Once upon a time, there was the best garden in the world. Like all dynamic gardens, this was a place of continual change on many levels, from the cyclical rhythms of the seasons, to the periodic ravages of monumental phenomenology. Compact, yet complex, this garden was a wonder to all who came upon it, yet owing to a number of circumstances, was not widely known. Occupying an area not greater than the enclosure suggested by an everyday elastic band (stretched to capacity, such that the rubber strains and begins to show wear, creating a long ovoid area) the garden was home to a surprising assortment. A dense array of minerals, assorted micro flora, a bustling insect community flora all attended to by the coincidental drip of an adjacent downspout and a benevolent solar aspect that tended to the earthen patch offered by the rift between two paving panels.
Once upon a time, there was the best garden in the world. Like all dynamic gardens, this was a place of continual change on many levels, from the cyclical rhythms of the seasons, to the periodic ravages of monumental phenomenology. Compact, yet complex, this garden was a wonder to all who came upon it, yet owing to a number of circumstances, was not widely known. Stretching from the edge of the eastern field where the large animals spent their days contentedly gnawing the persistent forbs and woody plants until the next field of this same sort was a thicket of all imaginable growth and solidity. Extending from beneath the visible surface above the heads and eyes of most humans to the tops of black locust trees, this managed mass was anchored by the glacial hunks of rock extracted from the fields where the animals spent their days. Amongst these masses of schist and gneiss grew lichens and mosses, mushrooms and fungii, and little pools of collected rainwater that passing birds paused in for a bath or a drink. Careful to mind the boundaries of their private property, and to conserve the needed break from the wind, each animal keeper preserved this garden through generations of benign neglect.
Once upon a time, there was the best garden in the world. Like all dynamic gardens, this was a place of continual change on many levels, from the cyclical rhythms of the seasons, to the periodic ravages of monumental phenomenology. Compact, yet complex, this garden was a wonder to all who came upon it, yet owing to a number of circumstances, was not widely known. Precisely between where their back door sill met the hard paving, perhaps allowing 2 to three inches to where an unrelated neighbor’s back door met the same material, thrived a compendium of every cultivable offering the town’s garden center had for sale. Floral displays of exuberance matched only by the street’s annual competitive display of holiday lighting ran amok from the moment the snow exposed the patch of earth until it fell again. Mornings and afternoons, the two back doors opened in altering cadences as the garden’s respective keepers, who never met, descended upon the shasta and gerber daises, the phalanx of phlox, and the luscious lobelia armed with plastic spoons filled with food for plants.
Once upon a time, there was the best garden in the world. Like all dynamic gardens, this was a place of continual change on many levels, from the cyclical rhythms of the seasons, to the periodic ravages of monumental phenomenology. Compact, yet complex, this garden was a wonder to all who came upon it, yet owing to a number of circumstances, was not widely known.
Vast, miniature, measured in nanometers or kilometers, florid, fierce or fetid–tended or attended? Whither the garden? .
accompanying the exhibition, Whither the Garden?, March-April, 2002, artSite, Wellsville, NY
polly apfelbaum, robin caster, diane cox, jim hodges, landworks studio, walter mcconnell, lynn mccarty, paula meijernik, rebekah modrak, nip paysage, david nyzio, ryan prince, kristy roberts. Organized by Nick Tobier.