scroggins turns the screw one more time by calling his poems "pastorelles:"  "A pastourelle is a simple poem set in a rustic scene, graceful and trifling in tone, describing the meeting of a man of culture and an ingenue, generally a shepherdess."  See the shepherdess on the cover of the Naked City album?  Yes, that's her: "The motif of the young girl scolded or beaten by her parents...on account of her lover is most frequent in the pastourelle."  To Scroggins' credit he avoids reproducing the misogyny of this tradition in his own poems, but he takes energy from its violent flouting of conventions of innocence, symbolized for him by the garden:

Luminous the division and joining

bone remains sliding screens of

landscape blanched alphabets les lumières

history revealed by pathology blesséd

art thou annunciation arrowheads catching

eyes vertical shaping water love

perdures contingencies of perception endured.

                                                        ("Numbskull")

This erudite mash-up of Enlightenment ("lumière") wisdom, Christian pietism, and garden design (vertical shaping water) testifies to the failure of any of these to console us for the losses (perdures) that can only be endured.  Art such as this that pulls away the curtain of artifice to reveal the powerless spectre behind it rides a fine paradoxical line; of course the careful "shaping" of the poem itself gives us a kind of pleasure, perhaps a painful one as its purposeful obscurity assaults our ignorance and its rapidly shifting linguistic registers knock us on one side of the head and then the other like an anvil dropped on Wile E. Coyote.  (Naked City was inspired by the composer of many of the Warner Brothers cartoons, and the cartoon violence is apparent in Scroggins' volume as well.)  Despite their attention to ugliness these poems can't help being beautiful.  The final stanza in this astonishingly accomplished volume could serve as its ars poetica:

"Gob of Spit"

Repeat flip rinse fist smear

shout move twist shift grimace

wince scrub dilate disarrange dismember

ravel translate offload unravel tear

stroke penetrate gesture finger retrace

retract gesticulate lick scale gut

retrace ejaculate rage respond repeat.

 

 

Poems in the Garden: Little Sparta

Today's post was inspired by a comment from a U.K. reader, Jerome Fletcher.  Mr. Fletcher pointed me to the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who first gained renown in the 1960s as a practitioner of concrete poetry.  Concrete poetry is the kind in which the layout and typography are part of the poem's meaning, so that it is a visual as well as linguistic object.  Here is one of Finlay's "poster poems," called "Acrobats:"

Its language not only describes but enacts tumbling, rendering the materiality of words concrete.

But sometimes Finlay (who died in 2006) actually makes poems out of concrete, or stone, or wood.  At Little Sparta, the garden he created in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh with his wife and collaborator Sue Finlay, garden spaces are designed around sculptural pieces engraved with poems.  (These great photos by Andrew Lawson are all from the Little Sparta Trust website.)

In this way, Little Sparta (so named in contrast to nearby Edinburgh, "the Athens of the North," with whom Finlay had been in decades-long conflict over issues of zoning and taxes) participates in a long tradition of poet-philosophers' gardens going back to classical times and epitomized in the eighteenth century by William Shenstone's The Leasowes.

Finlay's themes include pre-Socratic views of nature, the French Revolution, World War II, and the sea.  (Click on these horizontally-oriented shots to see them at full width.)

He works with master stonemasons and woodcarvers to produce virtuoso works of art.

Little Sparta is open to the public and I can't wait to visit it.

If Gardens Are Art, Who Is The Artist?

Yesterday I had the very great pleasure of participating in a panel discussion on my book, Sister Arts.  Several of my graduate and undergraduate students were there, including Max, an especially engaged member of my lower-division Introduction to Creative Writing class.  Max asked the first question and it was probably the most productive of the whole discussion:  "If gardens are art, who is the artist?"

In some ways this is a very American question.  There is a long and distinguished tradition of English garden historians who have made careers out of studying gardens as art, an equation that is rarely questioned in English academic or museum contexts.  When I participated in a workshop at Sir John Soane's Museum to help plan the Mrs Delany and Her Circle exhibition, the group of about twenty curators and academics included a specialist in the history of grasses, one who studied shellwork, and Mark Laird of Harvard, who had just finished re-creating the eighteenth-century plantings at Painshill Park.  

But by the same token, the English themselves make a distinction between garden designers, whose work is studied by historians of landscape architecture like Laird,  and gardeners, those who carry out the "simple job" of maintaining the garden.  I've written here and here about the status of gardening as England's national pastime; working-class men who in America would be fixing cars on the weekends instead tend their roses,

or as in the case of this 2009 winner of the Scarisbrick Parish Best-Kept Garden Competition, their petunias.  At most, this work is regarded as craft rather than art; at least, as property maintenance, a kind of outdoor housework.  In the sister arts tradition of confounding the line between amateur and professional, art and craft, garden and landscape, we want want to claim these blokes as sister-artists.  (Wouldn't they be surprised.)

In answering Max's question I talked about three kinds of garden makers:  the wealthy patron of taste who envisions and funds the project of a major garden, such as Jane, Duchess of Northumberland, whose Alnwick Garden, which I wrote about here,  is the most ambitious contemporary landscape design in Europe:

the celebrity designer, like Capability Brown (1716-1783), seen here in a Nathaniel Dance portrait:

and the groundskeeper who actually plants, weeds, trims, waters and sweeps to keep the garden looking as intended, as here at Alnwick.

One of my favorite examples of how this third, often overlooked garden artist can affect meaning is on the UT campus just outside the English department.  UT's landscape is liberally strewn with statues by Pompeo Luigi Compini, dating from the early twentieth century; many of them are of rather dubious figures from Confederate history.  On the plaza in front of the Main Building, topped by the infamous UT Tower, two statues face down the quad to the Texas State Capitol a few blocks away:  Woodrow Wilson to the east, and Jefferson Davis, former President of the Confederacy, to the west.  

The plaza's axial design means that the statues were meant to be a matched set, equally visible from the quad.  But over several years of teaching a course called Sister Arts in which I take students around campus to look at its design features, I've noticed that someone has trimmed the trees beside the Davis statue so that branches obscure its face when viewed from the quad.  You can see Woodrow Wilson just fine, but Davis has been literally thrust into the shadows by the anonymous garden artists of the UT groundskeeping crew.

Black Nature

I've been longing to read and write about (and write poems with) Camille T. Dungy's anthology, Black Nature:  Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry ever since Dungy came to Austin as the guest of the Pro Arts Collective this spring. I've finally run through my backlog of English garden photos from my summer travels, so today I was able to sit down with this luscious, thoughtful book.

the earth is a living thing

 

is a black shambling bear

ruffling its wild back and tossing

mountains into the sea

 

is a black hawk circling

the burying ground circling the bones

picked clean and discarded

 

is a fish black blind in the belly of water

is a diamond blind in the black belly of coal

 

is a black and living thing

is a favorite child

of the universe

feel her rolling her hand

in its kinky hair

feel her brushing it clean

                                -Lucille Clifton

In her introduction, Dungy points out that in ecopoetics, a new-millenium movement denoting writing with a strong ecological emphasis or message, African Americans "have been generally absent from tables of contents."  Indeed, at the recent Poets and Scholars symposium at The University of Texas, Lesley Wheeler said at a roundtable that for her, ecopoetics seems to be a way to create another white canon in the wake of the opening-up of American poetry more generally to non-white voices. 

And yet, as Ravi Howard points out in one of the ten brief critical essays included here, "Waves of paradise carried slave ships.  In southern woodlands grew both emancipation oaks and hanging trees.  (Could some have been both?  Can we ever know?)  Along with the rice, tobacco, and cotton, the enslaved grew okra and yams, pieces of home for many transpanted Africans.  The connections to nature, those that haunt and those that nurture, have been with us all along."

More soon as I continue to work through this amazing book.

 

Gertrude Jekyll Garden at Lindisfarne Castle

We had spent most of the morning waiting in an Edinburgh queue for our rental car.  Then Milo had to go to the bathroom so we stopped in Dunbar on the Scottish coast, where we enjoyed the self-proclaimed "Best Loo of 2010" facilities. In addition to the loo (which really was pretty fantastic), Dunbar boasts the ruins of a "slighted" castle, one deliberately destroyed in 1568 to prevent it falling into enemy hands.  The castle is set on a promontory in Victoria Harbor, the day was fresh and beautiful, and we lingered.  The children rolled down the steep grassy embankment to the harbor again and again. 

So by the time we got to Lindisfarne Castle, our destination for the day, it was early afternoon.  I had plucked this site from the British Heritage Pass list in haste, thinking it had literary associations.  A Scott novel?  (It turned out to be where the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of England's finest surviving illuminated manuscripts, was created in the eighth century.  Oh well.)  The castle is on Holy Island off the coast of Northumberland, and can only be reached by a causeway.  The causeway, in turn, is accessible only at low tide.  And the tide comes back in at 3:45 p.m. in August. 

We raced across the causeway and skidded into the parking lot just in time to catch the last shuttle bus up to the castle.  Our first acquaintance with the truly impenetrable Northumberland accent was when the driver told us, not once but several times, that we would not get to the castle in time for the last entry at 2:30.  We just kept saying we wanted to try.

We hustled the children up the steep stone path to the castle entrance.  As we were showing our pass to get in, I noticed a pamphlet about the Gertrude Jekyll garden at Lindisfarne.  Which I had not known.  Anything.  About.

I pretty much lost my mind, abandoned Madge and the kids, and raced across the meadow to the small walled garden Jekyll created with her collaborator, the architect Edwin Lutyens, who renovated the castle in the Arts and Crafts style starting in 1901.  The two worked together on some famous commissions, but this one, for publishing magnate Edward Hudson, is one of the few that remains.  Hudson featured the work of Lutyens and Jekyll, as well as their writings on home and garden design, in his iconic magazine Country Life, confirming their status as households names of the English domestic arts. 

I like to think of Jekyll as the Gertrude Stein of English garden history.  (She never married, and wore men's boots.)

Although the garden had fallen into disrepair by mid-century, it was restored according to Jekyll's original plan when the property was acquired by the National Trust in 1944.  It's one of only four Jekyll gardens left in the world.  I had stumbled upon a jewel.

Jekyll's designs are known for their untouched sweeps of lawn and naturalistic planting.  Hudson had originally envisaged a vast landscaped area stretching from the original 16th-century walled garden all the way up to the castle walls, creating a unified work of art from house and garden as was typical of Lutyens-Jekyll collaborations.  But he ran out of money by the time Jekyll began work in 1911, so she was constrained to this rather boxy design.  Needless to say, she rocked it.

Jekyll's signature massed beds of one color,

and unique cultivars--she herself developed almost 60 new varieties and introduced hundreds more to English gardens from around the world--including woolly lambs-ear, a staple of Austin gardens--

bear all the marks of her signature style.  She used form as well as color to shape her garden artifacts.

I had only about fifteen minutes in this treasure-box before the tide rolled in.  I snapped pictures so quickly I actually broke my camera and had to use my iPhone for the rest of our trip.  Madge and the kids almost had to drive off the island without me.

All the more precious for that.

 

Holyrood Palace Garden

Plodding down the rain-soaked Royal Mile in Edinburgh in August, we four drought-battered Texans could not have been happier.  We toured the palace best known as the royal residence of Mary, Queen of Scots, and then the skies cleared just in time for Max and I to walk through the garden.

Holyroodhouse Palace is the official residence of the British monarch in Scotland, and the Queen spends one week a year here in early summer.  (Like Queen Victoria, she prefers Balmoral for family vacations.)  Built in the twelfth century by King David I of Scotland, the palace was where Elizabeth I had the advisors of her cousin and rival, Mary, Queen of Scots, murdered, as both a strategy and a warning.  We saw the tiny royal bedroom where Mary was sitting at dinner when her men were dragged into the adjoining chamber and audibly slaughtered.  Although Mary lived for another twenty years, Elizabeth managed to keep her from the throne.  She essentially kidnapped Mary's son James and raised him as a Protestant as the price of letting the monarchy fall back into Stuart hands after her death.  The green, northern darkness of the 10-hectare garden seemed a fit setting for this bloody history.

A privy garden has existed on this site since the 16th century, although the current design dates from the 19th, when the current carriage drive was installed to spare royal visitors the trip through the Canongate slums on their way to the palace.  Sculptural features include a 17th-century John Mylne sundial and this undated piece of Burnsian whimsy:

The overcast day showed off the garden's subtle contrasts of color

and texture. 

For a color slut like me, the garden was a little monochromatic, but it certainly had its dark charms, including lots of my favorite color, purple. As you complete the circuit, you come back around to the front of the palace from which you get a spectacular view of Arthur's Seat, the hill overlooking Edinburgh. 

As I write here at the end of the driest 11-month period since Texas began keeping records in 1895, Holyrood Garden's damp northern beauty is a cooling memory.

 

 

 

Harry Potter's Garden

Travelling with ten- and seven-year-old boys, you come to see the U.K. as one giant Harry Potter theme park.  In Oxford, you can do a Harry Potter tour of colleges used as film locations.  In Edinburgh, you can sit in the back room of the Elephant Cafe and gaze at the view of Stirling Castle that inspired J.K. Rowling when, as an unemployed single mother, she penned the first two books in the series.  (And of course, you can purchase the indispensable "Birthplace of Harry Potter" muggle...er, mug.)  But our best day of Harry Potter tourism took place at Alnwick Castle, the "Hogwarts" of all eight movies, where Max and Milo took broomstick-flying lessons.

Fortunately for me, Alnwick is the site of what is reputed to be the most ambitious current garden project in Britain.  The castle, built after the Norman Conquest and renovated many times to fit the tastes of different eras, is the home of the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland.  The family is in residence for part of every year, and Alnwick Castle Garden is the project of the current Duchess, Jane.  Many of the gardens I've written about have the goal of historical re-creation, attempting to showcase a classic design from another period.  This garden is decidedly contemporary.  Work did not begin on the garden until 1996.  Since then, Jacques and Peter Wirtz, the stellar Belgian garden design team, have been working with the Duchess to bring her vision of a "garden for gardeners" that is also a "garden for families" to life. 

The first thing you see is a spectacular water feature by William Pye, The Grand Cascade.

The bold linearity of the design is set off by luxurious textures, such as the river rocks at the bottom of the small waterways

that run throughout the garden.  At the top of the Cascade is the Ornamental Garden, where this hard/soft tension is expressed through the contrast between the perfectly-trimmed, sharp-angled box and beech hedges

and the lush shapes and intense colors of the plantings.

Once again I greeted the familiar coneflower (ecinachea), which it turns out is as popular a garden flower in England as in Texas, where we like it because it can tolerate drought and heat.  Apparently it doesn't object to temperate climes and lots of rain either.

This part of the landscape garden is walled, and makes imaginative use of the textural contrasts between stone and shrub.  Often, the relationship is a delightful surprise:  it is the artfully-shaped yew topiary that seems hard while the warm, weathered stone looks soft.

The rectilinear crabapple pergolas shaped the space beautifully,

reminding me of the Donald Judd sculptures in Marfa, Texas.

Alnwick Castle Garden currently consists of ten different features, and I was not able to visit them all, but I could not resist venturing behind the locked gate of the Poison Garden.

In addition to well-known posionous plants such as deadly nightshade and stinging nettle, there were familiar garden plants such as laurel and vinca that I had not realized "can kill."  Opium poppies, cannabis, and even tea had their place, for as our guide (no one is allowed in the poison garden without a guide) reminded us, addictive substances work because they are just a tiny bit toxic.  I'll bet this is where the the students in the Hogwarts Potions class do their fieldwork.

Ignoring the Path of Virtue at Stourhead

Stourhead Park is one of the greatest eigheenth-century English gardens,

designed by the wealthy landowner Henry Hoare ("the Magnificent Hoare," a nickname that gave my students lots of giggles) after his return from the Grand Tour of Europe.  Like so many other Grand Touring aristocrats, he had fallen in love with the landscape paintings of Claude,

Poussin,

and Dughet.

Returning after several years loaded down with precious artifacts, including rare books and paintings, Hoare decided to create an Italian landscape in the English countryside.  Unlike other gentlemen of taste, he did not hire a professional landscape designer but did the work himself.  He had the Elizabethan house pulled down and replaced by a Palladian villa,

and also created, over many years, an exquisite landscape garden on more than two thousand acres.  Stourhead landscape garden is considered, in the "sister arts" tradition of the eighteenth century, to be both "painterly" and "poetic."  It is one of the chief examples of the notion that gardens, paintings and poems are "sisters" among the arts, capable of the highest form of aesthetic expression and thus each possessed in some degree of the qualities of the others.  Henry Hoare's garden, then, not only looks like a Claude painting, it also has a poetic meaning, a narrative that unfolds in time as visitors make their way around the property.  The most famous of the circuit gardens at Stourhead presents the visitor with a choice between the Path of Virtue, which leads up a steep and rocky climb to the Temple of Apollo

where one is rewarded with a spectacular view across the lake to the misty, Claudian horizon, and the Path of Vice, which leads, by a short, easy downhill walk, to the pub. 

I've always loved bringing students to Stourhead and I consider it one of my favorite walks in the world.  But on Monday, I decided that since I know the gardens fairly well, I would concentrate on two things:  looking that the spectacular collections in the house, which I had never visited, and finally getting some time for a little sketching of my own.  It was hard not to feel guilty as I sent the students (and Sam) off up the steep climb while I plopped myself down in front of a hydrangea bush.  But my talentless, completely untrained sketches are a major way that I relax, focus, and really see what's in front of me, and I have been missing the practice.  Besides, Stourhead's hydrangeas were beyond gorgeous that day, whether seen from a distance,

in a medium shot,

close up,

or even in an amateur's notebook.

And that's why the last four photos in this post are the only ones I took myself.

 

Jane Austen's Gardens

Here is a picture of me in JANE AUSTEN'S BEDROOM.

It's hard to imagine a greater thrill.  I checked out my first Austen novel from the library at Milton Williams Junior High School in Calgary, wrote an essay on Sense and Sensibility at university that became my first academic conference paper, wrote a chapter of my dissertation, which turned into my first book, on Emma, and have taught courses on Austen for twenty years, including two previous times on the Oxford Program.  But because I've always been interested in landscape and aesthetic issues in the novels and thus filled up our field trips with visits to famous eighteenth-century gardens, it was not until this trip that I took students to the Chawton House Library and the Jane Austen House Museum in Chawton.  The first was the residence of Austen's wealthy brother Edward and the second the "cottage" in which she lived with her mother, her sister Cassandra, and their friend Martha Lloyd and in which she revised, wrote and/or published her six masterpieces.

There is, of course, one greater thrill for a confirmed Janeite such as myself who also happens to be a garden writer.

Yes, here I am in JANE AUSTEN'S GARDEN.  Or to be precise, the walled garden planned by Jane, Cassandra and Edward but not built until shortly after the writer's death in 1817.  Edward Austen Knight was an early adopter of the nineteenth-century craze for walled gardens.  Although the tradition of the hortus conclusus or enclosed garden goes back to medieval Persia, and many gardens were surrounded by hedges or fences throughout the Renaissance, Jacobean and Georgian periods, the nineteenth century saw a technological breakthrough.  Gardens surrounded by two brick or stone walls with a narrow space between them could be heated by fires or hot water pipes running through the space.  Heat-loving imported plants could be grown against the warm walls, and even the center of the garden could be a few degrees warmer than the normal English climate, thus cheating the temperate summer into a longer growing season.  Thus, the espaliered fruit tree is a signature feature of the nineteenth-century walled garden.  Here is an espaliered cherry tree at Chawton:

The hardier apples were bearing well in the middle of the garden, where it looks like the gardeners have trained a free-standing tree to look espaliered, a charming effect:

Of course I loved the massed, Gertude Jekyll style flowerbeds,

and was delighted to see an old friend from Austin gardens, ecinachea or coneflower, looking just a little less sunburned than at home.

In addition to the fruit trees, the garden features several vegetable beds including crops like my favorite "pie plant," rhubarb,

which thrives in a temperate climate (it grew in our backyard in Calgary), and North American relative newcomers like squash.

All the produce from the Chawton garden is used to feed the staff of the library, with extras sold at local markets and the proceeds going to the Chawton House Library foundation. 

On the other side of the village of Chawton is the Jane Austen House Museum, which also has a beautiful restored garden.

The flowerbeds here were spectacular, showier than those at Chawton, which was after all designed as a working kitchen garden.

There is a small physic and herb garden,

but at its heart this is a place to enjoy what Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, Austen's best-known tree hugger, would call the refreshing sweets of nature.

 

The Pleasures of Prior Park

Although I've taken students to English gardens on two previous stints on the Oxford Program, this is the first time I've visited Prior Park, just outside Bath.  The day before our trip, I gave my students a quick run-down on the emergence of the open, "natural" English garden style, which replaced the popularity of French and Italian formal, geometric gardens as the hot trend in 18th-century Europe.  Prior Park is a leading example of the English garden designed by two of its most famous proponents, Lancelot "Capability" Brown (so-called because he was willing to move your trees around and install lakes in just the right places for a perfect view) and the poet and gardenist Alexander Pope.

A few students were ahead of me on the path through shady woods as we climbed to the first viewing-point.  As each emerged into the sunlight at the top of the hill, I heard him or her gasp.  "Oh my God."  "Wow."  "OH MY GOD."  It was like the restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally.  I hurried a little faster. 

Here's what we saw:

And yes, it was that good.

The Palladian bridge is one of only four in Europe (the only one outside England was built by Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg, and is made of marble).  This one is one of the most famous "dazzlers" (architectural features meant to serve as a focal point in the landscape) in garden history.  It was completely unavailable to visitors until Prior Park was bought by the National Trust in 1991 and renovated, for the first time since the original owner's death in 1756. 

On our busy-busy study abroad schedule, we had only an hour or so in the park before we had to go on to the Jane Austen sites in Bath.  Also, my camera ran out of memory and so was able to take only three pictures that day, including the one above.  My friend Sabrina took the last one:

Move over, Meg Ryan.