We
are all victims, whether we know it or not, of a way of
thinking that sets the city apart from any other kind of
environment. At the root of this confusion is one single
error: the error which proclaims that nature is something
outside of us, something green which we can perhaps enjoy
as a spectacle or examine for future exploitation, but which
is only distantly related to us. Nature, thus defined, belongs
in the country and is all but totally excluded from the
city; hence the oft-repeated outcry that urban man is alienated
from it. Nature is actually omnipresent in the city: in
the city’s climate, topography and vegetation, and
we are in fact surrounded by an impalpable or invisible
landscape of spaces and color and sound and movement and
temperature, in the city no less than in the country.
J.B. Jackson
When we look at a garden, do
we see nature or culture? That questions lies at the heart
of the writings of three authors that inspire my current
work. John Prest’s book The Garden of Eden explores
how religious and gardening allegory is interwoven. His
book traces man’s desire to recreate Paradise to the
design of the enclosed botanic garden where “beside
the fountain in the middle, a man could enter into communion
with what was green and full of sap, recover his innocence,
and shed his fear of decay.”
In Simon Schama’s book Landscape and
Memory, he argues that every landscape—forest, river
or mountain—is a work of the mind, a repository of
the memories and obsessions of the people who gaze upon
it. Among other things, Schama’s book reveals Gothic
architecture as the embodiment of forest wilderness; the
play of Christian and Pagan myth in Bernini’s Fountain
of the Four Rivers; the history of hiking; and the origins
of such garden features as the obelisk, the labyrinth and
the fountain.
A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time by J.B.
Jackson is a series of essays about how our surroundings
reflect our culture. He coined the term “vernacular
garden” and states, “Landscape is history made
visible.” His brilliant insights and challenges to
the mind, eye and conscience contained in his essays continue
to inspire me. When once asked to define himself and his
work, Jackson declared: “I see things very clearly,
and I rely on what I see . . . and I see things that other
people don’t see, and I call their attention to it.”
Jackson, who like John
Prest, believes that the domestic garden is the re-creation
of heaven on earth, makes the following statement: For if
we are to put this study of the relation between man and
environment on an enduring basis, we must not be afraid
to rediscover and reassert a neglected truth: that man is
the product, the child of God and that his works must therefore
always betray even in a distorted form, that identity. Man
the inhabitant reveals his origin in the habitat which he
himself creates.
