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Toward a New American Garden
| Article
# : |
13457 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1987 |
1,695 Words |
| Author
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Carole Ottesen
Carole Ottesen is an author and freelance writer who
specializes in gardening topics. She lives in Potomac,
Maryland. |
Gardens speak volumes about the cultures around them; they chronicle man's relationship to his natural environment.
After centuries of imitating the garden styles of the Old World, particularly England, American gardeners are at long last cultivating a uniquely American-style garden. This new American garden features native plants or those appropriate to the climate instead of the ubiquitous evergreens and lawn. The unifying factor in this garden concept - in states as different from one another as Washington, Louisiana, and Arizona - is a functional design with easy-to-maintain good looks.
If an American garden style is long overdue, England's genius for gardening is partly to blame. With a colonial inferiority complex, American gardeners have long aspired to English and European gardening traditions and have thus measured their own efforts with a yardstick forged abroad.
Western civilization was abruptly transplanted onto the American continent from Europe, where there was a well-established gardening tradition. Ancient Persian paradise gardens (whose name comes form the Old Persian pairadeza, meaning "enclosure") had influenced that Western tradition. During the Middle Ages in Central Europe and England gardens were tended behind walls. The wilderness was considered threatening; therefore, nature was refined and safely enclosed in order to be enjoyed.
It wasn't until the Renaissance that the walls came down. The natural world (conquered by geometry) was now considered to be part of the living space. In Italy, architects designed perfectly integrated gardens and buildings by strictly arranging shrubs, hedges, and trees. Architecture dominated and natural elements fell into line - literally. Hedges were neat, long rectangles, shrubs were cylinders, and trees were lined up in rows or espaliered along walls. Sometimes, however, outside space was paved and allotted to surrounding buildings and plants were totally absent, as in the piazzas of Italy.
In France, nature was subordinated to art in the classic French garden form, the parterre, which combined plants, gravel, and walkways in grand patterns over the garden grounds. At Versailles, Andre le Notre designed a vast series of parterres radiating around the hunting lodge of Louis XIV, which symbolized Le Roi Soleil (the Sun King) as the center of the universe. The entire garden - including the tapis vert, a green carpet of lawn, and the allees, avenues, edged by
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