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Garden Touring: Moving Beyond Plant Lust

'Tis the Season—for garden touring. Would you like to get more out of your tours? Here are some helpful suggestions and insights from a professional garden designer, veteran garden-tourer and a recent "touree".

As a novice gardener I went to other people's gardens with a mixture of awe, confusion and hunger. I thought that anyone who opened their garden up for show was already leagues ahead of where I was, had been to school or had generations of experience behind them. Sometimes that was true, but not always. I rarely asked questions for fear of showing my ignorance (which was real but may have been the sort of open mind I wish I had now), except the occasional blurting out of how much I liked this or that plant, combination or object. In truth, I didn't know what to ask. I was usually interested in the gardener themselves and how they got into gardening. I thought of questions about the garden such as its age, thereby reassuring myself that I could grow into the gardener of my dreams. And I, too, wanted to know plant names.

My hunger was for knowledge and understanding of how one created a garden, a garden with many "rooms" and features, one that moved you along in space and one that asked you to stop, ponder or rest a moment. I wanted a garden with humor, color, and intrigue year round, full of unusual and diverse plantings. I wanted to be able to create such a garden immediately, fully formed, as Athena had sprung from Zeus' forehead.

In those early garden touring years when I was tending a small plot of perennials and later, when I had purchased a few acres that I hoped to turn into my dream garden, I mostly came away from garden tours, after the initial thrill of seeing so much beauty and some genius, a bit depressed. I didn't have the slightest clue as to how to begin my garden. What I really lacked in touring these gardens was a language and basis for understanding what I was seeing. Therefore, I was unable to ask the questions that might help me along in the creative unfolding of my humble and grandiose visions.

Now, many years later, after becoming a professional landscape designer, I have put my garden on a tour and experienced the other side of the challenge. I was anticipating that the garden visitors would be my finest critics; asking daunting and stimulating questions, wanting to know how I did it all. Of course they would also want to know the names of plants they had not seen before. I was unprepared for the seeming lack of curiosity that existed.

There was praise and that was well and fine; and some people did appreciate my attempt at humor and even admired some of the same 'moments' in the garden that I so dearly loved. But what I wanted and didn't get was exactly the sort of questions I had been unable to articulate when I first began touring. It may be that the education of a gardener might also be taken on by those of us putting our gardens up for view, especially if we want the kind of rich exchange that comes from an informed and presumably like-minded public. In that vein I offer the following thoughts for beginning and experienced garden visitors alike.

1) There are no dumb questions.

2) Gardeners generally want to share knowledge and get feedback.

a) Gardens reflect the spirit and vision of the creator, see if you can discover what that is, or reflect upon what is moved in you upon seeing the garden. Most gardeners, like artists want to know how their creation communicates with you. In my garden, full of verdant, lush plants, I have a barren rectangle of earth set apart from any of the beds. At one end of this bed protruding diagonally, is a worn shovel handle. At the other end of the bed (12 feet away) the rusty shovel blade, sunken from the hilt, seems to exit the soil. In one corner of the bed is a clump of dead, brown sedge. This is my homage to a now defunct but still attractive, trusty shovel companion. Upon viewing, people either laugh, look puzzled, ask me why I did it, or join in the joke in some way. I love all of these reponses.

b) While gardeners garden for their own pleasure, if they are opening their creation to you then they are inviting you into a part of themselves. I was complaining to a fellow gardener about disease on one of my Japanese maples. She commiserated (because she too grows some rare and wonderful maples) and said she made sure she burned her diseased debris so as not to contaminate other plants. Then she casually mentioned that she had grown up on a farm and they did this as a matter of routine. This discovery gave me confidence in her information and led to a wonderful conversation about her previous farm life.

3) The garden is a vehicle for communication.

The nature of dialogue with the garden visitors I had hoped for centered around questions about my thinking and intentions for the garden past, present and future. I think this kind of exchange gives the novice (and experienced) gardener a sense of the hurdles and successes in garden making and allows for mutual learning.

For example, someone asked me recently which was my favorite plant. I couldn't possibly answer that question, for I have more than one or two kinds of plants in the garden (in truth I have over 300 different species) but it led me to answer that I liked a certain area very much. I told her that I loved the muted bronzes, copper, oranges and yellows in the early summer. They light up a gray day. I also explained that the area would deepen in color intensity as the season progressed and other plants became prominent, mirroring the increasing sun and warmer days. She seemed to follow my thinking, nodding as I spoke. I reflected on something that I had done both intuitively and with forethought which I now understood more consciously.

4) Every gardener is an artist.

Some are colorists by nature, painting a picture with plants. Others are sculptors, changing the topography of the land and using plants to create shapes in space. Topiary can be a formal, geometric use of a plant repeated along site lines or demarcating corners, while several tall grasses grouped together create an informal vertical statement. Still others see the garden as an architectural study, constructing spaces and moods for people to experience. Think about a bench off to the side of a path, in the dappled, woodland shade of Japanese maple branches and you may feel a sense of tranquility. Some designers are choreographers or conductors, moving you through the garden in a kinesthetic experience, beckoning you to follow a path as it takes a bend that you can't see the end of, or orchestrating the flowering of plants in a harmonic or atonal symphony throughout the seasons. Many gardeners see their plants first and want to know how best to grow them or group them according to place of origin or horticultural similarity.

Most of us are some combination of all of these but we favor one or two approaches over others. When touring a garden look for these different influences. If you can't figure out which ones are present or even dominant, ask the gardener how he or she perceives it themselves. It is a question that is not often asked and may open up an area of lively discussion.

5) Gardens are 'works-in-progress'.

We know this intuitively and from our own experience. Everyone starts somewhere, with existing soil, light, wind and water conditions. We deal with these constraints, altering them where possible to meet our images and fantasies. We are always learning about what works and what doesn't. Plants die unexpectedly, we have a hard winter, our beloved puppy trashes the new exotic we just paid dearly for, the neighbor takes down a large tree turning our shade garden into the Sahara, our life partner admits to hating the color green. I find great comfort when a fellow gardener, a highly respected horticulturist and long-time gardener, says that he's killed a large (though unrevealable) number of plants or when he admits to hating his garden. Like children, gardens can be sources of great joy , guilt and pain. You might ask a gardener how their garden has changed over time, or, what they would do differently now, knowing what they know.

6) Finally, do not expect yourself to be able to see everything in one viewing (a good garden needs to be reflected upon and seen in different seasons as a poem benefits from multiple readings and may speak to you differently at various points in your life).

Perhaps the next time you visit a garden you will have new ways of seeing it, points of entry so to speak into the mind and heart of the garden creator. Perhaps you will hear a voice inside that wants to know more and prompts you to follow your curiousity. It is fine to query the gardener about the name of an unknown plant, but be braver, ask them what conditions it likes best or why they chose to use it in that combination, or what about it they particularly like. You may come away from the exchange with a new appreciation for that plant, or be able to think about your own garden more clearly. After all, we gardeners are always aware of how much we don't know, even (and especially) the ones who've been at it for a long time. Indeed, many of us are hungry for what the Zen Buddhist teachers call 'beginners mind'— that open, genuinely curious approach to learning that brings the garden visitor and the garden creator into a mutually beneficial dialogue.

Suzanne Edison, M.A., has been gardening for 20 years, designing and installing landscapes for 9 years with her own firm, Edison Landscape Design, in Seattle, Washington. Suzanne integrates her former life as a psychotherapist and movement educator in her designs, focusing on aesthetic, ecological and emotional concerns, creating intimate spaces that flow easily from one to another and reflecting the spirit, needs and desires of the owners.