Storming the Gates of Paradise (38 page)

Think of P. T. Barnum as a gardener for a moment. Gardeners seek to alter their plants and push them to extremes, and Barnum sought out human beings who were similarly unusual. He began his career exhibiting an African American woman who claimed to be the 161-year-old nurse of George Washington’s father, soon acquired a mermaid skeleton, and was truly launched when he enlisted the services of young Charles Stratton, still remembered well as General Tom Thumb, a midget who eventually reached the height of 33 inches (84 cm). Thus began the Golden Age of circuses and the American sideshow or, as it was known at Coney
Island in New York, freak show: a sort of botanical garden of human variety from around the world, often including Siamese twins (seldom Siamese but always so designated after the conjoined Chang and Eng, two of Barnum’s performers), giants, dwarfs, midgets, fat ladies, thin men and living skeletons, pinheads, hermaphrodites, strong men, bearded ladies, contortionists, sword-swallowers, fire-eaters and tattooed, limbless, and otherwise unusual people. The botanical equivalent might be bonsai, sequoia, grafts, dwarf and espaliered fruit trees, barrel cacti, banyan trees, hybrid tea roses such as the Racy Lady and Scent Sation, tropical flowers bred to yet more extravagant displays, tulip breaks, and, of course, topiary and outsized pumpkins. (Just as in the sideshow, most of the freaks need do nothing more than be their unusual selves, so sunflowers and azaleas and the largest fig tree in the United States may sit serene in their fabulousness; but topiary is performative flora, akin to sword-swallowers and acrobats in its achievement of an effect that is the result of effort, not essence—topiary is, after all, usually nothing more exotic than box or yew.)

Whole forests have been laid waste to discuss beauty and, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the sublime and the picturesque. All of these aesthetics can be configured as being uplifting, enlarging, somehow in good taste. But there are other aesthetics, not least among them what could be called the exuberant, the appetite for the peculiar, the disproportionate, the unusual and exotic, the outsized, the gaudy, the excessive, the appalling. The United States, as Barnum and Brayton and Chesty Morgan (the stripper and B-movie star whose breasts were, more or less, the size of prize pumpkins) and a thousand Las Vegas designers all demonstrate, is the true home of this aesthetic. Familiar as part of the freak show, the hot dog stands shaped like hot dogs, the roadside dinosaur statuary—this is the aesthetic that would describe why we like to look not only at really beautiful people but also at really obese, tall, or tiny ones. It’s a curiosity that seems somehow connected to the botanical garden, which attempts to catalog the expanse of creation’s flora as the sideshow does its human fauna. It suggests not a nature of harmony and continuity, but of extravagant experimentation, endless variety, a never-a-dull-moment nature, a wide-open nature. And perhaps a democratic one, which brings us back to Americanism.

This nature can be seen as democratic because it achieves its effect not through exclusion but through inclusion, and because exuberance itself is generally considered to be a little déclassé. There is a whole language of class in the garden—when they returned to the garden, flowers were redeemed with the tasteful monochromatic schemes of the likes of Gertrude Jekyll; and, as gardening essayist Michael Pollan points out, there is a whole class war of the roses, in which old roses—more fragrant, more softly shaped, less abundant in their bloom, more limited in their palette—are the exiled aristocracy. Good taste is about renunciation: you must have enough to restrain in order to value restraint, enough abundance to prize austerity. After all, it was only after aniline dyes made bright clothing universally available that the privileged stopped dressing like peacocks; spareness is often the public face of excess. For those for whom too much is still a shining promise, brightness, quantity, and size are not yet dubious qualities. And good taste could also be an aestheticization of the limited-palette moderation of the temperate zone, in contrast to the vividness of the tropics and the starkly sculptural stand-alone forms of desert plants and the desert’s periodic wild bloomings. Moderation, the Greek philosopher said, is pleasant to the wise, but it’s not necessarily fun. Eleanor Perényi writes in her book
Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden
,

Looking at my dahlias one summer day, a friend whose taste runs to the small and impeccable said sadly, “You do like big, conspicuous flowers, don’t you?” She meant vulgar, and I am used to that. It hasn’t escaped me that mine is the only WASP garden in town to contain dahlias, and not the discreet little singles either. Some are as blowsy as half-dressed Renoir girls; others are like spiky sea-creatures, water-lilies, or the spirals in a crystal paperweight; and they do shoot up to prodigious heights. But to me they are sumptuous, not vulgar.

Exclusion seeks harmony, familiarity, tranquility, all those things that might be essential to a landscape garden and inimical to a circus—but why can’t a garden be like a circus and yield up a circus’s gorgeous pleasures? This is the question raised by John Pfahl’s garden photographs, and what makes the answer unusual is that it is entirely botanical.

Often, eccentric gardeners seeking self-expression leave plants behind to make gardens of found objects and accretions. The folk art environments that proliferate most in the American South but can be found almost everywhere often speak of religion, particularly the Book of Revelation. They are still gardens, but they have somehow left nature behind, perhaps because it requires a more patient manipulation than bottles and planks and old tires, perhaps because we tend to think of nature in general as restrained and subdued despite examples of nature in particular like Perényi’s dahlias and Brayton’s giraffe or yuccas whose spray of long leaves looks like fireworks in slow motion. There are other versions of nature that are vibrant, extravagant, even lurid and sensational, and though the most common approximation of paradise emphasizes its serenity, are not its variety and abundance equally essential? And does not the Book of Revelation, with all its architecture of jewels and uncanny beasts suggest that the landscape of revelation is going to be more like the Las Vegas Strip in its neon glory days than, say, the Lake District or the Roman campagna? Was not a long allée of tall trees always secretly offering the pleasures that a row of Vegas showgirls, each six feet tall, now proffers? In which case, plants best approach the ideal nature when the horticulture becomes extreme, an Eden of weirdness and democracy and large appetite for dazzle.

Saudi jihadists weren’t the only ones with a penchant for crashing into the upper levels of the World Trade Center. Songbirds did too, migrating by night and mistaking the lights high above the city for stars, with approximately the same disastrous results as moths attempting to navigate by candlelight. At least one ornithologist used to regularly stroll along the base of the towers in the early morning, removing small corpses and rescuing the living. A lot of species have been too fragile, too particular in their requirements, to survive our wholesale transformation of their environment. In my own corner of it, the brown satyr butterfly, endemic to San Francisco, became extinct sometime in the nineteenth century, and the Xerxes blue vanished during World War II when its Golden Gate habitat was overtaken by military expansion. A number of other local species—the bay checkerspot, the San Francisco garter snake, the mission blue butterfly—are near extinction. Farther afield, the California condor with its ten-foot wingspan, or rather the few dozen surviving specimens, continues to hover near the brink of disappearance; after an ingenious captive breeding program, a few have been reintroduced in the wild—where they show an unfortunate penchant for flying into power lines and eating the lead shot in game killed by guns. On the other hand and the other side of the country, one of North America’s showiest and most famously extinct birds, the ivory-billed woodpecker, reappeared in 2004; its existence was publicly announced in the spring of 2005, amid a media circus, bouts of scientists’ tears, and a lot of astonishment and rapture (and a little Arkansas forest protection). Whether there is a breeding pair rather than just a single individual
remains to be seen, as does the bird’s ability to make do with what habitat it has left.

Other species have rebounded, notably elephant seals, who were hunted nearly into extinction at the turn of the twentieth century, when at most a few hundred survived in Mexican waters. They first returned to their California coastal breeding grounds in the 1950s and have flourished since, north and south of San Francisco, where their spectacular sex and violence—the bellicose males weigh up to three tons—can be observed every winter. Dozens of species of birds once threatened by DDT have increased in number since the pesticide was banned, as have whales since the 1949 near-ban on hunting, though many, many species continue to lose ground. Yet others, notably a lot of omnivores and carnivores that once feared humans and were hunted by us, have begun not just to rebound but to expand their territory, their diet, and their habits. They are joining us.

Thus the mountain lions of Silicon Valley: a Palo Alto naturalist reports that after sixteen unconfirmed sightings in nine years, there were suddenly thirty sightings in the first nine months of 2004, two of which were so flagrantly out in the middle of suburbia that police decided the predators had to be shot. One primary school sent warnings to parents about letting kids walk to school alone. In a few spectacular cases in the past decade or so, mountain lions have hunted, killed, and partially eaten solitary runners. In several others, they have stalked children who were out with their parents. We are, after all, as food units, sized much like deer and not nearly as speedy. More often the lions, which reach up to 150 pounds, dine on the housepets (as do alligators in Florida, another population on the rebound). California offered a bounty on mountain lions into the 1960s, and they were wary, seldom-seen beasts in those days; but in 1990, we voted to make them a protected species. In 1920, there were about six hundred of them in the state; like the state’s human population, they have increased tenfold since. There are now four to six thousand of them, and they have changed their behavior, no longer shunning human beings and habitation.

In this past decade, we have seen the emergence of the new nature that will likely survive while the more fragile primordial nature falls. It includes a weedy,
flexible, tough set of species who thrive on the disturbances that send other species into flight or extinction. And they’re becoming increasingly urban. For a long time, cities had little but pigeons and rats for urban wildlife; but while foxes move into London, coyotes, raccoons, skunks, ravens, crows, and more have moved into North American cities. For one thing, they like garbage. For another, we have stopped killing them and everything else that moves; we have, from their perspective, become a relatively harmless species (except for our cars, but roadkill is a popular food source for crows, ravens, coyotes, vultures, and more). So they’re no longer afraid of us. And then, too, we’ve cleaned up: the toxic sewers that surrounded Manhattan in the 1960s have gradually become something resembling rivers again, in which fish can swim and herons can hunt. The urban air is cleaner too. And the garbage!

A lot of these species are enchanting to a lot of us urbanites, who are unworried on account of lambs or crops. When a coyote appeared on Bernal Heights in San Francisco, it became a local celebrity, though other coyotes in the city have remained relatively incognito. (Angelenos must have scoffed at our excitement, since choruses of howling coyotes are old hat in the canyons and hills that edge Los Angeles.) Bandit-masked raccoons have soared to bear-cub sizes on their garbage diet and become bolder and bolder; I often see them out strolling, or rather waddling, across streets, under cars, and up fences around the time the bars begin to thin out. Ecologically speaking, these species are mostly harmless: the supply of housepets, runners, and garbage is not endangered.

Ravens and crows are another story. About seventy-five miles up the coast from San Francisco, Alfred Hitchcock made
The Birds
, in which a Coalition of the Winged attacked human beings en masse, a fantasy in its achievement of unity between avian species as much as anything else. Some birds have proliferated amazingly in the past decade or so, notably ravens and crows, but they threaten the survival of more fragile species. One of the still-endangered species of the West Coast is the snowy plover; by 1995, ravens were plundering more than two-thirds of the plover eggs on the seashore north of San Francisco, as well as raiding nests of other at-risk species. Ravens have also been observed preying on other endangered species, including bank swallows in the Bay Area and the marbled
murrelet in the Pacific Northwest. A pair of Bay Area ornithologists trying to protect other birds reported, “We go to great lengths: hiding the traps, hiding ourselves, starting before dawn. It’s difficult to outsmart them.” They are very smart and, unlike most birds, great learners and interpreters.

A young naturalist who grew up birding in San Francisco—we have quail and great blue herons in Golden Gate Park and a considerable seabird population on the coast—told me he considered ravens and crows to be tantamount to a “second Silent Spring” (the first being the decimation of birds by DDT and other pesticides, which Rachel Carson addressed in her landmark
Silent Spring
of 1962). When I came to San Francisco, ravens and crows were rarely sighted in urban spaces—they had become rare altogether in the 1920s, but populations since the 1980s have exploded. In the 1983 San Francisco Christmas count of birds, ornithologists found 14 ravens; in the 1999 count, they found 239. Oakland went from 5 to 101 in the same period. They appear to have increased far more since then. There is a raven explosion afoot here and elsewhere. I see them everywhere these days, in the country, in the city, on campuses, in downtown plazas, and sitting on the power lines outside my windows, their bulk of ruffled feathers making them look middle-aged, disheveled, unlike their sleek corvid cousins the crows, who are also all over these days.