As part of its Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture series, the University of Pennsylvania Press has recently published Paula Deitz’s Of Gardens. This substantial omnibus of selected essays clearly demonstrates that, when it comes to Dietz, the editor of The Hudson Review, the word “writer” is as important as the word “garden.” Her literary stance belongs in the category of “Letter from. . . ”—they are epistolary accounts of trips written to friends who will recognize and enjoy the erudite references she makes in passing. Her New York Times pieces are necessarily the briefest and most topical, as for example the 1985 discovery of what was probably the earliest garden in America at Bacons Castle, twelve miles south of Williamsburg, Virginia. Longer, less news-driven articles written for magazines and journals allow her propensity for imaginative associations to range more freely.
Her subject is always linked, however, to some kind of personal observation, for Deitz refuses to write about a place she has not visited, a person she has not interviewed, or an exhibition she has not seen. After establishing her on-site presence, she allows the reader’s imagination to roam with hers as she makes fortuitous and sometimes surprising connections. Often these include references to other garden writers, such as Celia Thaxter and Gertrude Jekyll, and there are allusions as well to painters such as Thomas Cole and to authors such as Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Hans Christian Andersen.
Of Gardens is divided into seven chapters: “Landscape Architects and Designers” and “Parks and Public Places” constitute the first half of the book; the second half is broken into “American,” “British,” “French,” and “Japanese” chapters along with one on “Flower Shows,” a special interest of Deitz’s. Usually occasioned by the completion of some new project, her profiles on landscape architects and designers, including Laurie Olin, Michael Van Valkenburgh, Kathryn Gustafson, Deborah Nevins, and Martha Schwartz, are mini-disquisitions on topics of contemporary interest in design theory and practice.
In her chapter devoted to parks and public places, we accompany Deitz on her first visit to Athens. In this essay, “Garden Letter from Greece: The Agora” (Site/Lines, 2009), lively sensory impressions and scholarly observations imperceptibly merge. Visiting Bernard Tschumi’s new museum at the base of the Acropolis, where the remaining sculptures from the Parthenon frieze have been transferred for cleaning and permanent protection, we make our way uphill through sweet-smelling pines and cypress via the Dionysiou Areopagitou. We follow Deitz as she leads us through the Propylaia, the ceremonial gateway to the sacred precinct, where together we behold the Parthenon. There we see workers with cranes, pulleys, and ropes hoisting the carved marble blocks reproduced from casts of the famous ones removed by Lord Elgin and taken to the British Museum in 1802.
Moving back downhill to the Agora through a field of wildflowers and family picnickers, we find ourselves in a public garden, a welcome bit of green shade after the blazing splendor of the stony Acropolis. There we learn that we are looking at another example of the restoration of a famous antique landscape, for we are now standing in a 1950s replanting of the grounds of the Agora with trees and shrubs native to Greece. Turning around, we look up at the second-century B. C. Stoa of Attalos II, rebuilt by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. That this landscape reinterpretation is not—could never be—entirely faithful to the one that Socrates knew is, for Deitz, irrelevant. The double hedge of pomegranate and myrtle surrounding the Temple of Hephaestus on the hillside opposite strikes a note of perfection that is so harmonious with the landscape that it makes the antique scene contemporary.
Perhaps the best way to understand Deitz’s style is to look at the excellent article titled “A Crystal Palace: Final Portrait of the Palm House,” which she wrote for Vanity Fair in 1985. Establishing the specifics of place and her role as witness, she begins in a lyrical vein:
One day last winter, after a fresh snowfall, the arched glass walls of the Palm House at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew rose up beyond the frozen pond, with only a swooping flock of black-headed gulls and yellowed weeping willows to tinge the pristine landscape. Frosted with snow like sugar icing on a tiered cake, the Palm House became for a few hours the crystalline palace of fairy tales, of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. It glistened in the pale golden morning light for its final portrait, as it once was.
This “final portrait, as it once was” refers to Lord Snowdon’s photographic commemoration of Richard Turner’s great glass conservatory on the eve of its remodeling. Deitz stands in the snow next to Lord Snowdon, who is taking advantage of “the pale golden morning light” to shoot the image that she will eventually use as the cover of her book.
The Palm House is, in fact, a landmark in the history of architecture.
The Palm House is, in fact, a landmark in the history of architecture as well as the original home of modern botanical science. Modeled on the Great Conservatory at Chatsworth—another design by Paxton—the Palm House opened in 1841, marking a technological breakthrough in which “the use of glass and iron signaled a new era in architecture, a marriage between engineering and architecture not fully realized until the modernist buildings of the International Style.” Here is how she helps us to visualize it:
What is most remarkable about the Palm House is its profile—one writer calls it a Victorian jelly mold. With its sixty-foot-high double-tiered central court balanced by two apse wings that stretch the structure to a length of 360 feet, the Palm House resembles an overturned ship with the six-foot-high clerestories cresting it like a giant keel. Turner designed the support arches and the ten miles of glazing bars to such a thinness that where they radiate out from corners they themselves resemble the veins of large tropical leaves.
Those “veins of large tropical leaves” are more than a bit of architectural poetry, for the Palm House was the world’s first scientific greenhouse. Even though its ongoing research-based mission was uncompromised, its structure was not, and it was this that sparked a long-raging controversy over its restoration. Part of the controversy centered on the fact that the great palms were grown in pots: traditionalists did not want to see them replanted in deep soil beds, as recommended by Kew horticulturalists.
In the end, two thousand tropical plants, including a two-and-a-half-ton rare cycad that came to Kew in 1775, were removed and placed in a temporary conservatory until the restoration was completed and the Palm House could resume its dual role as an advanced botanical laboratory and cynosure for the gardens’ visitors. On a consoling note directed at those who protested the reconstruction, she adds, “Fortunately, wherever in the world potted palms grace a single interior, the memory of the Victorian-style Palm House will linger.”
For me, perhaps the finest essay in the book—one that Deitz wrote without the restrictions of deadline or word count—is her introduction to The Bulletins of Reef Point Gardens. It is an excellent short biography of Beatrix Farrand, an extraordinary garden designer and plantswoman as well as this country’s first important female landscape architect. The bulletins document the results of the horticultural experiments and landscape studies conducted in Farrand’s own six-acre garden in Bar Harbor on Mount Desert Island, where many of her clients also had summer residences. When Farrand saw that her plans to have Reef Point perpetuated as a study center beyond her lifetime had become impractical, she made the difficult decision to sell the property. She oversaw the gift of her twenty-seven-hundred-volume horticultural reference library to the library of the Department of Landscape Architecture at University of California, Berkeley. The sorrow of dismantling the garden was mitigated to a degree by the transfer of many of her finest trees and shrubs to the nearby Thuja Inn and the beautiful Asticou Azalea Garden created by the inn’s owner, Charles K. Savage, on the opposite side of the street.
Deitz brings us to the place where we can best comprehend the nature of Farrand’s enterprise. Thus, we find ourselves strolling with her along Bar Harbor’s long Shore Path past several Maine “cottages” to the one that Farrand’s parents had built in 1883. Beyond the gate, we will see that “a curved entrance drive leads to the picturesque Gardener’s Cottage, one of the few buildings to survive the demolition of the gardens. A short stroll along the lichen-covered white cedar boundary fence on the Shore Path gives a sense of the dramatic views across the water, which determined the axes of the fanned-out garden paths.” Deitz then makes us aware of Reef Point’s importance as a landscape:
It was modern in the sense that its design did not allude to any historical style but was instead an enhancement of an elaboration of the natural features of Maine, such as the native bunchberry (Cornus Canadensis), for example, which grew in dappled sunlight at the entrance to a wood. But her gardens also possessed components necessary to a botanic garden: systematic classification of plants of a single species; an herbarium of almost eighteen hundred plants, created for scientific study; and micro-environments specific to the coast of Maine. . . . The scientific scope of Reef Point—yielding a disciplined design with its own harmonies of color, texture, and form—was akin to those early botanic gardens founded by professors and physicians at medieval universities.
A circuit of the now-vanished garden follows, starting at the vine gardens alongside the house. From here the garden unfolds as we move through the rose gardens, the area planted with rhododendrons and mountain laurels, the kitchen garden with its espaliered fruit trees, the perennial borders and rock garden facing one another across the lawn, the mass of pink azaleas, the holly hedges, the collection of heathers, and at last the bog garden with its intriguing carnivorous pitcher-plants. We learn that the remaining native spruces were part of an enclosing windbreak, and we can still see across the bay the pointed firs, terminating the view from the garden in a serrated horizon line.
Deitz brings us to the place where we can best comprehend the nature of Farrand’s enterprise.
While infectious enthusiasm usually drives Deitz’s prose, she is a critic capable of negative judgment as well as praise. Such is the case with “A New Memorial Squanders a Sparkling Opportunity,” which is about the bombastic architecture of the World War II monument on the Washington Mall. After remarking how the “characterless blocky surfaces of the memorial’s structures and oversized open plaza radiate a blinding whiteness, particularly notable in Washington’s humid summer heat,” she directs our attention to Lawrence Halprin’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial overlooking the nearby Tidal Basin and to the Lincoln Memorial at the terminus of the Mall. These monuments make evident the magnitude of the squandered opportunity, for, “whereas the Roosevelt Memorial allows the visitor to think between inscriptions and episodes and the Lincoln Memorial offers the cool majesty of a Greek temple interior, here there is no relief from the onslaught of words and symbols.”
Deitz has read widely in the field of landscape history scholarship, and her goal is to place her thoughts on gardens within its context. Often missing from the academic sources from which she draws much of her information, however, is the descriptive vitality and vivid visualization she gives her subjects. The comparison between what is and what was makes the reader aware of the fact that landscape design is an ephemeral enterprise and landscape preservation an art in itself, one involving both an informed historic sensibility and an understanding of the dynamic forces of nature.
Though not intended as guidebook, Of Gardens will bring readers to the conclusion that the next best thing to having Paula Deitz as their traveling companion on a forthcoming garden tour is to read the relevant essay in her book. In the manner of similar collections, this book might have been titled The Best of Deitz. And, as we have seen, the best of Deitz is very good indeed.