Sayler: I am gazing out on our backyard, a garden inherited from previous owners, who, we have been told, were avid, perhaps even obsessive, gardeners.
My first couple years with this garden were colored with mild panic and shame. I was unable to control the plethora of so-called weeds that grew around the desirable plants, choking them, shading them out. Having spent most of my adult life in big cities, I never had much opportunity to garden before. I was well-intentioned but clueless.
As time passed, corners of the garden became more familiar through small forays into the soil. I brought part of a rhubarb root (a prehistoric-looking thing) back from my mother’s house along with some ferns from her woods. They survived. After a conversation with a friend tinged with longing for a leafy japanese herb called shiso, some seedlings appeared in our mailbox in bags ready to be planted. The shiso, like the rhubarb and ferns, come up every year without assistance or reminding. The garden is their place. If it gets too hot, I give them water but in truth they need very little from me.
Some Russian sage and false dragonhead were donated by my neighbor, Brenda. (I had to look up both names in a plant guide). I now think of those as Brenda’s plants, as if they were promiscuous cats. Then there are the volunteers — the few mystery residents that sprout up. This year a squash plant is growing out of a compost heap in the far corner of the yard under an ancient lilac. It grew from vegetable waste that was intended to enrich the soil and started a new, unpredictable life. Already six-feet long, its tendrils seem hellbent on making it to the backdoor. I had a plan; the compost suggested another. The origins of other volunteers are more difficult to place, like the milkweed. I suspect a seed blew into the garden and germinated. Since monarch butterflies are fond of milkweed, I encourage it and have noticed it spreading in the neighborhood too. In a similar way, there are certain weeds that bugs seem fond of and I let these grow as well, so as to provide food for birds, but most weeds I dig out, making myself into the sole arbiter of their fate. Finally, there are the plants purchased from the garden store. These occupy a somewhat liminal zone in the garden because they are like abstractions, lovely adornments without a story. I feel less kinship with these plants, whose origin is simply in exchange–money for a decorative commodity. Yet, one of these — a plum tree– has come closer to me by virtue of its sickly constitution. I worry over it, muttering with a spray bottle of neem oil while examining its browning leaves, searching for signs. It has become kin-like through worry and care. It has yet to produce fruit, but I don’t require it to.
But was it a garden or a forest? Merwin split the difference. He called it “a garden that aspires to be a forest.”
Morris:
I am sitting at a desk reflecting on a garden that is not ours, but that I feel in some way belongs to me, as it belongs to many people. The garden I am calling to mind is the late poet W.S. Merwin’s palm garden in Hawai’i. In the 1970s, Merwin bought a small piece of land that had been officially deemed “wasteland” due to the poor soil management of colonial plantations and logging for whale ships. He tried at first to “restore” it, planting what would have been there immediately prior to the plantations. However, these plants and trees would no longer grow there. The soil, the insects, the birds and animals– in short the entire ecosystem– had changed too dramatically. It was no longer the place it had been. He had to let go of a pure ideal of restoration and try something else. He found that palm trees could grow quite well there– all sorts of palms, from all over the world, not just those “native” to Hawai’i. One-by-one Merwin and his wife Paula planted palms, and the palms thrived– palms from Africa, from South America, from North America, from Asia, long-lost kin, reunited.1 After forty years, Merwin and Paula had created one of the most species-rich and abundant collections of palms in the world. But was it a garden or a forest? Merwin split the difference. He called it “a garden that aspires to be a forest.”
I feel that Merwin’s garden belongs to me in a way because I spent hours there when we were working on an installation inspired by Merwin for the American Writer Museum. So I am particularly intimate with the garden. But the garden belongs to many others with varying degrees of intimacy. Merwin lived a private life, off-the-grid, with his own solar array and his own water supply, his house in Hawai’i tucked into the dense palm forest-garden he created. Yet, he also lived a public life, as a widely admired poet, receiving just about every poetry honor there is, speaking publicly often, giving interviews, making appearances, writing poems. People from all over the world wrote to him. He read each letter and answered many of them. (One of the highlights of my life was receiving a three-page handwritten letter from him when I was a graduate student, simply because I had written him completely out-of-the blue asking for advice on translation). After reading the letters he received, Merwin composted them in his garden– the trees eventually taking up the intentions and wishes of these people into their roots– a very tenuous form of kin-making. Now, the Merwin Conservancy has been established to maintain the garden and to share it and does so online and through various programming.2 Further, many of Merwin’s poems were written in the garden and some were about the garden. The garden became a space, in this instance, for the cultivation of poems. As people read those poems and take something from those poems (what exactly is impossible to predict), they are drawn into a kinship relation of sorts not just with Merwin and his other readers but with the garden itself.
Sayler/Morris:
A garden, then, is both a cultivated space and a space of cultivation. It is itself cultivated in the sense that it is demarcated, set off, and thus by its very boundaries cultivated as a space apart from what lies outside. This is evident in its etymology, related to our word “yard”, which specifically denotes an enclosure, (as distinct, for example, from the word “forest,” which comes from the Latin word “foris” meaning outside, as in outside the walls).3 Further, a garden is a space of cultivation, both in the obvious sense of cultivating food and flowers but also, as we have explored above, more abstract forms of cultivation like certain types of kinship. Yet, it is important to note that to nurture these sorts of kinship relations through the garden requires yet another layer of cultivation, this one foundational to the others– namely the cultivation of a frame of mind or worldview.
To nurture kinship relations through the garden requires yet another layer of cultivation, this one foundational to the others—the cultivation of a frame of mind or worldview.
Thinking about kinship in such expansive terms does not come naturally for many of us, and requires tools. Cultivation implies an intention, a desire to produce a certain result. The aspiration or the inspiration (the breathing towards, the breathing into) comes first. One works towards something. Tools are what we feel can aid us in realizing this result. If ecological thinking and doing is our intention and “garden” is our specific object of contemplation and place of action, what are some tools to expand our ideas of kinship, such that the garden becomes not simply a space of enclosure and control but something more akin to Merwin’s “garden that aspires to be a forest”– a space of unexpected things, unexpected relations?
To think of tools for affecting one’s worldview and to think of such worldviews as necessary foundations for action is already to think in the mode of French philosopher Felix Guattari. Guattari saw ecology not just in terms of understanding natural ecosystems, but in terms of understanding any system of complex relations. He sought to link so-called environmental concerns to concerns of human society and identified three types of ecology—mental ecology (an ecology of ideas and the formation of the individual); social ecology (relations between groups of people) and natural ecology (what we normally think of in terms of ecosystems and how plants, animals and insects interact). In other words, there is an ecosystem of ideas within our psyche subject to the influence of competing ideas, old or new. Quoting Gregory Bateson, Guattari writes of how “there is an ecology of bad ideas just as there is an ecology of weeds.”4
Thus, to affect our ideas and feelings, other ideas and feelings (or to link these modes of apprehension in the coeval way they deserve: idea-feelings) are the very tools that first suggest themselves.5 These idea-feelings are carried in all forms of cultural production intentionally or not. In turn, within the individual who receives them these new inputs can gratify existing idea-feelings– bolster, strengthen, support them (a fundamentally conservative operation that preserves existing elements of a culture); or conversely these new inputs can upset, alter, mutate, hybridize (a fundamentally progressive operation that changes elements of an existing culture). The ecological dynamic is inevitable, whether it be seen or unseen. Toolshed aims to make it seen. For us, poetry has a particularly strong capacity to cultivate ecological thinking in this regard. By poetry we mean forms of writing, visual art or other modes of cultural production that have a certain opacity in the positive sense explored by Edouard Glissant, as in “that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence;”6 or a negative capability in the positive sense put forth by Keats, as in “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”7 Poetry, by being replete, as Maggie Nelson put it to us in a recent email, with “heterogeneity, paradox, and mess,” allows the ecological relation to unfold into each reader’s mind without force or invasion. It is a form of knowledge, as Glissant reminds us, that is itself ecological, because always relational.
Poetry…allows the ecological relation to unfold into each reader’s mind without force or invasion. It is a form of knowledge that is itself ecological, because it is always relational.
And yet… poems (broadly speaking) are certainly not cultivated without weeding, without control. (Yeats: “A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. …”).8 This brings us full circle to our backyard garden and our decisions about what lives and dies in it. Our decisions about what we will foster. For these are decisions in every respect. Such decisions apply to kinship relations, to our shelters, to our food systems, to everything having to do with human civilizations. This is the rub, the very paradox at the heart of an ecological understanding, not just of gardens, but of everything. And it is the very bugaboo of environmentalism. How do we assess control? Do we go the Steward Brand route: “we are as gods and have to get good at it.”? Or something more like Vandana Shiva: ““You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.” In other words, do we pull out every plant designated as a weed in our garden to make room for the delightful flowers, spray chemicals to save the plum tree from its fungus and coax it to bear fruit, cut back the milkweed crowding our forsythia? Or do we let the weeds be, make space for the insects, let the garden go to seed, go wild (if there is such a thing)?
There are no easy answers. Only tools.
Notes
| ↑1 | The fact the trees from the same family, genus and even species can be found on continents as far flung as Asia and North America, or South America and Africa has been cited as evidence for the theory that all earth was, at one time, a single large landmass that separated with tectonic plate movement (Pangea). If true, this would mean all families of trees had opportunities to be together and were divorced by the plate movement, mutating and becoming separate species only gradually. This would explain the enigmatic distribution of trees. We are currently working on a commission for the Arnold Arboretum, where trees from the same family, genus and species but from diverse locations are grouped together in the same manner as the palms in Merwin’s garden-forest. Whether or not the Pangea theory is true, it is pleasant, and we would argue productive, to see these groupings as cosmopolitan family reunions. A history of the Arnold Arboretum is titled A Reunion of Trees. |
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| ↑2 | A special “meditation” edit of our video for the American Writers museum showing the garden is available through the Conservancy, for example. The Conservancy also sponsors educational programs and is working on a residency program. |
| ↑3 | These etymologies are interesting and worth exploring in more detail. Rober Pogue Harrison explores the origins of the word forest in some depth in his book Forest. The word seems to have a particular administrative origin in the phrase forestis silva that specifically designated hunting grounds– first of Charlemagne and later others: “A ‘forest,’ then, was originally a juridical term referring to land that had been placed off limits by a royal decree. Once a region had been ‘afforested,’ or declared a forest, it could not be cultivated, exploited, or encroached upon. It lay outside the public domain, reserved for the king’s pleasure and recreation. In England it also lay outside the common juridical sphere. Offenders were not punishable by the common law but rather by a set of very specific ‘forest laws.’ The royal forests lay ‘outside’ in another sense as well, for the space enclosed by the walls of a royal garden was sometimes called silva, or wood. Forestis silva meant the unenclosed woods ‘outside’ the walls.” This is clearly evidenced by the fact that most (all?) primeval forests in Europe have been preserved only because they were royal hunting grounds. We pose the question whether the same impulse of privileged enclosure is behind at least the original national parks designations in the United States, particularly where such designations involved the removal of indigenous peoples. By this reckoning it is perhaps odd that Merwin chose to oppose garden to forest, as both in a sense are cultivated areas (decreed and set off) as well as areas of cultivation. The forest cultivated game for hunting and the garden cultivated pleasure or discrete food production, both for the ruling class. A meditation on the words garden, forest, desert, wilderness and farm will follow in our next essay. |
| ↑4 | Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Athlone Press, 2000), 27. |
| ↑5 | The linking of ideas and feelings, as equally valid types of apprehension is consistent with a parsing of our word understanding made by Edouard Glissant in Poetics of Relation. In a helpful note the translator of this book published by University of Michigan Press, Betsy Wing, notes “The French word for understanding, comprendre, like its English cognate is formed on the basis of of the Latin word comprehendere, ‘to seize,’ which is formed from the roots ‘con’ (with) and ‘prendere’ (to take). Glissant contrasts this form of understanding–appropriative, almost rapacious–with the understanding upon which Relation must be based: donner-avec. Donner (to give) is meant as a generosity of perception…There is also the possible sense of yielding, as a tree might ‘give’ in a storm in order to remain standing. Avec both reflects back on the com of comprendre and defines the underlying principle of Relation.” (xiv) Donner-avec becomes Glissant’s preferred term for understanding, then, which Wing renders in English as “gives-on-and-with.” |
| ↑6 | Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relaion, translated by Best Wing (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press: 1997), 191. |
| ↑7 | John Keats, The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, Cambridge Edition (London: Houghton, Mifflin and Company: 1899), 277. As further evidence of the inevitability of the ecological relation any author or idea that we quote throughout this essay was obviously introduced or received from some other source. In the examples at hand, the potential of Keats’ negative capability was suggested to Ed by Joe Reed, a college professor/mentor to whom he was very close; the power of Glissant was suggested by Kamau Patton with whom we are working on this very project. So there is a footnote like this behind every reference (and could be footnotes to the footnotes, as in our friend Jon Santos introduced us to Kamau, etc.). |
| ↑8 | William Butler Yeats, “Adam’s Curse.” |
