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Paths
of Desire: The Passions of a Suburban Gardener by Dominique Browning Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Blossoms Ever
since Henry Mitchell died, I’ve been waiting for a writer who will use the
garden as a way to help readers understand human nature. Dominique Browning
comes close, especially on the pages of her new book, Paths of
Desire. Readers learn about how the garden remains untended in the years
when Browning’s life was undergoing transformation. We then learn how the
garden became transformed when Browning also bloomed. Thanks to good writing,
even non-gardeners, will enjoy and appreciate the cycles of life presented in
Paths
of Desire. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 5, “Sitting
Around,” pp. 63-73: “From perplexity grows insight.” —Karl Jaspers The Great Philosophers I had been dragging lawn chairs all
over my yard for years, since the day I had moved in and first taken a rest
in the garden, trying out pools of sun or shade, contemplating the view of
the house from one and then another angle through the trees, or across the
tattered ribbon of a lawn. I was often drawn to a corner deep in the Back
Forty, one that had nothing in particular to recommend it, save for the
dwindling shelter of a few dying hemlocks, and its ample remove from the
house. What I loved about that far corner was the long view over the yard and
to the house. It was a deeply satisfying perspective. The chair in that far
corner gave me some distance on the house; sitting there in the twilight,
contemplating my dreams for the garden that I would one day plant, gazing
into the living room through the old French doors, I felt simultaneous and
conflicting waves of proud possessiveness and disassociation. There is a
fascination in looking into your own house as if you were a stranger,
especially at the gloaming of the day, when the rooms are lit up, and ever
one inside is going about their business as if they were on a stage, but not
knowing that they arc being watched, one son practicing the piano, which he
is supposed to be doing, the other tossing a hail around in the living room,
which he is decidedly not supposed to he doing. I would gaze into my house, and
wonder what I was looking for, and wonder at where life had taken me, and
wonder why I was on the outside of my home, and wonder why, over the years,
that grew to feel just fine. That corner was a good place for
inspection. I could survey the decline of the hemlocks from that corner, and
decide when it was time to take pity and fell another one. I kept a
protective eye on the dogwood, my anxiety growing, over the years, as they
began to wither and die all over town. I watched the pool of pachysandra
under the dogwoods grow wider, its green depths darken with age. From that
corner I watched a small, accidental bed behind the house, just under the
living room window, grow larger and messier; I called it the Holding Pen,
because its occupants were the transplants languishing in every other part
of the garden. I didn’t know what else to do with them hut save them until I
had figured out the shape of the garden; little did I know that would take
more than a decade. It was from that corner that I watched with spreading
concern as one uphill neighbor’s Norway maple grew unchecked, at an
alarmingly rapid clip, larger and more dense, unkempt, shading out the little
bit of grass in my yard, and the privet hedge in his, until large clumps of
it were no more than dead sticks upright in a dusty soil; that hedge was
meant to afford us both privacy, so that we could sit around in our gardens
in solitude. I began to feel exposed, and as the canopy spread, so did my
resentment. I sat around and watched the teak bench
I had moved from our last home grow dull and gray and covered with lichen. I
had placed that bench on a handsome old slate terrace off to the side of the
house; I had never understood why the stone there felt so substantial until
Leonard pointed out admiringly, one day, that the edge of each piece had been
hand-hewn and chiseled into position. Today stone is cut by machine; the
sharp, clean edges rob from it the subtle visual cues that give a sense of
the weightiness of each slab. I made arrangements of potted plants on the
side terrace, and studied the compositions from my chair in the corner,
getting up to rearrange the pots to greater effect, and sinking back down
again. I could take in the porch that ran across the side of the house; it
had been enclosed when we arrived, its thick columns encased in the walls of
what had been meant as a solarium, but never quite made it. Curiously, the
previous occupants had built a grill in that room, but had neglected to vent
it to the outside, causing such a smoky disaster the first time I lit a fire
that it was at that moment I decided to tear down the walls and return the
room to the porch it had been meant to be. The porch immediately became my
summer living room. It was from the corner seat that, one
year, I noticed the wisteria climbing pell-mell across the roof and onto the
chimney; it was from that corner I saw the gutter dangling off the front of
the house; it was from that corner, one evening in a summer twilight when all
the shading leaches out of the day’s colors and only the contrasts stand out,
that I first understood that the hard white paint of the trim was wrong for
the house; the dark cedar shingles disappeared with dusk, leaving the trim
outlined against the screen of sassafras in front, and the effect was that of
a child’s drawing. Months later, from that chair, dragged from one part of
the yard to another, I decided that the house needed a dark, green-black
paint on the trim that would blend with the shingles and meld into the woods
in front. From where I sat, the result of the paint job gave the house an
understated elegance. (From where he sat, my father, visiting one day,
declared the whole effect “lugubrious.”) We spend so much time inside our
houses, looking out, and not enough time looking at our houses from the
outside. They are altogether different creatures from that perspective. There
were many corners, in the garden, from which to contemplate the big picture. As the Winter of Last Daydreams began,
I suddenly realized what I had been doing, all those years, dragging furniture
around the yard. I had been conjuring up the contours of my idealized garden. Landscape designers sometimes talk
about “desire paths”: the paths traced by people’s habits of movement from
one place to another, the paths that make clear where we want to go, and how
we want to get there. Regardless of the paths laid down by the professionals
who have designed a park, say, or a public garden, people will cut their own
convenient, or pleasurable, ways through yards and meadows and fields, leaving
behind trampled grass or dirt footpaths that indicate the route they insist
on taking. The professional designer, setting out to reorganize a landscape,
ignores these markers at his peril. You can see paths of desire everywhere:
slicing across the grassy median strips in parking lots; traversing playing
fields; wending through city parks. Our own footsteps etch our desires into
the ground. Just before the end of my suburban street the commuters have
veered off the sidewalk to head uphill across a grassy strip of land to get
to the train station—every second counts, at rush hour; this scramble has
gone on for so many years that the town finally succumbed and paved the
walkway for us. (Even something that seems as rooted as a tree cuts its own
path of desire; I have come to know several quite well on my way to the station,
and have watched over the years as the roots of the solitary tulip tree, an
oak, and the ancient sugar maple on the next block have hurled themselves up
over the confines of a concrete edge and into a nearby patch of soil to find
sustenance.) And of course animals cut very clear paths to their feeding
troughs, or their watering holes, or their nests; deer in winter will always
cross a field in a file, leaving a surprisingly narrow, delicate trace in
the snow; skunks leave in your lawn their paths of desire with their fossicking noses. We create paths of desire in so many
ways, not just with our feet; our daily rituals leave behind poignant
reminders of our little ways. The candle that burns through the evening and
drips through the slatted dinner table, leaving a path of waxy mounds on the
bluestone, as the table is moved to catch the last rays of the summer light.
The greasy arc of spots on the stone where the scraps of meat are dropped for
the stray cat who always knows when to appear. The matted lawn, because the
children will always play catch in a part of the yard where the trees don’t
get in the way, the sun doesn’t get in their eyes. The scraped pad under the
favored, dangling seat of the swing set. The cut through the rhododendron by
the kitchen door, where the pachysandra is always squashed, because that is
the way the Con Ed man has been getting to the meter for years now, and
nothing you do, no alternate stepping-stones you place around the shrubbery,
will alter his course. His path is straightforward and he has no time to
waste. Your garden is full of the souvenirs of living. And, if you take care
to find them, it is full of clues that remind you how you have been using
it—you have left them there. All gardens contain paths of desire. As we are not cows, and will probably
not do enough heavy foot-dragging in our own pastures to leave behind rutted
trails, the furniture we move around the garden becomes an important clue to
locating our paths of desire. The far corner, in which I sat hour after hour,
was to become an important part of the new garden that I would lay out,
though I didn’t know it for years. Quite apart from matters of aesthetics,
it is important what kind of furniture you put into the garden, because
certain kinds of pieces are liberating, and others are anchoring. You will
have to leave off that snobbery about light furniture (of the aluminum and
webbing variety), at least while you are in a period of exploration of how to
use your garden. Much as I love teak, I found it
impossible to move by myself more than a few inches in any direction. When I
started furnishing the house and garden, I went to a tag sale in an old
house; everything arrayed on the lawn was from the forties and fifties. I saw
some aluminum lawn chairs whose sturdy green webbing was intact. These chairs
had been well cared for. My first memory of garden furniture had been of an
aluminum lounge chair, a long, low, cotlike affair
with the same sort of green webbing. The memory of this chaise was vivid
because it also contained the first memory I had of nude sunbathing in the
garden. I was probably six or seven years old; I had gone with my mother to
visit her friend, Suzanne, who was a very beautiful and thin and childless
Frenchwoman. (It fascinates me to realize that both women, so grown--up in my
memory, were then much younger than I am now, by at least ten years, just
beginning to learn to keep house, to ten(1 their gardens.) I loved visits to
Suzanne’s house because she was glamorous, and served generous and icy
Shirley Temples in tall crystal flutes, no matter what time of day we
arrived. Just after breakfast seemed the perfect time for a cocktail. When we
couldn’t find Suzanne in her house, we went into the garden at the back, yoo-hooing
in French for her attention. She called to us from behind a dense circle of
tall hedges. Rounding the corner first, I came on to Suzanne stretched facedown
across her chaise. She was completely naked. Not in the least hit worried
about a bee sting or a mosquito bite on her bare bottom. Her hair was neatly
tucked into a white terrycloth babushka, her toes with their blood reel nails
were tucked under the silver bar at the bottom, her hands dangled off the front
of the chaise (she was wearing many rings), a white towel was stuffed into
the green webbing underneath her glistening, oiled, slightly sweaty skin.
There on the ground was a bottle of baby oil——the stuff we used to soften up
my little brother! Un a grown-up? A silvery sun reflector lay on the
grass under her face, and next to it was balanced a tall, thin glass of something
refreshing; a cigarette balanced on the edge of an ashtray sent up a thin
curl of smoke. Who knew? Did my mother have a naked body, too? Ever since that fateful day, I have
been partial to the liberating
promise of lightweight garden furniture. The arms and legs of the chairs at
that yard sale had swooping curves; they were wide and comfortable and light.
I bought them. Forty bucks for four. One day, shortly after the announcement
of my appointment as the editor of House & Garden, I got a call
from a friend. He had been at a swanky This conversation, gleefully reported
to me the next day, was disconcerting for any number of reasons—not the least
of which is that, in order to see any furniture in my garden, you must travel
up the driveway and walk around to the back of the house. Well, I wasn’t in
too much of a position to protest such a violation of privacy, being the sort
of unregenerate snoop who cannot resist the urge to climb a wall to see just
what that fragrant blossom is attached to, or tromp through a construction
site, or sneak up a driveway (“Come on, don’t worry, just go up; if we get
caught, we can say we’re lost ). But matters of taste are difficult to
articulate, in house or garden design; what is beautiful to your eye may not
be appealing to mine. I can learn to understand why you find something
handsome—a chair constructed of pressed layers of cardboard; I can educate myself
about its design antecedents, or its radical departure from tradition. I can
learn to get past an initial discomfort I may feel with the unfamiliar—in a
line, an ornamentation, a material. But none of that
means that I will ever be able to feel the beauty you see—and 1 cannot
be argued into it. So often, our choices have little to do with taste and
more to do with necessity— and is that not the famous “function” part of the
form and function equilibrium a good designer seeks? (And, to further
complicate things, there is the matter of trends-—those things that last
weekend were in people’s trash piles are suddenly worth thousands of dollars
on the open market. The trend for stuff from the fifties, like my lawn chair,
with its confident, swooping lines and unabashed celebration of plastic and
metal, had, sadly, not arrived in time to rescue my reputation from the claws
at that dinner party.) The Boys and I happily carried those
aluminum chairs all over the garden: under trees, out into the sunshine, next
to the swing set, over by the sandbox. On cool days I would follow the
patches of sun that would make their way through the trees; the patches got
bigger as more trees came down. In my chair, in the late-afternoon sun, I was
quiet enough to see the tiny moths and white flies billowing about in
circles, going nowhere, hovering in the last rays of the sun, at the end of
their lives. Mobility is a must in any garden. You
can never get enough of changing perspective. And as I moved the chairs, I
began to appreciate small things I had not noticed before. I suppose it is
from sitting around that I learned that there is no such thing as a clean
slate upon which to design a garden; there are too many God-givens, even in a
suburban patch that has been shoved into shape by a bulldozer. When you sit
around, you notice the soil, the path of the sun, the stone outcroppings. The
gentle slope at the side of the yard. The abruptness with which the stand of
sassafras stopped growing, as though someone had drawn a line of demarcation
across the garden many years ago. The wild daylilies that had sprung up, one
summer, of their own accord, and whose fluorescent pool was growing wider and
wider, spilling down a rocky drop-off in the front of the yard. The contours
of the granite boulders that had been partly covered over. How far did those
shelves of stone extend? I wondered. The protected feeling of sitting under a
tree. The warm hut exposed feeling of sitting in sunshine. And, too, over the years of dragging
the chairs around, I began to notice how the paint on the sandbox was
peeling, how the toys were filthy and half-buried in the sand, how the swing
set was falling into disrepair. Much of my yard had long been, rightfully,
the domain of the Boys; they were home all day, and played in it, so they
made it theirs. A few more years of sitting around went by; I began to notice
plastic water guns and small baseball hats abandoned in the pachysandra. I
began to accept that my children were exchanging the pleasures of their baby
years for other ways to enjoy the garden. That they were growing up, and
that the garden would soon swallow up their toys. And as they were getting
older, so was the garden, and so was I. The heavy teak bench in the garden had
for years served an entirely different purpose from that of the lightweight
chairs that I dragged around. It was in a place where I wanted to stay put.
At anchor, so to speak: a
heavy bench doesn’t move, and neither do you, while you are in it. It invites contemplation; you do
not follow the sun, hut instead the play of light across the trees, across a
patch of grass. You bring cushions, hooks, teacups or wineglasses, all the
sections of the Sunday paper, and a broad-brimmed hat. That is the part of the garden inviting
you to settle down, stay awhile. That is where the True Love sometimes lit up
a cigar, and there is nothing nicer than the smell of a good cigar wafting in
the fresh evening air—except the smell of a good cigar lingering in a quiet
room, around the fireplace, the next morning, especially if someone has left
an unfinished glass of fragrant whiskey nearby. By such alchemy, nostalgia is
born. The True Love seemed drawn to the
domesticated parts of the garden, those parts with floors. Even though he
occasionally looked like a farmer, according to my youngest son, in his
flannel shirts and suspendered work pants, he was
assuredly a farmer of the gentleman variety. He liked to nib-He his way
through a dinner outside, and as he was a great appreciator of food, it was
fun to watch him eat. He would throw his head hack, like a bear, and close
his eyes, and wave a piece of pungent cheese back and forth under his flaring
nostrils, a smile of rapture spreading across his face. Or he would finger a
slab of chocolate, sniffing it, riffling the wrapper, rumbling and growling
and purring, nearly licking it before
deciding to stick to his diet. It wasn’t just food that I learned to
appreciate, sitting around in the garden. It was also the fragrance coming
from the flowerpots: the scented geraniums threading their way through a ball
of lavender, the aroma of rosemary when I brushed my fingers across the top,
the jasmine in flower in August. I would sit, like a dog, nose in the air,
parsing out the odors, waiting for a breeze to carry a new perfume past my
chair. So many of the white blooms are especially pungent in the evening. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to
sit still in a garden? It is nearly impossible not to let your gaze wander
and catch on an errant weed or two; nearly impossible not to get up and start
weeding; impossible not to need the clippers to cut down the stray sapling;
impossible not to reach into the geraniums and pull out the browned and
withered stalks; impossible not to sweep the flagstone; impossible not to
rearrange the pots, and then the bench; and then, of course, impossible not
to go inside to get more pillows because the bench seems a bit hard, and
impossible to sit still on. Take
a walk with Browning down her Paths of
Desire, and come away rested and refreshed, ready for your own suburban
challenges of gardening and the rest of life. Steve
Hopkins, March 23, 2004 |
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ă 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the April 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Paths
of Desire.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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