Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Art, Community

Houston Ekphrasis

Ekphrasis is the ultimate sister arts mode:  art about art.  On Sunday I talked my friends Allen and Susannah into a road trip to Houston to visit the museum district and take part in a poetry contest sponsored by the Houston reading series Public Poetry.  I love museums but so often visit them only when I'm travelling; this seemed like a great excuse to revisit the major museums we're lucky enough to have just a few hours down the highway.  Here are some Robert Longo pieces in the fabulous Menil Collection:

The works chosen by Public Poetry for us to write about were in the Museum of Fine Arts.  There were nine of them, ranging from a Mangbetu (Congo) anthropomorphic harp:

to a John Singer Sargent portrait of Mrs. Joshua Montgomery Sears.

Allen had the best line of the day about the contest.  I had printed out some information about it from my women poets list, and the person who sent it wrote that we should get discounted admission to the museum as participants.  So I mentioned this at the front desk.  The older South Asian lady behind the desk looked dubious but consented to take the papers I had and looked through a big binder with them in her hand.  Nothing.  So she called her supervisor.  Still nothing.  No one had ever heard of the contest or Public Poetry.  She sent us down an escalator and through a long underground art installation called the Wilson Tunnel to a building at the other end of the block, to the main membership desk.  There too the young blonde Houston socialite behind that counter had never heard of us and could not find a key on her cash register with which to give us a discount.  "Are you with The Art Crowd?" she kept asking, because apparently if we were, she could let us in.  No, not with The Art Crowd.  So she called HER supervisor who flipped impatiently through our by-now-dog-eared printouts, tossed them back across the desk, and pointed to a key on the register:  "Free admission.  Just give them free admission." 

Allen said, "We are going to win this contest."  Because no one else has ever heard of 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.

On Phillis Wheatley's Imagination

Today I had the pleasure of hearing Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley give a talk on the voudon loa Ezili, a force of nature that protects femininity and creativity, as an epistemology for understanding Caribbean genders and transgenders.  I have been working slowly and with great pleasure through Tinsley's book Thiefing Sugar:  Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature.

I was electrified to read the following sentence in Tinsley's Introduction:  "What happens when the beloved/landscape and the poet/lover are both women?"  Although Tinsley is writing about Caribbean literature and I'm writing about eighteenth-century gardens, these questions also describe the project of my own recent book, Sister Arts.  I think that makes our books sisters.

In this afternoon's lecture Tinsley spoke movingly about the hard work of being a black woman (as instanced by the cultural work of misisis and madivines, the Haitian genderqueers who are the focus of her new research).  She also talked about the transformative power of feeling good, and about the crucial role the imagination must play in that transformation.  My friend Omi Jones was in the audience and asked Tinsley about how she was experimenting, post-tenure, with new, poetic forms of writing (for instance in her recent essay "Black Atlantic/Queer Atlantic.")  And that made me think of Phillis Wheatley

whose poem "On Imagination" I read this morning as I continued to make my way through Black Nature, which I've written about here and here.  It's always seemed to me a stunning poem on many levels, not least of which is the sheer ambition of writing a sublime and existential poem that engages with a major Enlightenment aesthetic debate, all from a position of enslavement.  But not of the imagination, and that's the point.  That's the way in which the virtuousity of Wheatley's poetry is always making a rhetorical argument in favor the humanity of the speaker, but in the face of dizzyingly high stakes that would have silenced a lesser talent.  For your inspiration today, here is her poem:

Thy various works, imperial queen, we see,
How bright their forms! how deck'd with pomp by thee!
Thy wond'rous acts in beauteous order stand,
And all attest how potent is thine hand.
From Helicon's refulgent heights attend,
Ye sacred choir, and my attempts befriend:
To tell her glories with a faithful tongue,
Ye blooming graces, triumph in my song.
Now here, now there, the roving Fancy flies,
Till some lov'd objects strikes her wand'ring eyes,
Whose silken fetters all the senses bind,
And soft captivity involves the mind.

Imagination! who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Soaring though air to find the bright abode,
Th'empyreal palace of the thund'ring God,
We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind;
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies, and range the realms above.
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze th' unbounded soul.

Though Winter frowns to Fancy's raptur'd eyes
The fields may flourish, and gay scenes arise;
The frozen deeps may break their iron bands,
And bid their waters murmur o'er the sands.
Fair Flora may resume her fragrant reign,
And with her flow'ry riches deck the plain;
Sylvanus may diffuse his honours round,
And all the forest may with leaves be crown'd;
Show'rs may descend, and dews their gems disclose,
And nectar sparkle on the blooming rose.

Such is thy pow'r, nor are thine orders vain,
O thou the leader of the mental train:
In full perfection all thy works are wrought,
And thine the sceptre o'er the realms of thought.
Before thy throne the subject-passions bow,
Of subject-passions sov'reign ruler Thou,
At thy command joy rushes on the heart,
And through the glowing veins the spirits dart.

Fancy might now her silken pinions try
To rise from earth, and sweep th' expanse on high;
From Tithon's bed now might Aurora rise,
Her cheeks all glowing with celestial dies,
While a pure stream of light o'erflows the skies.
The monarch of the day I might behold,
And all the mountains tipt with radiant gold,
But I reluctant leave the pleasing views,
Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse;
Winter austere forbids me to aspire,
And northern tempests damp the rising fire;
They chill the tides of Fancy's flowing sea,
Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay.

1767-1773?

Wheatley is, as Tinsley would say, one of Ezili's children.

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.

 

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.

 

Gardens of Yorkshire

There's just too much to say about our whirlwind two-day tour of Bronte country and the seacoast town of Whitby.  Improbably brilliant colors under changeable grey skies; every humble dooryard exploding with flowers; wide expanses of wild country in grays, greens and purples.

Walking through the village of Haworth was a lesson in floriculture. 

I actually had to feel the petals sometimes to believe the flowers were real.

These are the front gardens of modest row houses, designed, planted and maintained not by professionals but by ordinary people.

Walking past garden after garden gave me a palpable sense of how deeply this art form is sunk into English culture.  It is an art that many practice with a high degree of skill, and most know at least enough about to enjoy. 
It's hard to come up with a North American equivalent...would it be cooking?  Swimming?  I don't know.

But we could not linger long at dooryards, however beautiful.  Our destination was sublimity.  We wanted to dare the cliche and walk the moors in the footsteps of the Brontes.

And we were not disappointed.  This was another Sam-Baker's-Ordnance-Survey adventure, and we had a glorious time getting lost and then finding ourselves again under skies that alternately smiled and threatened, but were always spectacular.

The landscape contains a wide variety of ground cover and flowers,

always in the same subdued and lovely palette.

Walking back into town after an exhilarating four hours, we visited the Bronte Parsonage Museum and its garden.

At the Parsonage as in the neighboring churchyard where the Brontes are buried, the colors of the flowers against the grey stone walls and endless rows of tombstones seems to add to the melancholy atmosphere rather than cheer things up.

Especially after seeing the dark, expressive portraits and tiny personal effects of the family in the museum, the place felt spooky.  Sublime, rather than beautiful. 

This mood continued when we arrived at Whitby the next morning and jumped off the bus to gales of wind and temperatures worthy of a Texas winter.  A ruined abbey dominates the sea-cliff, surrounded by another enormous graveyard where key scenes in Bram Stoker's Dracula are set.  But facing the ocean is also a cheerful crescent of Georgian townhouses worthy of Bath, fronted by--of course--a lovely garden.

 

Tramping with Sam

I'm really enjoying spending time in Oxford with my "frolleagues," Sam, Phil, and Sabrina (and 15-year-old Eli).  Sam and I both like to hike so Sunday morning we set off early to walk north out of the city of Oxford.  Our destination was John Buchan's gravesite in Elsfield, and then we planned to circle back around to the Victoria Arms, a pub on the Cherwell about a fifteen-minute walk from where we are living in the north Oxford neighborhood of Summertown.

After about thirty minutes on bike paths through the suburbs, we hit wheat fields.

It's been rainy the last few days so the track through the fields was pretty muddy.  At one point I looked at Sam's pants and thought, "Wow, he is muddy up to the knees.  I wonder how he got so much muddier than I did?"  Then I looked at my own pants, and they were worse. 

Sam had an Ordnance Survey map of the region.  Although I've used topo maps hiking in North America, this was my first encounter with the legendary Ordnance, started in the eighteenth century as an Enlightentment project of total knowledge.  The goal:  to map every square inch of the island of Britain.  Often Sam and I would pause to look for the next path and spy a barely-discernible tamping-down of the grass.  Could that be it?  And THERE IT WOULD BE on the Ordnance Survey map.  Not only every cowpath, but every barn, outbuilding, and house was on that map.  My parents' ranch in Alberta is criss-crossed with tracks much more substantial than some of those we followed, but I know they are not on any map.  Sam kept the invaluable document tucked under his arm:

In this way, we proceeded past the estate of Water Eaton,

under occasional showers, against which I had provided myself with what turned out to be an utterly useless poncho,

through the village of Wood Eaton, and to the Church of St. Thomas of Canterbury in Elsfield.

Sam is a fan of John Buchan, the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps.  Sam had heard that he was buried with his chauffeur, but we could find no mention of this.  Looking around at the graves, though, I noticed that next to Buchan's striking circular headstone

was one commemorating Amos Combs with the statement, "for twenty years the friend of Lord Tweedsmuir."  I pointed it out to Sam, and he said, "You found the chauffeur?"  "But what about Lord Tweedsmuir?"  I asked.  "Was it a threesome?"  No, as it turned out Lord Tweedsmuir and John Buchan are one and the same.  Tweedsmuir is a familiar name to me because he was the Governor General of Canada in the early 20th century.  There's a private school in Calgary named after him and that's where all my druggie friends got sent when they got into trouble at the public high school.  So not only was my gaydar affirmed, I also got some unexpected CanCon.

On our way back into Oxford, we met some very handsome locals:

and later saw evidence of the activity of their wives:

Thinking of eggs made us hungry, and by the time we reached our destination, we had been out five hours.  Needless to say, the reward of a Sunday roast at the pub was most welcome.

Thanks to Sam and the Ordnance Survey, it was a wonderful day out.

 

 

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.

 

Blogarchy in the UK: Anne Hathaway's Garden

This summer I'm fortunate enough to be leading a five-week study-abroad trip to Oxford University.  In the past, when I've been a faculty member on the program, one of its many appeals has been the way in which travel pulls you out of your daily routine and actually opens up new swathes of time.  Most of the watercolor sketching I've done, for example, has been here at Oxford on one of my previous two trips.

But this year I'm the Program Director as well as a faculty member and I am shocked--SHOCKED--to have gotten to the end of the first week without posting!  Things have been crazy around here.  Now that we are up and running I hope to have more time to post about the truly spectacular gardens that are woven into the fabric of the English landscape, urban and rural.

Our first trip out of Oxford was to take the students to see "The Scottish Play"(we were warned not to say the title even while on our way to the theater!) at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon.  The best historical site among the Bardolatry in Stratford is the Tudor farmhouse known as Anne Hathaway's Cottage.

No, not her.  Shakespeare's wife grew up in this house and probably looked more like this:

Actually, if Tudor Anne Hathaway had a Hollywood stylist she would probably be pretty hot.  She was already pregnant when Shakespeare married her.

The garden is an attempt to both re-create a Tudor kitchen garden in style and form and to preserve heritage English plants authentic to the period. 

Strangely, even though England has had an unusually warm, dry, globally-warmed spring, everything is over-the-top blooming. 

I guess dry for England is still pretty wet.  And these gardens are of course irrigated for our touristic pleasure. 

I especially loved the plants that also thrive in Canadian gardens, such as these incredible sweet peas,

espaliered along a path which leads to a meadowy space planted with apple trees

and a sculpture garden.

This undated piece by Somerset artist Jane Lawrence is called History Play.  Behind the standing piece, the cut-out shapes of Great Britain and Ireland lie on the ground, set in concrete.  It's quite effective.

We had another glorious day at Prior Park Landscape Garden this week, but more about that in my next post.