The destruction of two buildings, one by Union forces in the 19th century and one by a single man on a skid steer in the 21st century, have me re-imagining space and how a long view can contribute to a garden. The former, the razing of the house at Middleton Place outside of Charleston by the forces of Northern aggression (as Southerners were known to call it), left one of North America’s oldest planned landscapes open from one end of its extensive garden to the other. The second, the demolition of an old farm building at my house in Ashley Falls, gave me a view I never knew I had. And, having taken in both these modified sites in a matter of weeks, I was left with a new understanding of the pleasure of open space and open perspective.
I love the sense of containment a garden brings. The word garden is derived from a term for an enclosed space. And surely, in the colonial era, this idea of a protected or fenced-in space made sense as a safe haven from the world around us (and may again in these times when the outside world feels dangerous and at war). In our case, our garden is also home to a mother bear and her two cubs who cross our property regularly, driving our dogs Henry and Billy to great distraction. However, as gardening aesthetics evolve, so does the relationship between our backyards and the larger landscape the surrounds us. This merging of our gardens with nature has taken on a certain fashionability in the present day. Our ecological and environmental awareness of our connection to the natural kingdom is influencing our notion of beauty.
This concept feels modern and new. However, my recent visit to Middleton Place made me realize that this sense of being open to the world around us is not, in fact, new. Middleton Place is a colonial-era garden, overlaid with rectilinear man-made canals and allees of camellia filled-borders. Its design is based on the rational principles espoused by Andre Le Notre, designer of Versailles. Developed as a rice plantation in about as formal a manner as possible, Middleton Place did something that gardens of that era often did not—it opened itself up to the surrounding landscape that lay beyond the gardens and pathways flanking the house. By so doing, the orderly nature of the gardens was contrasted with a sense of the wild beauty of the Ashley River, the surrounding salt marshes and cultivated rice paddies, and the open sky of the Low Country that gives the region its name. And if this wasn’t enough, the carefully placed live oaks, weighted down by Spanish moss, frame the view with a combination of the planned and orderly (the trees themselves) and of the wildness of the Spanish moss hanging from the branches of these evergreen oaks. And, as time has moved forward, the work done by nature’s hands has contributed beauty to the landscape. Still, the place has a shadow over it; the work to create the human-made aspects of this site was done by enslaved persons. And the fact that the house was brought down in the war over slavery and that this event opened the garden up to the world around it somehow seems fitting.
Back at home, without the work of enslaved labor, our shed came down, opening up a view to a hemlock, an old apple tree and some lindens, elms and willows at the back end of our property. At first, this made me feel exposed. The shed and the shrubby planting beds that surrounded it had given me and the house a sense of enclosure and safety. With it gone, I felt like I was left standing outside in my bathrobe for all to see. But in a manner not unlike that of Middleton Place, where the building at its center was eradicated, what was left of the garden—five trimmed yews set in a staggered line leading back to the apple tree and hemlock in the background—was enhanced by having this sense of the formal balanced by the wilder setting in which it was contained.
It was not the work of Union forces that left me with this open space to ponder as I stared at the silhouette of the apple tree. And I was dressed neither in my bathrobe nor in the uniform of the military nor of the enslaved, but in corduroys and a coat that protected me from the coolness of the season. I imagine that my feelings were not unlike those of the Middleton family members who inhabited the plantation after the Civil War. Like them, I knew the world I was living in had been changed and that, in time, I would find peace in the wilderness that enveloped me. Maybe what we call civilization is overrated.
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A gardener grows through observation, experimentation, and learning from the failures, triumphs, and hard work of oneself and others. In this sense, all gardeners are self-taught, while at the same time intrinsically connected to a tradition and a community that finds satisfaction through working the soil and sharing their experiences with one another. This column explores those relationships and how we learn about the world around us from plants and our fellow gardeners.
