Reviews for The Poetics of Gardens

The average rating for The Poetics of Gardens based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-11-29 00:00:00 Chuck Mackin I got this book in my first semester of sophomore year at Bard, for a class on the History of Gardens. It was one of the worst times in my life, a semester spent entirely in a pinwheeling plummet; I failed all my classes (by not showing up to classes or tests, not writing a single paper) except art and my art professor told me, frankly, that he was only giving me a C- out of pity. I remember going to the first introductory lecture for that History of Gardens class, a one-time course taught by a guest professor, a balding, red-bearded American who had lived in France so long he struggled to find English words and had a strong French accent, and as he explained his thoughts on gardens and their history, I thought to myself, "this is the sort of class that can change your life." But I only ever attended two or three classes. Over the rest of my time at Bard I would speak to other people who took the class with me, and they always said the same thing when I brought it up. "Oh my god," they'd say, "that class changed my life." Rereading this book, which takes an expansive view of gardens and garden design, brings a deep sense of a missed possibility, of another life, perhaps, stretching away from me that semester onward, a strangely haunting road not taken. It is not at all a gardening book; it has almost nothing to say about plants and their care, or anything like that. Just about everyone I know, if they mention "their garden", are talking about rows of vegetables, or maybe a patch of flowers. The authors are architects, and when they talk about a garden, they are talking about a space, outdoors, generally containing plants but not necessarily, and made for no purpose but for human pleasure. (Thanks to this book and my class, that is also how I think of gardens, and it has always meant a somewhat frustrating disconnect.) In the first part of the book, they discuss gardens in general, starting with their theory that there are really only two kinds of gardens, the formal (exemplified by Persian chahar bagh), and the naturalistic (exemplified by the Japanese gardens described in the 12th century Sakuteiki). They discuss kinds of spaces, different ways of approaching garden-making (the 'game' you decide to play -- the 'painter's game', the 'collector's game', the 'storyteller's game', etc), ways to shape and create spaces. There is something thrilling about the most basic and generalized forms of things, as when they note that a bare pole, stuck in the ground, creates a place, an axis around which the space is mysteriously activated, and illustrate this with a tiny drawing and an Australian Aboriginal folktale. In the second section, the heart of the book, the authors discuss 30 or so gardens around the world, illustrated with plans and axonometrics and tiny, black-and-white, flip-phone sized photos, which means that their writing has to carry most of the weight to evoke the places they are describing. Luckily, they are up to the task there, and bring the gardens alive to you; they all sound very beautiful and satisfying. They describe gardens from Capability Brown's huge landscape parks to square courses of water in Kashmir to the raked gravel and scattered stones of Japanese Zen gardens to their own idiosyncratic choices like Uluru (made a "garden" by the evocative stories and names given to various features by the Yankuitjatjara and Pitjantjatjara) and the entire island of Bali. Here too, though, the pleasure of the book is bound up in pain, because it does nothing so much as remind me how seldom I, or any American (the only American "gardens" featured are national parks) are ever in a well-designed space of any kind. In New York, at least, there are Prospect Park and Paley Park and the gardens of the Cloisters; in Chicago, I could sit in Mies's Federal Plaza (not, as far as I know, one of his more celebrated works, but unbelievably satisfying compared to the mall I worked in); but here in California I don't really know of any. Even Frederick Law Olmsted could not reconcile a graveyard with palm trees, and most of the "parks" of downtown Oakland are bare, neglected "playgrounds" with dead grass and no trees. But, you might say, you could make your own. Indeed, the entire point of this book, as written, is not for the simple pleasure of study but for inspiration, ideas for your own garden. The final section of the book is particularly dedicated to this idea: a series of more-or-less dire and allegedly humorous dialogues ("I'm getting sick and tired of these fashionable Derrida-da games," says King Kong -- I'm not making this up) between famous garden designers of the past, giving advice on how to deal with the American front, back, and side yards. Here, though, perhaps the sharpest pain is hiding for me. For several years I lived in an excruciating suburban neighborhood, in a house I partly owned, with an American front, back, and side yard, planted with hideous half-dead foundation plantings and some trees which also managed to die for reasons unknown. The entire time I lived there, I would think, "I have to make this better." But though I had lots of time on my hands, I had no gardening skills, I had no money, and even if I had money a perennial suspicion/distaste for getting other people to do things for me, especially when it comes to art, and worst of all, I had no ideas, even with this book. Part of the problem, of course, was having too many cooks, too many people to please -- it wasn't all my house, after all, other people lived there too, with their own desires, plus of course the fucking neighbors and their fucking opinions -- but also part of it was, perhaps, the very space/place vision of gardens that this book and my class gave me. All the ideas the architect authors give for American front, back, and side yards deal with some pretty large-scale earth movement and erecting buildings and working with fountains and water. All my ideas were like this too. Maybe I could terrace the backyard (we lived on a hill) like rice paddies. Maybe a huge, moss-covered stone would look nice in the front yard. Maybe a statue of Diana half-hidden in a grove of delicate birch trees. All of the things I most respond to in a garden are man-made: a pavilion, a wall, paving stones. But there is a reason there was never a punk architecture style, like there were punk music, fashion, publishing; it's impossible, or nearly so, to DIY a building. And even planting bushes or whatever requires some money, some know-how, and especially, some idea of what you want. I never came up with anything. More than the memory of the ugly banality of our yard and the neighborhood (easily outbalanced by the warm memories of life inside, with my wonderful family) it is that failure of imagination, of a puzzle never solved even in my mind, much less in physical reality, that haunts and hurts me now. And gives me a lack of confidence for the future; now I live in a rented room in a house with a backyard cast in permanent shadow, with only a bed of dead leaves on dirt; could it be made nice? I have no idea how, again, and not even the right to hire someone, to help it be made so. None of this of course is the fault of the authors (except the awful dialogues of the last section, which cost them a star). Their book continues, all these years later, to fill me with dreams, to inspire me to go out into the world, to see places as art.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-09-13 00:00:00 Michael Clauson Notable for what is missing.