A Sleuth in a Garden of Earthly Delights

Seasoned naturalist and poet Diane Ackerman spends hours languishing in her garden in Ithaca, N.Y., pondering the world around her. Naturally so, you say. But Ackerman’s fertile mind rambles fearlessly where other nature lovers fear to tread: Do hummingbirds have memory? she wonders. Could human males suckle their young the way bats do? Indeed, do female squirrels have orgasms?

Ackerman is, as she likes to say, simply seeing the forest for the trees. “It’s the nature of the calling,” she says softly. Ackerman is sitting on an overstuffed couch at a Beverly Hills hotel, her perch while she’s on tour promoting her ninth nonfiction book, “Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden” (HarperCollins). She focuses intently on a visitor, speaking in phrases as nimbly crafted as other authors write. At the moment, Ackerman is wearing a casual black pantsuit, a lacy green top and a single strand of pearls. Her longish, coal-black hair is tamed into braids, but wisps everywhere are struggling to break free.

Knowing that gives you a preview of her taste in gardening. “My garden is like my hair,” says Ackerman, whose books include the bestseller “A Natural History of the Senses” (Random House, 1990), which inspired a five-hour PBS series. “It’s braided at the moment, but normally it’s a weather system of curls, and that’s the way my garden is, a profusion of miscellaneous things spilling over one another. I know there are people who like to plant tidy pools of flowers surrounded by mulch, but I think of that as zoo gardening. I like profusion, and I think that reflects my personality.” Not surprisingly, the book is a profusion of lyrical musings and intriguing factoids about the natural world. Ackerman wrote it as a journal detailing a year in her garden, but that’s merely the trunk of the book. Its branches go off in myriad directions, toward meditations on Thomas Jefferson’s passion for gardening, which overshadowed his interest in politics; lunar gardening, which prescribes planting, harvesting and even weeding according to the phases of the moon; and the outlaw nature of plants, which she likens to certain late-night denizens of Santa Monica Boulevard.

“Most plants are pimps and thugs,” she writes. Pimps? “They are,” she insists. “They would dress up in gorilla suits if they could. They would do whatever they had to do to persuade some creature--including humans--to perform sex for them because they can’t move. And they’ve devised such ingenious ways to do it.”

Most famously, she points to the bee-pollen accord. “I find all of that thrilling, to be surrounded by that many marvels.” Of course, some of Ackerman’s enthusiasms may pose a challenge to her followers making their own garden forays. “I admire slugs,” she says simply. “I think they’re very attractive.” But don’t underestimate Ackerman as some earth-mother apologist aiming to spice up the image of the humble plant and its animal associates. She views her own backyard through the eyes of an adventuress, a predilection from childhood that has taken her as far away as Japan, the Amazon and the South Pole in search of natural wonders. Not one to sit on the sidelines, Ackerman once put a bat her in her hair to see whether there was anything to the old wives’ warning that the nocturnal animals become entangled in one’s coif. (It didn’t.) And she recently earned an unusual reward for being sporting enough to reach inside a spot beneath the tail of a hissing Florida alligator so that scientists could determine its sex: They named a newly discovered molecule after her--dianeackerone, a sex pheromone produced by the snappish beasts.

Ackerman’s quests have resulted in broken ribs, intestinal parasites and the more fortuitous legacy of a fervent following for her acclaimed, fastidiously researched books, among them “The Moon by Whale Light: And Other Adventures Among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians and Whales” (1991), a collection of animal profiles first published in the New Yorker; “A Natural History of Love” (1994), in which she examined such arcana as women’s special bond with horses and the demands of oxytocin, “the cuddle chemical”; “A Slender Thread” (1997) an account of Ackerman’s experiences volunteering for a suicide hotline; and “Deep Play” (1999), an examination of the relationship between play and creativity. All of these were published by Random House.

The New York Times applauded her as a peer of science and nature writers Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould and John McPhee. And the Chicago Tribune declared that “a preternatural sensitivity to the rich and complex connections to the world without and the world within drives all of Ackerman’s ardent writing.” Ackerman also sees a thread connecting her diverse subjects. “My mission is to put together a mosaic of what it was like to have once been alive on the planet,” she says, “what it smelled like and tasted like, felt like and thrilled like and hurt like. So of course I’d be interested in the senses because we live in a glacial rut of our senses, we can’t know the world except for our senses. And of course I’d be interested in love, the most important emotion that humans have ever felt and probably will ever feel. And I’ve been interested in our relationship with our animal neighbors and I’ve been interested in the dark night of the soul. I’ve written books about all of those things.”

Now, at the ripe age of 53, Ackerman has become the Dorothy of the natural world, discovering at last that there’s no place like home. In her case, home is a ranch house in Ithaca, where she lives with novelist Paul West, whom she met when he was her professor at Penn State. Not far from their home is Cornell University, where Ackerman earned a PhD in English and has taught a course on creativity. Ackerman is now writing books of nonfiction and poetry full time, working in an airy study overlooking her organic garden that sprawls over an acre and a half. The path meanders from shade to light, among woodland plants and an extravagant rose garden with a rock-garden heart and 120 bushes that gushed forth about 1,500 blooms last summer. These days, that’s where Ackerman searches for excitement.

“Adventure is not something you travel to find,” she says. “It’s something you take with you, or you’re not going to find it when you arrive. And you can have steep adventures in your backyard. So I have extraordinary adventures in the garden watching the dramas of the wren families and dealing with the deer and everything that’s going on in the plant world. And some of what’s going on in the plant world is very exploitative, wanton, violent, manipulative.” Seen through Ackerman’s lens, gardens should probably be rated for content.

In the book, she describes a neighbor’s garden as a marital battleground where the wife wreaked revenge on her husband for divorcing her for a younger woman. The husband got custody of the house, so the wife ripped up all the rare and pricey perennials that would thrive there only as long as she did. Her wedding gift was a dead garden. “For all I know,” she adds drily, “she may have poisoned the dirt as well.”

Ackerman isn’t alone in regarding her own garden as a brave new world. In 1995, National Geographic published an account of her two-year study of the gray squirrels that frequent her backyard. “I gave them necklaces--blue for boys and pink for girls--and ear tags, and they would show up at the windows of all my neighbors, standing up like little Masai warriors,” she says.

To Ackerman, even garden mainstays can harbor an exotic past. The name tulip, for example, stems from the word dulband , Persian for turban, because Persian men wore the flowers in their turbans. These days, tulips may be associated with the Netherlands, but they weren’t grown in Europe until the 16th century, the gift of Turkish sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. And the hyacinth--named after a young lover of Apollo, whom the god killed by accident--is one of many blossoms commemorating violence and loss in Greek myths. “It solved a lot of problems created by prolonged anguish; it provided an agreeable form of reincarnation and it lifted the bloody tales into a slightly sunnier mood of redemption,” Ackerman writes.

The author makes comparisons between humans and the natural world, in part to drive home the point that humans are part of nature’s continuum. Not all are merely metaphorical; hummingbirds, she writes, sometimes die in their sleep because they’re vanquished by the effort required to rev up to their waking heart rate of 500 beats per minute. “The most dangerous time of day for humans is also at dawn, when most strokes and heart attacks occur, because the body must rouse many different processes, and that can make blood pressure soar,” she writes.

In her own life, the parallels to nature have become a religion. Literally. She calls herself an “earth-ecstatic,” which she describes as “a religion of one.” “One of the arguments I make throughout the book is that we really need to accept ourselves as animal,” she says. “We think that ‘animal’ is beneath or behind us, that it’s some degraded state of being, and feeling like that separates us from nature. But something inside of us doesn’t really allow that to happen because we need it so desperately, and then instead we go to visit nature. We go to parks, we go to zoos, we go on vacations, and those things are important, but I think it’s especially important that we accept that we are part of nature and that we need to reacquaint ourselves with all of the charms of nature that we found so tonic when we were little.”

Ackerman agrees with the theories of Gottfried Benn, a German poet and doctor who worked in a prostitutes’ morgue early last century. Benn believed alienation from nature causes disease. And Ackerman argues that people should be allowed vacations for green time and that gardens are so healing that they should be deductible as a medical expense.

“I think they’re sanctuaries for the mind and spirit,” Ackerman says. “Wonder is a very bulky emotion, and if you let it fill your mind and heart, there really isn’t room for anything else. It’s easy to feel wonder-struck in a garden, especially if you cultivate delight.”