Having just finished Olivia Laing’s excellent ‘A Garden Against Time’ (last month’s recommended book) and in the next breath, so to speak, visited the Van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery, my mind is full of gardens and Edens and paradise, but also what gardens might mean to artists and gardens AS art.
‘A Garden Against Time’s tagline is ‘in search of a common paradise’ and the book roams through Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, John Clare’s madness, poetry and flowers, Derek Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage (and his book about it, ‘Modern Nature’), via William Morris, Benton End and Cedric Morris, Diggers and Communists, all the while documenting Olivia’s own bringing back to life of her garden in Suffolk.
She deftly runs a thread through history and culture where a search for Utopia has led to gardens and gardening (or perhaps gardening has led to a Utopia). I was greatly attracted to the art school started at Benton End in Suffolk by Cedric Morris, a ‘plantsman artist’ (in his own words), in the 40’s and 50’s. Apparently a place of tolerance, openness, mess, chaos and beauty- and of finding identity and one’s own voice. It was an attempt at a kind of Utopia and a mirror of what a garden (a life?) should be- tended AND wild, kept AND let loose.
In the years after the art school ended, and Cedric’s art declined in fashion, he cultivated many different irises at Benton End, creating many exquisitely and subtly coloured specimens- and so he called himself a ‘plantsman artist’, using gardening as a form of art, alongside his paintings.
Many artist’s have used the garden as a work of art (always in progress, I suppose), mixing as it the does the human controlled and the uncontrollable work of nature, the signature and identity of the creator and the hand of the ultimate Creator. The garden is at once an expression of creativity, and it’s destroyer as well as reminder that all things end and begin again- the simple and devastating story of our lives.
Another story from the book, that resonated with me, was that of John Clare the so-called ‘peasant poet’ of 19th century Northamptonshire, who eventually spent many decades in a mental asylum. Clare seemed to be ‘friends with the flowers’ of his garden and wider countryside- he enquired after their health in letter after letter home. He used his garden, made with cuttings from the wild, as a solace and community.
Looking at Van Gogh’s paintings of both the neatly tended Park opposite ‘The Yellow House’ in Arles and the gardens at the asylum in St Remy, where he stayed after his breakdown, one gets the sense that he, too, was a friend of the flowers (having read his letters too, one gets the very real sense of a beautifully sensitive soul, who would not have seen anything strange in seeing plants as living beings, akin to himself).
It’s also interesting to see his form and colour flow and become more ‘Van Gogh’ (no other way to describe it) when he moves to the asylum, especially in comparison to the park, which was neatly trimmed to accommodate the public and where, presumably, he had to appear ‘normal’ and without either mania or distress. In the asylum garden, he is allowing his body and mind free rein, and one imagines he is finding relief, from the world and coping with it, as well as other’s expectations.
His paintings of the asylum garden shake & tremble with energy-they seem without thought-only sensation & emotion. Olivia Laing talks of time changing while she gardens-it having a different quality to ‘real time’ and gardening has that in common with art making, a flow activity-less thought, more fully being.
I think making gardens speaks to our desires to control miniature versions of our worlds and also to make our own paradises (surely similar reasons for making art). That desire for control is tempered by the forced realisation that death & mess & luck & serendipity all play their part-in fact we cannot have a garden without rest & dormancy. Perhaps that is one of the hard-won lessons of the gardener-that a world in miniature is also life in miniature, it comes with the end built in from the beginning and we’re all going around again.