Rhyme Paysage

As much as I find it a chore to main­tain my own lot, and find myself envy­ing my sopho­more chem­istry teacher, who boast­ed of hav­ing paved over hers, I still always get charmed in think­ing through the ecol­o­gy of forces that lead the house land­scape to express itself the way it does. To write out all the fac­tors in play – to be sim­ple to main­tain, easy to sur­vey, not out­right hos­tile to plant life – is not all that reveal­ing on its own. It might be more to the point to note that the house lot is more inter­per­son­al than personal.

Our expla­na­tions at hand for why land­scapes appear the way that they do lie at oppo­site poles: here, per­son­al fan­cy (“I just like it that way”), there, deep instinct (“we evolved to like the savan­na”). My stu­dents neat­ly switch from one expla­na­tion to the oth­er depend­ing on the occa­sion, spend­ing as lit­tle time as pos­si­ble in the uneasy gra­di­ent between them. The com­mon ver­nac­u­lar gar­den forces a reck­on­ing between indi­vid­ual and group, just as you might imag­ine ver­nac­u­lar fash­ion does; it con­sists of super­flu­ous arti­cles that are shared in a com­pul­so­ry way, and nec­es­sary arti­cles expressed in a fan­ci­ful way. Peo­ple oth­er­wise not inclined to make a state­ment at all find them­selves enjoined to make a dis­play to oth­ers; oth­ers look­ing to express them­selves are checked with­in that improb­a­bly long list of prac­ti­cal con­straints. The field they all occu­py togeth­er becomes chaot­ic enough to be best under­stood as a series of equiv­o­cal things – as a bat­tle­field is best under­stood, to a sol­dier, as what­ev­er hap­pens to be present­ly hurtling at them.

The con­tents of the lot are often cho­sen less as objects, and more by dint of the set of rela­tion­ships they make pos­si­ble. That could mean grow­ing milk­weed, despite not lik­ing it much in of itself, only to draw in the but­ter­flies you are real­ly look­ing for; sow­ing mel­on seeds less for the taste than their asso­ci­a­tion with your moth­er, or your neigh­bor. You put whirligigs in the front lawn to have some­thing to talk about; you mass the com­post in the back­yard for the exer­cise in sling­ing it. But note all the mis­un­der­stand­ings that can ensue, because each of these things inescapably presents itself to oth­ers both as an aes­thet­ic propo­si­tion in of itself, and as a piece of the sin­gle snap­shot that your prop­er­ty presents to the street. 

Like lan­guage does, land­scape stands between us. As much as it makes rela­tion­ships pos­si­ble, it is also intend­ed as a tool of dis­con­nec­tion; it says that I am not a part of what is twen­ty feet away. The sub­ur­ban land­scape is vis­i­ble as an elab­o­rate set of buffers and bumpers, cush­ioned off­sets to labo­ri­ous­ly bub­ble through. If the lay of the land, and the lawn draped over it, is the nec­es­sary gram­mar that brings us togeth­er, the col­lec­tion of objects upon it is the vocab­u­lary we employ to stand out and stand against, mak­ing choic­es from the lit­tle the­saurus of the clos­est Home Depot. And so we try to make a gate out of rose­bush­es, or an edge out of priv­et, feel­ing the whole time as though we are try­ing to ham­mer a nail with a stone.