Salon Wanderlust | No man is a garden

[Salon Wanderlust: Travel with a passion]

T A B L E_T A L K
What do you wear when you travel? Discuss comfort versus style on the road in Table Talk's Wanderlust area

R E C E N T L Y
Chili con carne, anyone?
By Vijai Maheshwari
In Moscow, buyers are snapping up whatever's on the shelves
(09/14/98)
From nudism to Buddhism
By Tanya Shaffer
Desperately seeking solace in three European retreats
(09/11/98)
Bangkok's got a brand new bag
By Karl Vetas
Sex change capital of the world
(09/10/98)
Have dress, will travel
By Lori Leibovich
Test-driving Travelsmith's "Indispensable Black Travel Dress"
(09/09/98)
A legendary cafe-restaurant in Paris
By David Downie
Le Pied Rare is celebrated in novels -- and by its pork-loving patrons
(09/08/98)

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NO MAN IS A GARDEN | PAGE 1, 2
- - - - - - - - - -
Arriving in East Meon we found the place plastered in signs to the 20 or so gardens deemed worthy of our interest. The streets were already jumping with nosy neighbors. Clouds scudded above the throng, threatening showers but failing to intimidate the curious. At each garden gate stood a nervous owner -- a smart retired executive, a real estate agent or a farmer's hand in shirt-sleeves: a cross-section of modern village life united in anxious pride.
To be deemed worthy of our attention, each garden had already survived a merciless cut on the part of the day's organizers. Every chosen rose was thus properly bursting with flowers and aphid-free. All the anointed hollyhocks were tall, the clematis lush, each lawn was immaculate and rolled and every vegetable garden was a model of order and plenitude. The overwhelming style was, not surprisingly, that of the English cottage garden, but there were rebel gardens, too, that specialized in exotics like fuchsias or vast collections of varieties of a single plant.
If it takes vanity to open one's garden to viewing by strangers, it also takes courage. Apart from a family of Swedes, representative of the increasing numbers of Europeans that the Channel Tunnel has brought into this part of the country, most of the day's tourists were relative locals with firm ideas about what constitutes a true cottage garden.
Allowing them to pass beyond one's garden gate also involves a certain amount of risk. Even England's most idyllic villages are not untouched by crime, either from within or from the inhabitants of the conurbations that are never far away on this small island. Many of the pricier homes had all their curtains closed -- so criminals masquerading as garden-lovers while actually casing the joint for antiques couldn't see what treasures the owners had, explained my mother. My father added that people he knew had had statuary stolen after events like these. But as yet, in East Meon, the ultimate sacrilege -- the theft of plants -- was apparently mercifully rare.
The rewards for the noncriminal visitor, though, were rich enough. These were small Edens that we were being invited to see. We get the word "paradise" from the ancient Iranian word for a walled garden. To be allowed into these beautiful private enclaves by normally very private people was to witness as near perfect a realization as you're likely to find while alive of what the English fully expect Paradise itself to be.
Many of the builders of these terrestrial paradises were, interestingly, ex-sailors. East Meon is not so far from the dockyards at Portsmouth where my school's first graduates joined their first ships bound for the East Indies and where the royal navy still maintains much of its fleet. Like much of the area, the village is a favorite retirement spot for captains of what they still like to refer to as the Senior Service. Seeing these former embodiments of absolute authority nervously welcome us into their gardens, I had the sense that in retirement, adrift from the ships upon which they were the only law, these men's gardens were their conduits back into the real, uncertain world the rest of us share. Plants cannot be ordered to grow nor threatened if they don't. And in swapping commands for compliments, salvos for salvias, these men were not diminished but humanized. The unspoken sentiment among the visitors that day seemed to be that while military service was valuable -- essential even -- to society, it was not man's natural state; that this finally attained gardening life was what all that playing around in boats was for and that these men were acknowledging this in their newfound dedication to impressing us with their horticultural flair.
Perhaps the finest garden, though -- and the best bit of snooping -- was to be found at the village's most important house, a small but unusually intact medieval hall built by the Bishop of Winchester in the 13th century and now owned by a London barrister and his wife. Their garden is a team effort. She is the plantswoman and he the topiarist -- annually clipping hundreds of yards of the yew hedges between which we were being allowed this once to stray.
It was the most popular spot on the tour -- everyone wanted to see what was behind the hall's high stone walls. What had been hidden from us were beautiful terraces, an ancient wood-frame barn, a reflecting pool surrounded by moss and lichen-strewn stone and countless finely planted herbaceous borders. My parents muttered approvingly of how the house's current guardians were taking a proper squirearchial interest in village life. The correct quid pro quo of having the nicest house in town is that you share it with everyone once in a while.
But if that garden was exquisite and, as the French say, juste, it also contained no real horticultural treasures. It had thousands of plants but no real rarities to get a seasoned garden maven like my father really excited. That event had to wait for the last garden we visited.
This garden was the most controversial of those on display. Set at the rear of a tumbledown thatched cottage next to the pub on the village's main street, it was owned by the nearest East Meon has to a gardening celebrity. This lady is an herbalist and writer on herbal medicine. And in the eyes of the locals that makes her less famous than infamous.
Her garden is not just for viewing and contemplating God's work as manifested in manicured nature, it is also a working herb garden. It is a modern cousin of the medieval "physic" gardens that supplied the drugs to treat that age's sick. This makes her garden not just commercial (or "trade" as my grandmother would call it) but also suspiciously New Age-y. Of course that's because it's also very Old Age-y -- probably the only garden in the area that its original owners would recognize. But no matter. As much as the aroma of lavender and thyme, comfrey, yarrow and mint, an air of suspicion, coupled with genuine interest and admiration, was filling her garden this day.
A couple of hundred years ago a woman like this would have had to have been careful not to be branded a witch. And with her apparently filed teeth and clear lack of care for pearls or tweed, I got the sense that similar feelings lingered about her in the village now. But then again, she was a gardener. Her garden did look, and smell, lovely, and it also possessed something that was able to soon dispel, almost magically, any lingering suspicions other visiting gardeners might have about her: Her garden was packed with -- holy of holies -- rare plants.
In my father's case it was a scarce Plymouth Strawberry that got him interested and racking his brain for what he could offer her as a swap. In the end it turned out he had a Creeping Double Buttercup that she did not and so a deal was done. My father's own glorious garden -- the product of a man who showed his sons what he thought of "manly" pursuits when he banned the playing of rugby, hockey and cricket from the lawn to protect the bordering daffodils and croci -- would now be possessed of one more horticultural jewel.
Many of the gardens we saw that day were the work of women, but as many were the creations of men. Many were the combined efforts of both. Gardening is an equal opportunity vocation. Yes, it can be physically exhausting, but the important stuff can be done by a man or woman of 80. No male gardener ever gains respect for his feats of digging alone. Earth moving and tree pruning can be contracted out. What counts are the plants -- which you choose, where you put them.
Viewing these various paradises was a pleasure that managed to satisfy both the higher aesthetic and baser voyeuristic impulses in all of their visitors. But to this visitor from so far away, it was also a reminder of what growing up among gardening and gardeners had taught me, and an explanation of what I'd perhaps been looking for in my weekly cycle rides to East Meon many years before.
I was reminded that, as the village's ex-warriors have learned, there are great achievements a man can make without trouncing others, physically or psychologically. Men, as well as women, can create fragile worlds that both inspire awe and bring peace. To build a green walled paradise is to juggle with the laws of nature and conjure out of the display a piece of delightful, restful but ever-changing architecture. It is hard on the back and heart. What you produce is ethereal, it dies back in winter and can be lost with a storm, a drought or a diminishment of interest. But while it exists, while it is at its most florid, brazen, splendiferous best like it is in an English cottage garden in July, a garden is a glorious thing for a man to have wrought. And he does it best through nurture, through cooperation and hand in hand with women.
SALON | Sept. 15, 1998
Simon Firth is a writer who lives in the San Francisco area. His last feature for Wanderlust was "Tallest Tree epiphany."


	T A B L E_T A L K What do you wear when you travel? Discuss comfort versus style on the road in Table Talk's Wanderlust area R E C E N T L Y Chili con carne, anyone? By Vijai Maheshwari In Moscow, buyers are snapping up whatever's on the shelves (09/14/98) From nudism to Buddhism By Tanya Shaffer Desperately seeking solace in three European retreats (09/11/98) Bangkok's got a brand new bag By Karl Vetas Sex change capital of the world (09/10/98) Have dress, will travel By Lori Leibovich Test-driving Travelsmith's "Indispensable Black Travel Dress" (09/09/98) A legendary cafe-restaurant in Paris By David Downie Le Pied Rare is celebrated in novels -- and by its pork-loving patrons (09/08/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		NO MAN IS A GARDEN \| PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - Arriving in East Meon we found the place plastered in signs to the 20 or so gardens deemed worthy of our interest. The streets were already jumping with nosy neighbors. Clouds scudded above the throng, threatening showers but failing to intimidate the curious. At each garden gate stood a nervous owner -- a smart retired executive, a real estate agent or a farmer's hand in shirt-sleeves: a cross-section of modern village life united in anxious pride. To be deemed worthy of our attention, each garden had already survived a merciless cut on the part of the day's organizers. Every chosen rose was thus properly bursting with flowers and aphid-free. All the anointed hollyhocks were tall, the clematis lush, each lawn was immaculate and rolled and every vegetable garden was a model of order and plenitude. The overwhelming style was, not surprisingly, that of the English cottage garden, but there were rebel gardens, too, that specialized in exotics like fuchsias or vast collections of varieties of a single plant. If it takes vanity to open one's garden to viewing by strangers, it also takes courage. Apart from a family of Swedes, representative of the increasing numbers of Europeans that the Channel Tunnel has brought into this part of the country, most of the day's tourists were relative locals with firm ideas about what constitutes a true cottage garden. Allowing them to pass beyond one's garden gate also involves a certain amount of risk. Even England's most idyllic villages are not untouched by crime, either from within or from the inhabitants of the conurbations that are never far away on this small island. Many of the pricier homes had all their curtains closed -- so criminals masquerading as garden-lovers while actually casing the joint for antiques couldn't see what treasures the owners had, explained my mother. My father added that people he knew had had statuary stolen after events like these. But as yet, in East Meon, the ultimate sacrilege -- the theft of plants -- was apparently mercifully rare. The rewards for the noncriminal visitor, though, were rich enough. These were small Edens that we were being invited to see. We get the word "paradise" from the ancient Iranian word for a walled garden. To be allowed into these beautiful private enclaves by normally very private people was to witness as near perfect a realization as you're likely to find while alive of what the English fully expect Paradise itself to be. Many of the builders of these terrestrial paradises were, interestingly, ex-sailors. East Meon is not so far from the dockyards at Portsmouth where my school's first graduates joined their first ships bound for the East Indies and where the royal navy still maintains much of its fleet. Like much of the area, the village is a favorite retirement spot for captains of what they still like to refer to as the Senior Service. Seeing these former embodiments of absolute authority nervously welcome us into their gardens, I had the sense that in retirement, adrift from the ships upon which they were the only law, these men's gardens were their conduits back into the real, uncertain world the rest of us share. Plants cannot be ordered to grow nor threatened if they don't. And in swapping commands for compliments, salvos for salvias, these men were not diminished but humanized. The unspoken sentiment among the visitors that day seemed to be that while military service was valuable -- essential even -- to society, it was not man's natural state; that this finally attained gardening life was what all that playing around in boats was for and that these men were acknowledging this in their newfound dedication to impressing us with their horticultural flair. Perhaps the finest garden, though -- and the best bit of snooping -- was to be found at the village's most important house, a small but unusually intact medieval hall built by the Bishop of Winchester in the 13th century and now owned by a London barrister and his wife. Their garden is a team effort. She is the plantswoman and he the topiarist -- annually clipping hundreds of yards of the yew hedges between which we were being allowed this once to stray. It was the most popular spot on the tour -- everyone wanted to see what was behind the hall's high stone walls. What had been hidden from us were beautiful terraces, an ancient wood-frame barn, a reflecting pool surrounded by moss and lichen-strewn stone and countless finely planted herbaceous borders. My parents muttered approvingly of how the house's current guardians were taking a proper squirearchial interest in village life. The correct quid pro quo of having the nicest house in town is that you share it with everyone once in a while. But if that garden was exquisite and, as the French say, juste, it also contained no real horticultural treasures. It had thousands of plants but no real rarities to get a seasoned garden maven like my father really excited. That event had to wait for the last garden we visited. This garden was the most controversial of those on display. Set at the rear of a tumbledown thatched cottage next to the pub on the village's main street, it was owned by the nearest East Meon has to a gardening celebrity. This lady is an herbalist and writer on herbal medicine. And in the eyes of the locals that makes her less famous than infamous. Her garden is not just for viewing and contemplating God's work as manifested in manicured nature, it is also a working herb garden. It is a modern cousin of the medieval "physic" gardens that supplied the drugs to treat that age's sick. This makes her garden not just commercial (or "trade" as my grandmother would call it) but also suspiciously New Age-y. Of course that's because it's also very Old Age-y -- probably the only garden in the area that its original owners would recognize. But no matter. As much as the aroma of lavender and thyme, comfrey, yarrow and mint, an air of suspicion, coupled with genuine interest and admiration, was filling her garden this day. A couple of hundred years ago a woman like this would have had to have been careful not to be branded a witch. And with her apparently filed teeth and clear lack of care for pearls or tweed, I got the sense that similar feelings lingered about her in the village now. But then again, she was a gardener. Her garden did look, and smell, lovely, and it also possessed something that was able to soon dispel, almost magically, any lingering suspicions other visiting gardeners might have about her: Her garden was packed with -- holy of holies -- rare plants. In my father's case it was a scarce Plymouth Strawberry that got him interested and racking his brain for what he could offer her as a swap. In the end it turned out he had a Creeping Double Buttercup that she did not and so a deal was done. My father's own glorious garden -- the product of a man who showed his sons what he thought of "manly" pursuits when he banned the playing of rugby, hockey and cricket from the lawn to protect the bordering daffodils and croci -- would now be possessed of one more horticultural jewel. Many of the gardens we saw that day were the work of women, but as many were the creations of men. Many were the combined efforts of both. Gardening is an equal opportunity vocation. Yes, it can be physically exhausting, but the important stuff can be done by a man or woman of 80. No male gardener ever gains respect for his feats of digging alone. Earth moving and tree pruning can be contracted out. What counts are the plants -- which you choose, where you put them. Viewing these various paradises was a pleasure that managed to satisfy both the higher aesthetic and baser voyeuristic impulses in all of their visitors. But to this visitor from so far away, it was also a reminder of what growing up among gardening and gardeners had taught me, and an explanation of what I'd perhaps been looking for in my weekly cycle rides to East Meon many years before. I was reminded that, as the village's ex-warriors have learned, there are great achievements a man can make without trouncing others, physically or psychologically. Men, as well as women, can create fragile worlds that both inspire awe and bring peace. To build a green walled paradise is to juggle with the laws of nature and conjure out of the display a piece of delightful, restful but ever-changing architecture. It is hard on the back and heart. What you produce is ethereal, it dies back in winter and can be lost with a storm, a drought or a diminishment of interest. But while it exists, while it is at its most florid, brazen, splendiferous best like it is in an English cottage garden in July, a garden is a glorious thing for a man to have wrought. And he does it best through nurture, through cooperation and hand in hand with women. SALON \| Sept. 15, 1998 Simon Firth is a writer who lives in the San Francisco area. His last feature for Wanderlust was "Tallest Tree epiphany."