Certainly if after the conquest an Aztec had gone into a shop and said “It’s my husband’s birthday. I would like to give him some flowers. May I have a bunch of cocoxochitl, please?” no one would have been able to help her, because cocoxochitl was no longer the name of that flower. It had become the dahlia. In its place of origin (Mexico, Central America), the people who lived there had no dahliamania, no Dahlia Societies, no dinner-plate-size dahlia, no peony-, no anemone-, no ball-shaped-, no water-lily-, no pompon-flowered dahlia. The flower seems to have been appreciated and cultivated for its own sake and for its medicinal value (urinary-tract disorders—cocoxochitl means “water pipes”) and as animal fodder. And understandably, beautiful as this flower would have appeared to these people, there were so many other flowers and shrubs and trees and vines, each with some overpowering attribute of shape, height, color of bloom, and scent, that it would not be singled out; the sight of this flower would not have inspired in these people a single criminal act.
At what moment is the germ of possession lodged in the heart? When another Spanish marauder, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, was within sight of the Pacific Ocean, he made his army stay behind him, so that he could be the first person like himself (a European person) to see this ocean; it is likely that could this ocean have been taken up and removed to somewhere else (Spain, Portugal, England), the people for whom it had become a spiritual fixture would long for it and at the same time not even know what it was they were missing. And so the dahlia: Who first saw it and longed for it so deeply that it was removed from the place where it had always been, and transformed (hybridized), and renamed? Hernando Cortez would not have noticed it; to him the dahlia would have been one of the details, a small detail, of something large and grim: conquest. The dahlia went to Europe; it was hybridized by the Swedish botanist Andreas Dahl, after whom it was renamed.
I was once in a garden in the mountains way above Kingston (Jamaica), and from a distance I saw a mass of tall stalks of red flames, something in bloom. It looked familiar, but what it resembled, what it reminded me of, was a flower I cannot stand, and these flowers I saw before me I immediately loved, and they made me feel glad for the millionth time that I am from the West Indies. (This worthless feeling, this bestowing special qualities on yourself because of the beauty of the place you are from, is hard to resist—so hard that people who come from the ugliest place deny that it is ugly at all or simply go out and take someone else’s beauty for themselves.) These flowering stalks of red flames turned out to be salvia, but I knew it was salvia only because I had seen it grown—a much shorter variety—in North American gardens; and I realized that I cannot stand it when I see it growing in the north because that shade of red can’t be borne well by a dwarfish plant.
I do not know the names of the plants in the place I am from (Antigua). I can identify the hibiscus, but I do not know the name of a white lily that blooms in July, opening at night, perfuming the air with a sweetness that is almost sickening, and closing up at dawn. There is a bush called whitehead bush; it was an important ingredient in the potions my mother and her friends made for their abortions, but I do not know its proper name; this same bush I often had to go and cut down and tie in bunches to make a broom for sweeping our yard; both the abortions and the sweeping of the yard, actions deep and shallow, in a place like that (Antigua) would fall into the category called Household Management. I had wanted to see the garden in Kingston so that I could learn the names of some flowers in the West Indies, but along with the salvia the garden had in it only roses and a single anemic-looking yellow lupine (and this surprised me, because lupine is a temperate zone flower and I had very recently seen it in bloom along the roadside of a town in Finland).
This ignorance of the botany of the place I am from (and am of) really only reflects the fact that when I lived there, I was of the conquered class and living in a conquered place; a principle of this condition is that nothing about you is of any interest unless the conqueror deems it so. For instance, there was a botanical garden not far from where I lived, and in it were plants from various parts of the then British Empire, places that had the same climate as my own; but as I remember, none of the plants were native to Antigua. The rubber tree from Malaysia (or somewhere) is memorable because in the year my father and I were sick at the same time (he with heart disease, I with hookworms), we would go and sit under this tree after we ate our lunch, and under this tree he would tell me about his parents, who had abandoned him and gone off to build the Panama Canal (though of course he disguised the brutality of this). The bamboo grove is memorable because it was there I used to meet people I was in love with. The botanical garden reinforced for me how powerful were the people who had conquered me; they could bring to me the botany of the world they owned. It wouldn’t at all surprise me to learn that in Malaysia (or somewhere) was a botanical garden with no plants native to that place.
There was a day not long ago when I realized with a certain amount of bitterness that I was in my garden, a flower garden, a garden planted only because I wished to have such a thing, and that I knew how I wanted it to look and knew the name, proper and common, of each thing growing in it. In the place I am from, I would have been a picture of shame: a woman covered with dirt, smelling of manure, her hair flecked with white dust (powdered lime), her body a cauldron of smells pleasing to her, and her back crooked with pain from bending over. In the place I am from, I would not have allowed a man with the same description as such a woman to kiss me.
It is understandable that a man like Andreas Dahl would not have demurred at his eponymous honor, because this was the eighteenth century and the honor was bestowed on him by a king (a Charles of Spain, who might well have named the flower after himself, or a close relative, or any one of the many henchmen in his service). Andreas Dahl was very familiar with the habit of naming, for he had been a pupil of Carlolus Linnaeus. This man, Carlolus Linnaeus, had been a botanist and a doctor, and that made sense, botanist and doctor: they went together because plants were the main source of medicine in that part of the world then, as was true in the other parts of the world then also. From Sweden (his place of origin) he had gone to the Netherlands for his doctor’s degree, and it was there, while serving as personal physician to a rich man, that he worked out his system (binomial) of naming plants. The rich man (his name was George Clifford) had four greenhouses filled with plants not native to the Netherlands—not native to Europe at all but native to the places that had been recently conquered. The Oxford Companion to Gardens (a book I often want to hurl across the room, it is so full of prejudice) describes Linnaeus as “enraptured” with seeing all these plants from far away, because his native Sweden did not have anything like them, but most likely what happened was that he saw an opportunity, and it was this: These countries in Europe shared the same botany, more or less, but each place called the same thing by a different name; and these people who make up Europe were (are) so contentious anyway, they would not have agreed to one system for all the plants they had in common, but these new plants from far away, like the people far away, had no history, no names, and so they could be given names. And who was there to dispute Linnaeus, even if there was someone who would listen?
This naming of things is so crucial to possession—a spiritual padlock with the key thrown irretrievably away—that it is a murder, an erasing, and it is not surprising that when people have felt themselves prey to it (conquest), among their first acts of liberation is to change their names (Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka). That the great misery and much smaller joy of existence remain unchanged no matter what anything is called never checks the impulse to reach back and reclaim a loss, to try and make what happened look as if it had not happened at all.
As I started to write this (at the very beginning) I was sitting at a window that looked out over my own garden, a new one (I have just moved to this place), and my eye began in the deep-shade area, where I had planted some astilbe and hosta and Ranunculus repens,
and I thought how beautifully the leaves of the astilbe went with the leaves of the ranunculus, and I took pleasure in that, because in putting things together (plants) you never really know how it will all work until they do something, like bloom. (It will be two or three years before I know whether the clematis really will run up the rosebushes and bloom together with them and whether it will really look the way I have imagined.) Just now the leaves in the shade bed are all complementary (but not in a predictable way—in a way I had not expected, a thrilling way). And I thought how I had crossed a line; but at whose expense? I cannot begin to look, because what if it is someone I know? I have joined the conquering class: who else could afford this garden—a garden in which I grow things that it would be much cheaper to buy at the store?
My feet are (so to speak) in two worlds, I was thinking as I looked farther into the garden and saw, beyond the pumpkin patch, a fox emerge from the hedge—the same spot in the hedge where I have seen the rabbits and a family of malicious woodchucks emerge (the woodchucks to eat not the lettuce or the beans or the other things I would expect them to eat but the tender new shoots and tendrils of the squash vines). The fox crossed the garden and ran behind the shed, and I could see him clearly, his face a set of sharp angles, his cheeks planed, his body a fabric of tightly woven gray and silver hair over a taut frame of sinew and bones, his tail a perfect furpiece. He disappeared into the opposite hedge and field; he, too, had the look of the marauder, wandering around hedge and field looking for prey. That night, lying in my bed, I heard from beyond the hedge where he had emerged sounds of incredible agony; he must have found his prey; but the fox is in nature, and in nature things work that way.
I am not in nature. I do not find the world furnished like a room, with cushioned seats and rich-colored rugs. To me, the world is cracked, unwhole, not pure, accidental; and the idea of moments of joy for no reason is very strange.
MONET’S GARDEN
What would the garden be without the paintings? Would I be standing in it (the garden, Claude Monet’s garden), looking at the leaf-green arches on which were trained roses (‘American Pillar,’ ‘Dainty Bess,’ ‘Paul’s Scarlet Rambler’) and clematis (‘Montana Rubens’), looking at the beds of opium poppies, Oriental poppies, looking at the sweep of bearded iris (they had just passed bloom), looking at dottings of fat peonies (plants only, they had just passed bloom), and looking at roses again, this time standardized, in bloom in that way of the paintings (the real made to shimmer as if it will vanish from itself, the real made to seem so nearby and at the same time so far away)?
It was June. I was standing looking at the solanum ‘Optical Illusion’ (Monet himself grew the species Solanum retonii but solanum ‘Optical Illusion’ is what I saw on a label placed next to this plant) and the hollyhock ‘Zebrina’ (they were in bloom in all their simple straightforwardness, their uncomplicated mauve-colored petals streaked with lines of purple, and this color purple seemed innocent of doubt); looking at the other kind of hollyhock, rosea, which was only in bud, so I could not surreptitiously filch the seedpods; looking at the yellow-flowering thalictrum, the poppies again (only this time they were field poppies, Papaver rhoeas, and they were in a small area to the side of the arches of roses, but you can’t count on them being there from year to year, for all the poppies sow themselves wherever they want); looking at an area of lawn set off by apple trees trained severely along a fence made of wire painted green and beech posts.
I was looking at all these things, but I had their counterparts in Monet’s paintings in my mind. It was June, so I had missed the lawn full of blooming daffodils and fritillarias, they came in the spring. And all this was only the main part of the garden, separate from the water garden, famous for the water lilies, the wisteria growing over the Japanese bridge, the Hoschedé girls in a boat.
And would the water garden be the same without the paintings? On the day (days) I saw it, the water garden—that is, the pond with lilies growing in it—the Hoschedé girls were not standing in a boat on the pond, for they have been dead for a very long time now, and if I expected them to appear standing in the boat, it is only because the pond itself looked so familiar, like the paintings, shimmering (that is sight), enigmatic (that is feeling, or what you say about feeling when you mean many things), and new (which is what you say about something you have no words for yet, good or bad, accept or reject: “It’s new!”)—yes, yes, so familiar from the paintings.
But when I saw the water garden itself (the real thing, the thing that Monet himself had first made and the thing that has become only a memory of what he had made after he was no longer there to care about it, he had been dead a long time by then), it had been restored and looked without doubt like the thing Monet had made, a small body of water manipulated by him, its direction coming from a natural source, a nearby stream. On the day I saw it, the pond, the Hoschedé girls (all three of them) were not in a boat looking so real that when they were seen in that particular painting (The Boat at Giverny) they would then define reality. The Hoschedé girls were not there, for they had long been dead also, and in fact, there were no girls in a boat on the pond, only a woman, and she was in a boat and holding a long-handled sieve, skimming debris from the surface of the pond. The pond itself (and this still is on the day that I saw it) was in some flux, water was coming in or water was going out, I could not really tell (and I did not really want to know). The water lilies were lying on their sides, their roots exposed to clear air, but on seeing them that way I immediately put them back in the arrangement I am most familiar with them in the paintings, sitting in the water that is the canvas with all their beginnings and all their ends hidden from me. The wisteria growing over the Japanese bridge was so familiar to me (again), and how very unprepared I was to see that its trunk had rotted out and was hollow and looked ravaged, and ravaged is not what Monet evokes in anyone looking at anything associated with him (even in the painting he made of Camille, his wife before Alice, dead, she does not look ravaged, only dead, as if to be dead is only another way to exist). But to see these things—the wisteria, the Japanese bridge, the water lilies, the pond itself (especially the pond, for here the pond looks like a canvas)—is to be suddenly in a whirl of feelings. For here is the real thing, the real material thing: wisteria, water lily, pond, Japanese bridge—in its proper setting, a made-up landscape in Giverny, made up by the gardener Claude Monet. And yet I see these scenes now because I had seen them the day before in a museum (the Musée d’Orsay) and the day before that in another museum (the Musée Marmottan) and many days and many nights (while lying in bed) before that, in books, and it is the impression of them (wisteria, water lily, pond, Japanese bridge) that I had seen in these other ways before (the paintings in the museums, the reproductions in the books) that gave them a life, a meaning outside the ordinary.
A garden will die with its owner, a garden will die with the death of the person who made it. I had this realization one day while walking around in the great (and even worthwhile) effort that is Sissinghurst, the garden made by Vita Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson. Sissinghurst is extraordinary: it has all the impersonal beauty of a park (small), yet each part of it has the intimacy of a garden—a garden you could imagine creating yourself if only you were so capable. And then again to see how a garden will die with the gardener, you have only to look at Monet’s friend and patron Gustave Caillebotte; the garden he made at Petit Gennevilliers no longer exists; the garden in Yerres, where he grew up, the one depicted in some of his paintings, is mostly in disarray. When I saw the potagerie, the scene that is the painting Yerres, in the Kitchen Garden: Gardeners Watering the Plants was now a dilapidated forest of weeds: a cat who looked as if it belonged to no one stared crossly at me; a large tin drum stood just where you might expect to see a gardener, barefoot and carrying two watering cans. The Yerres River itself no longer seemed wide and deep and mysteriously shimmering (as in Boater Pulling In his Périssoire, Banks of the Yerres or Bathers, Banks of
the Yerres), it was now only ordinarily meandering, dirty, like any old memory.
And so, would the garden, in Giverny, in which I was standing one day in early June, mean so much to me and all the other people traipsing around without the paintings? The painting The Artist’s Garden at Giverny is in a museum in Connecticut, the painting The Flowering Arches is in a museum in Arizona, the painting The Japanese Footbridge is in a museum in Houston, Water Lilies are everywhere. On seeing them, these paintings, either in the setting of a museum or reproduced in a book, this gardener can’t help but long to see the place they came from, the place that held the roses growing up arches, the pond in which the lilies grew, the great big path (called the Grand Allée) that led from the front door of the house and divided the garden in two, the weeping willow, the Japanese bridge, the gladiolas (they were not yet in bloom when I was there), the peonies (they were past bloom when I was there), the dahlias (they were not yet in bloom when I was there).
My Garden (Book) Page 10