Rhyme Paysage

The process of judg­ment does not end with oth­er people’s hous­es, but goes on work­ing through the rest of the set­tle­ment too. And when you see a place for the first time, how do you judge it? Do you see it all in one go, as a sin­gle face? Or do you look at the sum of things with­in it, pric­ing one thing after the oth­er, and then tal­ly­ing up the whole? I guess you alter­nate back and forth. But the first judg­ment, in our habit, seems like the mean­ing­ful one, and it seems that the sum of things is an unfair way to mea­sure the whole; after all, any stray thing could land in the ensem­ble at any moment, a fly on the cheek.

Now why should that be? If the space laid in between thing, the over­all pro­por­tion, is impor­tant, the char­ac­ter of each of thing should mat­ter as well; and that the rea­son why a stray shop­ping cart should be eject­ed is not that it betrays the place, or mars the place, but that it actu­al­ly changes the place – the place is not so sol­id as we’d like.

To invert that, we can also view it from the point of view of the per­son tasked to make a land­scape. I think it’s a mis­take to think that most peo­ple bear a strong image of the land­scape they are try­ing to get to, not least because, once again, they have inher­it­ed so many con­straints in try­ing to cre­ate it. The land­scape is equal­ly the sum of one-off pur­chas­es of con­ve­nience or fan­cy. In that light, the most impor­tant gar­den of Colum­bus could be the hum­ble one perched on the side of the Lowe’s.

From the out­side, it is walled off by a thin false front of a wall, only sig­naled from out­side by lit­tle racks of African vio­lets in squat lit­tle box­es, priced at $3.79 per thir­teen ounces. You head in through the front door and then to your left, through the grand vol­ume of the store’s hangar and the lit­tle tableaus of patio fur­ni­ture there­in. Racks of seed pack­ets and Scott’s Mir­a­cle-Gro on the inside pre­fig­ure what’s out­side, like the por­trait of the fields dis­played inside an Eng­lish coun­try house. 

A door slides open to announce a space that is very hard to see as a whole, despite being more or less open. Does this place resem­ble the land­scapes it is meant to cre­ate? I’m not sure, nev­er sure if a gar­den is show­ing you a series of pur­chas­es pre­served as neat­ly as pos­si­ble, or a place to occu­py. In its hon­esty, any­way, I like this as a place to occu­py; I like the seri­ous­ness with which the pil­lar lights pick out the goods for you at night.

Many of the con­tents are com­mer­cial plants, strand­ed in indi­vid­ual vol­umes of soil instead of shar­ing a bed togeth­er. The raw stag­ing out here prods you, even more than in a stan­dard res­i­den­tial gar­den, to see the plants as a series of indi­vid­ual pur­chas­es; to acknowl­edge that these things are all amassed togeth­er here in the real world would cause you to look too care­ful­ly at this hasty stag­ing area. Look nonethe­less at the dis­play tables laid out through the mid­dle; they’re lit­er­al­ly grates laid out on cin­derblock legs, as though a man­ag­er had run up to two hourly work­ers the night before and said, ​“I for­got, I for­got!” To one side, a wall of shelv­ing holds palet­te­fuls of bricks, shrinkwrapped and spray­paint­ed with day-glo codes: 477118 378. 

You get con­front­ed with one annu­al after anoth­er, named after one or anoth­er Ger­man botanist, exhibit­ing one or anoth­er of the same small check­list of prop­er­ties, bun­dled at ran­dom togeth­er in one body. In this, you may feel odd­ly at home. It is the sit­u­a­tion of wan­der­ing into a beau­ty sup­ply store for the first time, or a com­ic book store for the first time, chock­ablock with dif­fer­ences-with­out-dis­tinc­tions. The same basic set of ingre­di­ents seems to get brute-forced togeth­er a thou­sand times, under a thou­sand dif­fer­ent names. 

Some of the goods for sale will call out to you. As you look them over, they will start to sug­gest to you – espe­cial­ly if you haven’t paid atten­tion before – the nature of the prob­lem at hand. Which goods are meant for you? Which goods will match each oth­er? Will peo­ple rec­og­nize these goods on your lot? You won­der if you too will need to put in solar path lights to point your guests to your front door. You won­der if you should go in for con­crete geese. You squint and try to project back an appro­pri­ate land­scape from the col­lec­tion of goods ahead of you. 

Such a gar­den gives you an explod­ed view of what a nor­mal land­scape could be. It is not only the series of things that would be laid out for dis­play in your land­scape, but the series of imple­ments that you would have to oper­ate to make them coex­ist. Such mag­ic goods can lead to a desire for out­comes in the land­scape, not always the oth­er way around. Don’t you ever start out only want­i­ng to run a chain­saw, and only then invent excus­es on your lot to use it?

We tend to believe that through hard work and study, all the mis­cel­la­neous pur­chas­es of the gar­den cen­ter will glom togeth­er on your own lot into a feel­ing of home. The feel­ing of accom­plish­ment will sink in like a soil amend­ment, and make you see the lot with the glow of a favorite child; in the same way, it will reflect your own virtue back at you, your own wor­thi­ness to con­tin­ue. Maybe for some; and for oth­ers it will nev­er get bet­ter than that preg­nant moment of inhab­it­ing a cat­a­log. Maybe it is because in such places you can step into the com­mon fan­ta­sy of the com­mer­cial world, a world where you have been invit­ed behind the counter, into the choco­late fac­to­ry; where all prod­ucts are free to browse, to pick up and weigh. You can won­der at the lime spread­ers and spurges with­out wor­ry­ing about them, with­out wor­ry­ing about rust, or rust fun­gus. The plants them­selves seem root­less, each one pre­pared to go at a moment’s notice with any­one with the mon­ey. If they are not root­ed, not nat­ur­al, not yours, then it is also good that they are some­one else’s problem. 

If a lot shows the val­ue of the home, we can sus­pect that for many Colum­bu­sans, rich or poor, it is tempt­ing to run up the score, quite as though you were the Buck­eyes jump­ing up and down on the North­ern Illi­nois Huskies. Gar­den cen­ters, being large and full of mis­cel­la­neous things, can out­per­form the typ­i­cal lot, which is con­strained by the lim­it­ed time and atten­tion the house­hold­er can bring to the task. Since there are no roots to the show gar­den, no com­pelling need to have the plants suc­ceed long-term, the show gar­den can over­com­mit. So that table­fuls of sprigs can be laid like a ban­quet, with alleys of pre­cast foun­tains, pal­lets full of grotesques in ter­ra cot­ta, rough­ly sort­ed and heaped up between the avenues.