Every Garden Links to Eden

It’s not unusual that one’s first experience of the garden is through the graces of a woman. In my case it was my grandmother Taylor’s garden in Mississippi. The Taylor’s had what would now be called a small homestead, seventy acres, some of it in bottom land where blackberries grew in profusion (how idyllic it was to go picking berries in the late afternoon, with the lengthening shadows beginning to cast the small hollow along the creek into a cool, damp refuge from the heat of the day, the gentle slopes having the look almost of a mowed yard from the eating of the couple of milk cows, two horses, and sometimes a goat. On the way back, as we went though the gate we would pick some mulberries from a large tree by the gate. I can still hear in memory the soft clank of a cow bell in the distance and the hoot of an owl beginning its evening menu as dusk began to set in.)

My grandmother’s flower garden was enclosed with a little wire fence and stretched around the old L-shaped porch, a fixture of many of the old unpainted clapboard farmhouses. The only flower I really remember, other than the spring Lycoris, shooting up nakedly, all pink and sprangly looking, was the flowering maple or abutilon, with its peculiar stamen poking out the bottom and striking red and yellow motif. It’s funny how flowers go in and out of fashion: one rarely sees the flowering maple in urban gardens – although I’ll bet you can catch a glimpse of it occasionally out ‘in the country’ (not the ‘burbs for sure, all of which tends to ‘monocrop’ otherwise know as Fescue). Every time we would visit, I would rush to the push lawnmower and begin to run wildly with over the small yard, amid cries from the porch to watch out for this or that newly emerging plant. In the back yard to the side was a chinaberry tree (Melia azedarach: I love the name, sounds Babylonian), known for its berries (nothing better for a young lad with a slingshot!) and a peculiar habit of sending up loads of vertical shoots – another tree you seldom see in the city (alas, now consdered as an alien invasive by some). The back yard itself was a swept yard, that is, nothing but fine powered dirt scratched up by the wandering every-present chickens, occasionally broomed with a handmade rough broom by my grandmother.

A few paces from the house were a couple of cherry trees, not the bing cherry but a yellow fruit, a small bush or tree often found by the roadside of the many dirt/gravel roads in the area. And of course a large fig tree, a very large pear tree further out, a small pecan orchard of about 5 or 6 trees out across from the small vegetable garden, and a muscadine vine formed into a large lump with a sort of hollow inside, formed from the growth of the stems as it wrapped around its little arbor and kept moving toward the light. I always loved the little pop of the hard skin and then the gelatinous pulp, then the almost impossible to extricate seeds. I later found out as an adult that my grandfather ordered many of these plants from the old Hastings Seed and Feed store in Atlanta. The building is still there on Marietta Street (and strange to think that I did an installation piece there a number of years ago, as the building was commandeered by an arts group). Hastings of course is still around over on the other side of Lenox Square on Peachtree but in nothing like its former farmerly glory, not even a reminder (since most folks wouldn’t remember its origins as a seed and feed farm supply) but a flower boutique shop complete with parrots and a large outdoor miniature train set.

Of course, the most immediate garden nestled up close to the old farmhouse was for pleasure, the next vegetable gardens for more corporeal sustenance, and then my grandfather grew many acres in corn, which he took into town to sell. These days the farm would be called a sustainable enterprise (he even had a little blacksmith shop) and there many of these little enterprises all throughout the rural areas of the country. Now they are almost non-existent (although circumstances seem to mitigate they come back – if nothing else, to give the hope and prospect of having access to non-industrial-method-non-agribusness non-toxic fruits and vegetable)

At any rate, this closeness to the green world must have indelible imprinted itself somewhere in my psyche since much of my sculptural work (such as this kitchen table I designed and built) seems informed by a biomorphic impetus. (Alan Sondheim once said to me as he was taking a tour around my old house which I reformed in relation to the vegetable kingdom, something to the effect of "Gosh, why are you still doing this surrealist stuff?!" A I write this, I am reminded of the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard who, as he was coming to my house for an interview for perforations, made some negative comment about surrealism, in retrospect, an obvious slam against the house and surroundings….it might have been more appropriate for him to have addressed it as a mater of the 'art noveau' era; but then I suppose they both have a lot to do with the ever-fecund floral underbelly of the human, the tendrils of which always threaten to emerge and swamp our more right-angled – read: rational -- world. And there is the case that Professor Lyotard is now part of that green world.)

At any rate, the bioform is a perennial 'thing'. Us humans have managed to escape as far as possible from the vegetable kingdom ( I can't help but think there is a certain fear there) but there is a definite, and great, price to be paid for it. And besides that we carry it with us deep inside and will continue to do so until we become completely transformed by the 'Matrix' into something other than human.

So for better or worse, I am stuck somewhat on the bioform as an ur-form – not necessarily to the exclusion of everything else but certainly as something that always carries a charge for me, something that brings the outside inside and, oddly enough, vice versa.

So it is no wonder that the Garden is a fabulous thing, a wondrousness which has a consistency all though out history and probably pre-history, a place of myth where fairies and dryads show up, and all sorts of creatures that interlock with the human id.

As far as I can tell, a garden is a necessity, not a luxury: there is something of the garden we need both physically and mentally. The distance we have become removed from that ancient kingdom is the distance we lapse into a sort of cultural sickness, an (ongoing) lapsarian order which is defined by conflict on all levels. Even the placement and care of a simple cottage garden can restore some sense of balance, some acknowledgement of those vast green ‘intelligencies’ which allow us to stay alive. In a less than romantic age, in an age that tries to forget its history, the Garden (harkening back to all the Gardens of Eden though out all cultural memories) somehow maintains its subdermal grip on imagination and memory, a romanticism of all forms and of the highest order, but one indebted to the most profound work of all: life.

Freedonia is dedicated to a new appreciation of this new yet very old world. This blog site will exist to drum up some business in design and construction of gardens (baby always gotta have new shoes you know), to talk about gardening issues, favorite plants, an occasional rant here and there (as some may know, committed gardeners are also often very good ranters), favorite plants, the philosophy of gardening, design issues and who knows what else. We hope you will return and engage in some conversation with us AND engage us for some money to change hands in return for some beauty, contemplation, and maybe even a new way of thinking.

But I’d like to close from an extended passage from a most wonderful book I am currently reading, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison .

Happy gardening and stay in touch!
Robert Cheatham

"If life is indeed a subset of gardening, rather than the other way around, then there is every reason to believe that if humankind has to entrust its future to anyone, it should entrust it to the gardener, or to those who, like the gardener, invest themselves in a future of which they will in part be authors, though they will not be around to witness its full unfolding:

' The gardener wants eleven hundred years to test, to learn to know, and appreciate fully what is his …. We gardeners live somehow for the future; if roses are in flower, we think that next year they will flower better; and in some few
years this little spruce will become a tree – if only those few years were behind
me! I should like to see what these birches will be like in fifty years. The right, the
best is in front of us.' (Karek Capek, The Gardener’s Year)

Even if history tells us that this is by no means always the case, the gardener must continue to believe that 'he best is in front of us.' For without such faith there would be no gardeners, and without gardeners there would be no future, for better of worse."