The Rural Life (20 page)

Wherever the sage and chamisa gave way to grass, the cattle would bunch up eating, and wherever their path crossed irrigation
ditches, they would wallow and bawl, and then the blacktop would be traced with long sinuous lines of drool. But mostly the
yearlings were quiet, almost stoic. From a distance their feet moving through stiff grass sounded like spring rain. In their
silence they were completely unlike a herd of cow-calf pairs.

The night before, one of the horsemen had moved a herd of mother cows and their calves from one pasture into the next, a trip
of perhaps five hundred yards. The word “moo” doesn’t do justice to the cries that filled the evening air. As the cries rose
and fell and rose again, they began to sound like the tintinnabulation of bells on a feast day in some medieval city. Then
the last calf was driven through the gate, its mother found, and the night was no louder than the wind across the hilltops.

T
he tomato cages have been toppled by the latest storm—yet more rain in a rainy summer. Japanese beetles have pinholed the
raspberries and the rhubarb and the leaves of a Montmorency cherry. The roses and hollyhocks are in tatters too. It’s late
summer, and I can almost feel the organic inertia overwhelming the vegetable garden—the outsized cucumbers, the bolted lettuce,
the ever-bearing strawberries making their break from the raised beds. I planted the dark side of the garden in squash and
pumpkins, and for a few weeks the seedlings grew hardly at all. Then in early July someone fired a starter’s gun, and the
race was on. The French pumpkins have overtaken the butternut squash, and they are all bearing down in a dead heat on the
hops arbor, where the hops have lapped the climbing roses. So much growth looks surprisingly like decay. The end is in sight.

A gardener anticipates the mortality of his vegetable garden. By early fall, it’s somehow the point. My own garden nearly
always ends in fresh wilderness. In autumn I stare at the demise of my spring plans and realize that the great sadness and
great joy of vegetable gardening is that so few vegetables are perennial where I live. All those drawings and plottings come
down to this, a cornucopia of nettles and soon-to-be-frostbit tomatoes. The fullest ambition of the northern kitchen gardener
is to see the wrack of his old garden moldering in a compost heap, ripening for next spring.

Other gardens—the kinds with conifers and obelisks and classical fountains, with avenues of pleached trees and files of boxwood—are
planted in homage to continuity. But even those gardens, those enduring works of imagination and design and ambition, don’t
last forever. Not long ago I came across a passage in Goethe’s journal of his voyage to Italy that says something substantial
about the way even lofty gardens come to an end. The date is September 21, 1786, and Goethe is in Vicenza, still in his first
intoxication with Italy. He writes:

Today I visited Doctor Turra; for some five years he concentrated passionately on botany, assembled a herbarium of Italian
flora, and, under the previous bishop, established a botanical garden. But that is all past. Natural history was replaced
by medical practice, the herbarium is food for worms, the bishop is dead, and the botanical garden has been replanted, as
is proper, with cabbages and garlic.

The bishop dies, and that’s that. Under the next bishop, food for the scientist’s mind becomes food for the cleric’s stomach,
“as is proper.” Goethe gives every garden its epitaph: “But that is all past.”

So gardens end with the bishop’s death and with the worms. They end in a hard frost and in a drought. They end where the neighbor’s
property begins or at the limit of the drip-irrigation line or where the woods close in. They end in a view, a wall, a border,
a road, a tangle of weeds, a subdivision, or in political turmoil, a change of ownership, a reversal of fortune. They end
where energy and money and ideas run out, or where the deer and woodchucks begin. They end in divorce and death. They end
most happily by beginning all over again.

And sometimes gardens end abruptly, violently, in a cataclysm, natural or otherwise. A few months ago I was reading John Ruskin’s
strange, late work called
Fors Clavigera,
a series of long, fulminating letters addressed to “the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain,” whom he hoped to form into
a utopian society called the Guild of St. George. In the fifth letter of
Fors Clavigera,
dated December 1871, Ruskin writes about Goethe’s theory that a plant’s parts are merely variations of each other—that, in
Ruskin’s words, “all the parts of a plant had a kind of common nature, and would change into each other.” Goethe put it more
succinctly. “Everything is leaf,” he wrote.

For Ruskin the idea that “there are no such thing as Flowers—there are only gladdened Leaves” is an attractive one, but he
believed that in the hands of scientists the idea became a misperception, a misreading of the plant’s purpose, which is to
produce flowers. His mistrust of science is unequivocal. “You have learned,” he wrote,

that there is no such thing as a flower; and as far as your scientific hands and scientific brains, inventive of explosive
and deathful, instead of blossoming and life-giving, Dust, can contrive, you have turned the Mother-Earth, Demeter, into the
Avenger-Earth, Tisiphone—with the voice of your brother’s blood crying out of it, in one wild harmony round all its murderous
sphere.

As a footnote, Ruskin quotes a letter to the
Times
of London, dated April 5, 1871, from the great English garden designer William Robinson. Robinson had gone to Paris to see
what the Franco-Prussian War had done to the gardens there. In September 1870 the German army laid siege to Paris, and during
the winter the city consumed itself. Some forty thousand oxen and a quarter-million sheep grazed in the Bois de Boulogne,
but they were not enough. The city grew cold and dark and hungry that winter. A French Horticultural Relief Fund had been
raised to repair war damage to French gardens, but it was clear to Robinson that the money would fall far short of the need.
Most of Paris’s public gardens had survived the siege, Robinson reported, but along the Avenue de l’Impératrice “a sad scene
of desolation presents itself.” What was once “the finest avenue garden in existence” was now, he stated dryly, “as cheerless
as Leicester Square or a sparsely furnished rubbish yard.” It was hardly surprising. “After a similar ordeal,” he wrote, “we
should not have a stick left in London.”

Grand Parisian gardens, though, weren’t the only ones to be decimated in the winter of 1870-71. “When at Vitry on the 28th
of March,” Robinson noted, “I found the once fine nursery of M. Honoré Dufresne deserted, and many acres once covered with
large stock and specimens cleared to the ground.” Near one village Robinson came upon an embankment built to protect an artillery
battery. It was made up of “mattresses, sofas, and almost every other large article of furniture, with the earth stowed between.
There were, in addition, nearly forty orange and oleander tubs gathered from the little gardens in the neighbourhood visible
in various parts of this ugly bank.” Robinson wrote: “Multiply these few instances by the number of districts occupied by
the belligerents during the war, and some idea of the effects of glory on gardening in France may be obtained.”

Thoughts of war, even distant, long-forgotten wars, are the kind of thoughts that gardeners try instinctively to exclude from
their meditations. So many natural forces prey upon a garden over time that it’s hardly worth thinking about the unnatural
forces that might also do so, the ones that by Robinson’s estimate destroyed some two and a half million young trees around
two villages near Paris in a single winter. But I find myself thinking again and again about the way Robinson links glory
and gardening. “Glory” is his shorthand for military esprit, the zeal for conquest and blood sacrifice. It makes an interesting
juxtaposition, glory and gardening, if not a perfect antithesis.

I wonder, for instance, what it must have been like for a veteran of World War I, supremely a war of excavation, to have turned
his first peacetime spadeful of soil in some quiet cottage garden during the spring of 1919, the first spring after the armistice.
What must the bite of the spade have felt like to him? How immaculate, almost virginal, must the earth in those few square
meters of home garden have seemed after the squalid soil along the front lines in France and Belgium, where large parts of
former battlegrounds are still cordoned off, where bits of bone and metal, explosives and debris, are still being disinterred
nearly a century later. That indeed is Ruskin’s Avenger-Earth, the evil garden.

In December 1999 severe storms swept northern Europe and blew down some ten thousand trees at Versailles, many of them nearly
two hundred years old. The news photographs of the destruction at Versailles looked like the early stages of a bombardment,
the woods toppled, the earth not yet plowed into mud by the shells. But those photographs also resembled a pair of eighteenth-century
paintings by the artist and garden designer Hubert Robert. When Louis XVI came to the throne in 1774, the various woods at
Versailles, the bosquets, were in terrible repair. They had been planted with mature trees ripped from forests in Compiègne
and Normandy at the end of the seventeenth century. It fell to the new king to undo his predecessors’ neglect, and he ordered
the removal of several of the old bosquets and the planting of new groves in a less formal, English style.

Robert, whose patron was also one of the king’s horticultural counselors, was commissioned to paint two different scenes of
the destruction, both of which were exhibited in 1777. One is called
View of Apollo’s Wood During the Felling of the Trees.
Robert was famous for his love of architectural ruins, but in this painting the ruins are botanical. Apollo’s Wood is a scene
of industry and chaos. A work crew tugs at a rope attached well up the trunk of a tree being felled. A sawyer works his way
along the length of a downed tree. Men of military demeanor survey the scene, as do ladies of fashion.

The more interesting painting of that event is Robert’s view of the felling of trees near the Tapis Vert, with a glimpse of
the Grand Canal receding into the distance. Children play on an impromptu seesaw. Woodsmen and their axes rest against the
base of a statue and the carcass of a tree. The king and queen stand in the right foreground, looking over the arboreal upheaval.
Somehow there’s a tension in this painting that’s missing in its companion piece. Partly it’s the grotesquerie of the trees
themselves—enormous hulks of wood—towering over the colonnade in the distance, over great urns, over a statue of Milo of Crotona
being devoured by a lion, his hand caught in the trunk of a tree. It’s a scene right out of William Gaddis’s
JR,
where trees “appeared to stagger without even provocation of a breeze, rearing their splintered amputations in all directions.”

But the real tension in this painting comes from the presence of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. They transform this scene
of destruction and revelry into a moment of overlap between two worlds, that of the woodsmen, axes at rest, and that of the
king and his consort, who would feel the blade on their necks some seventeen years later. The interest of the painting is
its faint horror, the sense of botanical carnage and social inversion, even though what Robert witnesses is a new approach
to order, a reinvestment in the park, and workmen resting under the eyes of their employer and king. It’s a view of peaceable
destruction, but in the very restoration of those bosquets there is also a glimpse of the end of the lineage that planted
them, though Robert could not have known it.

That moment in Versailles—the felling of those trees—was merely a minor adjustment in a garden that even then belonged to
history, a garden already more than a century old. Robert’s painting is both a documentary and a Shakespearean fantasy, a
comedy in which the court ventures into a wood where disorder prevails, where ruin is imminent but always forestalled, where
decay suggests not the past but the future. Catherine the Great, who tried unsuccessfully to bring Robert to Russia, remarked
that he preferred to live in what she called a land of ruins, which is what revolutionary France would become. Denis Diderot,
the art critic and Encyclopedist, tried to explain the psychological effect of Robert’s fascination with ruins. It was, he
said, a fascination with endings and the transformation they bring. “How old the world is!” Diderot imagined Robert thinking.
“I walk between two eternities.”

Yet the world isn’t old for everyone, and on the American plains the two eternities aren’t past and future, but grass and
sky. I have my own personal pendant to Robert’s painting. It’s a print of a work called
Spring in Town,
painted by Grant Wood at the end of his life. The scene is the harvest of one’s own labor, set on the edge of a small Iowa
town. Quilts hang on a laundry line. Two men beat a carpet spread on the grass. A young girl bends the bough of a cherry tree
in blossom. The painting is dominated by a broad-backed, shirtless young man turning the soil with a garden fork. He is nearly
as large as the white-spired church rising on a hill at the edge of town, and he could have posed as Milo of Crotona. The
geometry of his unplanted garden, as well as its tilth, is perfect, altered only by a row of irises. The compost of last year’s
vegetation has already been spread. The formalism of Versailles—a monarchical, absolutist vision of garden geometry—has been
pared down to this democratic, self-reliant vision of gardening.