Meadows of the Mind
It isn’t really a meadow. It’s a figure of speech. If a garden is someone’s conscious, intentional arrangement of plants in a space, then the arrangement could be taken as a “picture,” or expression, or reflection of that person, her values, preferences, choices — her aesthetic. Many gardens reflect paired, shared, even institutional values, of course, but here, I’m thinking about a management of one, perhaps with a bit of instructed help on occasion. I’m convinced that a garden, if it really is a cultivated, considered space, can be trusted to provide some sort of account of its cultivators.
In my own case, I feel sure it goes beyond the strictly conscious, too. The metaphor is loose, but telling. If we take consciousness to be the “visible” aspect of a garden, the part in the light and wind and rain, we’ll locate the unconscious aspect — I’m thinking of memory, associations, autonomic functions like breathing — to be below the surface, in the roots, in exchanges with the soil and with one another.
A few weeks ago, I set up a grid of stakes and strings in part of the garden. It’s a strange thing to do, I guess, and I felt like I was sleepwalking — a fairly common state of mind when I go about my gardening. It was unresolved patchof the garden, an oval-shaped space with a way to walk around it, That’s because my relationship with the space demands that I have access, but there was no particular reason for the enclosure. It’s been there a few years, a space where I put things temporarily, or indulged enthusiasms. Cognitively, it contained a lot of loose thoughts and vain hopes. It didn’t have an identity strong enough to keep me coming back, maintaining it. In fact it was the spot where I started gardening (“Daisies”), but — oddly, now that I think about it — it was also the last one I “reclaimed” from the former owners of the property. In retrospect, I see that I had been fairly systematically changing a fairly conventional arrangement of lawn with planted borders into something else. I really only knew I did not want a lawn. So far — it’s almost ten years! — an arrangement tends to begin as something complicated and gradually simplify. It’s still underway.
With stakes and string, I haltingly laid out a grid of maybe 12 lines, marking about that many square metres. I’m not decisive or adept. At first, the stakes weren’t sturdy enough, the string not long enough or visible enough. I had to do almost everything at least twice. But I did it.
It resembled mapping, but I had no intention of keeping any record of it, or “using” it to locate plants. It was mainly an exercise in seeing space abstractly, as a surface rather than a site of past triumphs and failures. As I was working, I realised that I wanted to avoid the suggestion of centre and periphery and establish something more like a rhythm, or pattern — more like a meadow than a display case…
It resembled mapping, but I had no intention of keeping any record of it, or “using” it to locate plants. It was mainly an exercise in seeing space abstractly, as a surface rather than a site of past triumphs and failures. As I was working, I realised that I wanted to avoid the suggestion of centre and periphery, and establish something more like a rhythm: there were already some number of plant species growing there; the plan was to divide some, transplant some, remove some, acquire a few until they were loosely distributed in the space, like vegetables in a soup or salad. I don’t know why. I don’t know whether I’ll still be committed to it in, say, a year.
“When I don’t know what I’m doing, I watch what I do,” one character said to another in a recent novel I read (Elizabeth Strout, Oh, William! 2021). I enjoy my gardening, without knowing what I’m doing. It seems like my best, perhaps my only means of finding out.
There were already some number of plant species growing there; the plan was to divide some, transplant some, remove some, acquire a few until they were loosely distributed in the space, like vegetables in a soup or salad. I don’t know why. I don’t know whether I’ll still be committed to it in, say, a year.
“When I don’t know what I’m doing, I watch what I do,” one character said to another in a recent novel I read (Elizabeth Strout, Oh, William! 2021). I enjoy my gardening, without knowing what I’m doing. It seems like my best, perhaps my only means of finding out.
