Jardin d’Art et d’Essais, pt 7
Cécile once traveled on a garden tour of England, where she saw the Osborne House, a former residence of Queen Victoria. There was a Lebanon cedar, a magnificent plant with powerful branches that extended out to embrace the air, the lower ones barely, ever so delicately, kissing the ground at their end. Cécile, with her experience in the garden, looked at those branches and thought: what a pain that must be to mow around! If that tree were in a garden “à la française” — that is, like the gardens of Versailles, the style that emphasizes order, the triumph of the rational human mind over nature — the branch would surely have been cut. But here, the tree was treated with tenderness, so rather than cutting the branch, great pains are taken to mow the grass without hurting it. She tries to keep a similar attitude on her garden. If a branch develops buds while leaning into the path, she’ll carefully lift it up and move it each time she goes past, waiting for it to flower before cutting it back.
And what could be the motivation for this tenderness but love? Perhaps a gardener who cuts a hedge into a rectangular prism is driven by love — but a love of geometry, not of plants. Love does not demand that its object conform itself to the lover’s wishes. Cécile tells me that she cared little for plants when she started this work thirty years ago but has by now developed a strong empathy for plants — she says that plants suffer when they have been uprooted and have not been transplanted, or that they will be happy when we cut an obstruction and give them more sun. Love means sacrifice, and sacrifice deepens love — and Cécile has sacrificed for the garden. She is in the soil every day, working with her hands, giving her a sense of connection not felt when using a machine. The intimacy means she knows her garden “A to Z”. She is able to see a sprout, rattle off its scientific name, and decide whether she wants to keep it in the area it’s in, and she willingly accepts the “gifts” of plants that grow where she hasn’t deliberately seeded them.
Cécile’s ability to identify a plant at means I can take a picture and ask her to name it at leisure within the house. I’m generally not able to remember the eight-syllable Latin monstrosities of names, so this is generally how I’m able to look up information about the plants I work with. I began to take three or four a day and try to remember them, repeating the name to myself as I pass them. With 3000 plant species in the garden, it would only take a few years to learn them all! I find myself regretting not having started earlier — I only did so about five weeks into my stay, and not very intensely, which means I missed out on learning maybe one hundred names if I had had more initiative. I know that a name is only a name, but I’ve found it’s nucleus around which knowledge accretes — one learns the name, then facts about the plant, then once one is able to discuss it one can compare it to other plants and so start growing a system of knowledge.
Will I return to the garden? I think about that question while on my last few days here. It is art in motion, and I wonder how its appearance shifts as the seasons pass. I could return to the spots where I’ve made contributions and see how my efforts have borne fruit — or emerged barren. The garden, certainly, will be here as long as Cécile has the strength to maintain it. The roots of their destinies are intertwined; her moods follow as it flourishes or suffers. She rarely travels (she says she “travels with the Earth around the Sun”) and has no retirement plan — artists, she says, are not able to retire. She shows me a video of a formidable woman who still gardens and cooks at the ripe age of ninety-nine, and I ask, jokingly, if that will be her someday. She shrugs her shoulders.
My body now anticipates the elaborate movements to traverse garden — step around this flower, duck to avoid that branch. More and more often I am able to recognize the plants as I pass them, and sentiments attached to certain areas develop and deepen. I think about the mirrored process of my body tracing paths through the garden as the garden etches its trails in my memory. The vegetation is always pushing back against these paths and without somebody to maintain them, they will be reclaimed by the plants. So it is with our memories — I know that once I leave here the Latin names and facts will fade, my body-sense of working in the soil will weaken. I hoped when I came here that the experience would let me look at plant life with a little bit more knowledge, more attention. I have gained that, but I have also gained the sense that the symbiosis of gardening, where humans and their world of ideas collide and embrace with plants and their mysterious natures, needs to be lived in continuously to be understood. The memory of the garden, like the garden itself, is a living thing that must be cared for.
