BOOK REVIEW HOLIDAY SPECIAL SECTION : Soulful Gardening

Ever since our expulsion from that first garden of fields and flowers, the spirit has longed to go home. Home, therefore, in this spiritual sense, is among the leaves and blossoms and their attendant blessings--fragrance and color, fresh air, and, importantly, the architecture in which they are enclosed--the pleasures of linear or curvaceous design imposed upon sweeping and patternless nature.

That the first garden, and its bliss, is irretrievable has never yet kept man or woman from attempting a restoration. Indeed, the difficulty of the task has only released an inventiveness that bubbles and buds beyond all expectation. For the essence of garden is something other than dirt and leaf--though the actually created garden may stretch over many acres, it may also be contained in the narrowest side-yard.

Neither can the nature of gardeners be easily known; they range from the metaphysical through the pragmatic and romantic and on outward to the pure zany. They include the architect bent over his drafting board; workmen moving along a thousand summer paths, delineating with snippers and the hoe; the woman who, at dawn or even midnight, leaves her bed and glides to the young pansies or poppies, to pluck from them the cruising armies of glutonous slugs. Devotion is no small part of making a garden.

“The Country House Garden: From the Archives of Country Life, 1897-1939,” by Brent Elliott, is an elegant book. The text is crisp, informed, historically specific and always interesting. Without such a fine text, I am not sure what effect the photographs themselves would have, for, lamentably, they are all black and white. The effect is dreadfully serious. We read herein about the “harmony of colors”--the book longs for illustration of it.

Still, it is a book that takes one’s breath away, presenting England’s most lavish gardens, in the shadows of the great English houses. It is as though, around these halls and castles, the hills have been lowered, ponds polished and swans invented, while the trees have been cropped (through the odd art of topiary) in a meticulous insistence upon form, accompanied by still other attuned insistences--for vista, statuary, enclosures, rigidly straight paths or paths that twirl and amuse among the boxwood.

These are gardens built by immense wealth, and in many cases they are now open to the public. Such places have little to do with the changeable decades--their intention is not to change, but to draw us back into some previous idea of the beautiful and the harmonious.

Ah, but who and where are the gardeners? This book is about landscape gardening and its achievements, not its labor, I understand that. Still, I was happy to come upon a single photograph in which two gardeners appear, one of them wonderfully whiskered and doing no work at all, the other dipping around, not vigorously but carefully, in a small lily-padded pond.

A salutary sweetness lies at the threshold of another and, to Americans, more familiar landscape, the object of an exuberantly bright volume titled “Grandmother’s Garden: The Old-Fashioned American Garden 1865-1915,” text by May Brawley Hill. Derived from the purely utilitarian kitchen garden, such flower plots, in the years following the Civil War, sprang another way, becoming places where women could escape the tedious and the expected and, performing the labor themselves, create for themselves a ferment of crowded, climbing and twining, bright and beautiful things.

And who could have passed such gardens by without a turn? Here was surely a token of heaven, a place where life was lived not frivolously but with rootedness and grace. Many painters could not pass by until one more painting had been added to the ranks of many, displaying the innocent fire of roses, cucumber vines and foxgloves as, very probably, the gardener herself. How many of us remember such gardens with something very close to heartbreak--for with their passing went many reassuring things.

If one has not a single seed or fern or vine but has perhaps 100 empty blue bottles or 500 orange bottles or a 100,000 stones collected handful by handful--along with a vision of a place of beauty and an independence of spirit and a purpose perhaps loose of plan but certainly beyond the mere gusto of collection--can one be said to be building a garden? John Beardsley, author of “Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists,” thinks so, and I find no argument with his view.

We begin in this book with an awareness of being entertained; we finish with an awareness of having been instructed. In the best sense--whatever abridgments of the term creativity we have been used to, we have the opportunity here to extend them. What these artists have built are not natural gardens, but a growth of vivid color, idiosyncratic shape, sometimes motley, sometimes strange, sometimes with a bloom of the ridiculous but always with another gleam as well, suggesting the joyful and the profound. There are grottoes, bridges, towers, statues, buildings huge or miniature, bottle walls, bottle cities, mosaics made from broken china--environments that take up acres or are jammed into a single house.

Beardsley knowledgeably connects such art to the surreal as well as the fringes of society where formal training often does not occur and where only free materials are used. And some of the artists I suppose were mad--one gave himself the title Director of Special Projects for the State of Eternity. It is well-written and well-photographed. It is a rare find. It is splendid.

I am left with too small a space in which to give adequate praise to a passionately informed book about gardening, first published in 1894. “An Island Garden” was written by a poet no one has noticed for many years, Celia Thaxter. Thanks are due to the publisher for this facsimile edition, which includes the delicate and frothy illustrations of the American artist Childe Hassam.

Thaxter’s garden, on the Isles of Shoals, was exceptional; even more so was her ability to describe her process and her passion. One must tolerate a few quavering high notes--sometimes the wish to express her pleasure tosses rather too much bright pollen across the page. Still, it is simply the best gardening book I have ever read. Here, from the gardener’s own vision, are the regency of hollyhocks and the dark thrones of the roses. Don’t miss this visit. Find her cottage, open the white gate upon a swirl of silk and honey of every color and description and enter--paradise.

****

AN ISLAND GARDEN, By Celia Thaxter, paintings by Childe Hassam (Houghton Mifflin: $19.95; 126 pp.)

THE SNOWS OF OLYMPUS: A Garden on Mars, By Arthur C. Clarke (Norton: $25; 120 pp.)

GARDENS OF REVELATION: Environments by Visionary Artists, By John Beardsley (Abbeville: $60; 223 pp.)

TRANSITORY GARDENS, UPROOTED LIVES. By Diana Balmori and Margaret Morton (Yale University Press: $25; 160 pp.)

THE UNSUNG SEASON: Gardens in Winter, By Sydney Eddison . Photographs by Karen Bussolini (Houghton Mifflin: $29.95; 204 pp.)

GRANDMOTHERS GARDEN: The Old-Fashioned American Garden 1865-1915, By May Brawley Hill (Abrams: $45; 240 pp.)

THE COUNTRY HOUSE GARDEN: From the Archives of Country Life, 1897-1939. By Brent Elliott (Mitchell Beazley: $60; 192 pp.)