Bram Stoker: Cultural Landscaping

Breaking out this (public domain) passage of Bram to take a look at something I actually meant to write about yesterday.

This garden in front of my room is the old Italian garden.  It must have been done with extraordinary taste and care, for there is not a bit of it which is not rarely beautiful.  Sir Thomas Browne himself, for all his Quincunx, would have been delighted with it, and have found material for another “Garden of Cyrus.”  It is so big that there are endless “episodes” of garden beauty I think all Italy must have been ransacked in old times for garden stone-work of exceptional beauty; and these treasures have been put together by some master-hand.  Even the formal borders of the walks are of old porous stone, which takes the weather-staining so beautifully, and are carved in endless variety.  Now that the gardens have been so long neglected or left in abeyance, the green staining has become perfect.  Though the stone-work is itself intact, it has all the picturesque effect of the wear and ruin wrought by many centuries.  I am having it kept for you just as it is, except that I have had the weeds and undergrowth cleared away so that its beauties might be visible.

But it is not merely the architect work of the garden that is so beautiful, nor is the assembling there of the manifold wealth of floral beauty—there is the beauty that Nature creates by the hand of her servant, Time.  You see, Aunt Janet, how the beautiful garden inspires a danger-hardened old tramp like me to high-grade sentiments of poetic fancy!  Not only have limestone and sandstone, and even marble, grown green in time, but even the shrubs planted and then neglected have developed new kinds of beauty of their own.  In some far-distant time some master-gardener of the Vissarions has tried to realize an idea—that of tiny plants that would grow just a little higher than the flowers, so that the effect of an uneven floral surface would be achieved without any hiding of anything in the garden seen from anywhere.  This is only my reading of what has been from the effect of what is!  In the long period of neglect the shrubs have outlived the flowers.  Nature has been doing her own work all the time in enforcing the survival of the fittest.  The shrubs have grown and grown, and have overtopped flower and weed, according to their inherent varieties of stature; to the effect that now you see irregularly scattered through the garden quite a number—for it is a big place—of vegetable products which from a landscape standpoint have something of the general effect of statues without the cramping feeling of detail.  Whoever it was that laid out that part of the garden or made the choice of items, must have taken pains to get strange specimens, for all those taller shrubs are in special colours, mostly yellow or white—white cypress, white holly, yellow yew, grey-golden box, silver juniper, variegated maple, spiraea, and numbers of dwarf shrubs whose names I don’t know.  I only know that when the moon shines—and this, my dear Aunt Janet, is the very land of moonlight itself!—they all look ghastly pale.  The effect is weird to the last degree, and I am sure that you will enjoy it.

My maternal family line include a number of diggers and gardeners, and go back in a line of farmers whose memory makes me blush.  My brother, especially, is the living branch (you must excuse the fancy) of this in our generation, probably more than anyone.

It was from him I first heard about planting for the long haul.  Beyond the locally inevitable crepe myrtle, azaleas, and boxwoods, few people put much thought into landscaping.  Their own, or the increasingly corporate variety which surrounds us.  My own yard owns all of two trees, and some very rare and beautiful camellias and azaleas which predate my tenure, and are kind enough to get on with what they are do without much input nor attention from me.

When Mojourner lived closer by, in the days even before our dad died - there was a greenhouse in my front yard, and a richly interesting garden in the back.  I did nothing for them, but let it be said I did benefit from them.  The back garden was more for food than artifice's beauty, but it was a wonderful sight in its day.  Peppers, and these amazing marble-sized tomatoes, positively *blooming* - and in such profusion even the birds never got them all.  Sweet, and delicious right off the vine.  Lettuce lived in the protection of the eastern wall of the house, a spot with enough sun to thrive but enough shade not to wilt - and popular with mockingbirds, who were not shy to strafe (and, indeed, even touch) you should someone venture out for a little greenery for a sandwich ...

In the greenhouse out front, there was a once-huge collection of ti plants (for Virginia!).  Some had slender, inky-dark leaves, with the reddishness and greenness deep and mingled into an almost raven-wing iridescent purple.  I used to have many of these inside, but none survive today to grace the place.  Others had larger, richly green leaves.  For a long time, I still had two of these.  By now, only two ti's with these wonderful, verdant leaves still lives.  At less than 24" tall, each of them would be considered "cute" by Island standards - and shockingly small, at probably eleven years of age now.  Mojourner has laughed with his friends before, about the stunted growth of transplanted ti's.  But for me, these two plants are the only Hawai'ian life my home has seen since he moved so far away, and I am protectively in love with it.  The cat catches, if possible, even more grief than when he meddles with the memorial plant I bought after Siddy La died.  (And he does meddle with that one, and it's lost two of its major shoots, too - little bugger.)

Obviously ... I am not the family botanist.  The garden is a vague, disappearing hump along the east side of my backyard.  The lettuces are long since gone.  Even the greenhouse - what, once, our mom thought looked like a big plastic coffin in front of my home - is no longer, its denizens distributed long ago.

Mo knew the magic of planting for years' growth, for putting together trees or bushes or flowers which, ages down the line from his involvement, would still relate to one another, to their environs, in the way Bram Stoker describes so richly, above.

My family - my grandmother, my mom and dad - my brother - have all known the richness of nurturing and growing.  But I never have.  Like the bone-deep urge for procreation, it's one of those things I simply lack.  Unlike The Baby Itch, though - I do, from time to time, regret this omission in my makeup.  It disconnects me both from my family and my earth - particularly from an important experience in the kind of stewardship of my blessings, my literal *estate* on Earth, which I do think is important.  I remember my mom's mother - one of the most beautiful photographs I have ever seen in my life, a photo of a blue bucket, filled with her potatoes, tomatoes, squash, whatever it was she had grown and one of her kids had collected.  I remember helping Mo collect from our own parents' garden, when we were kids.  The year he grew that huge musk melon.  My dad's father, who cultivated tall asparagus and roses and almost certainly corn.  The berries I've eaten with my nieces, and the snow peas, sweet as those tomatoes - as fresh - as beautiful.

I'm not the sort to make New Year's resolutions, and I'm to aware of my weaknesses to become a person who thinks about shoring them up.  It's unlikely I'll *ever* plant for food - or for the ages - or for the almost melancholy, evocative beauties above.  My creative outlets ... are the most passive and undemanding kind.  I write.  I put together the occasional stylin' outfit.  I revel in a laugh from someone who thinks I am momentarily clever.  I do take pride, always aware it may be disproportionate, in my own accomplishments and talents - and I don't regret those I have not (hah) cultivated enough to feel I'm truly "less" as a person.

But I know that ... I've missed out.  And so, I fancy - I sit back, arms crossed like our dad, and watch with pride what my bro does and I do not.  What my mom and dad planted a long time ago.  Planted by other generations.  And I think we've grown, as a clan, to a mellow, fascinating balance.  To ... perhaps ... the right composition ...