{"id":3453,"date":"2016-02-08T16:41:51","date_gmt":"2016-02-08T16:41:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.siteandinsight.com\/?p=3453"},"modified":"2016-02-08T16:41:51","modified_gmt":"2016-02-08T16:41:51","slug":"layers-in-the-garden-or-the-necessity-for-ruins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/layers-in-the-garden-or-the-necessity-for-ruins\/","title":{"rendered":"Layers in the Garden, or The Necessity for Ruins"},"content":{"rendered":"

When gardeners mention layers, or layering, they are often\u00a0talking about propagating a plant. Tucking a flexible shoot of a shrub underground and leaving it to form roots is one method of layering. Separated from the original, one shrub becomes two or more, depending how many branches were\u00a0layered.<\/p>\n

Layering can refer as well to different vertical spaces, from ground covers to perennials\u00a0that are knee high, at eye level\u00a0and taller, or to shrubs and trees that tower overhead. It can refer to a\u00a0succession of bloom, how one flower overlaps with another, before\u00a0fading as still a third flower\u00a0begins\u00a0to show its stuff. \u00a0David Culp’s recent book, The Layered Garden: Design Lessons for Year Round Beauty from Brandywine Cottage<\/em>, treats these types of layering in a enjoyable and informative way.<\/p>\n

There is another\u00a0type of layering, though, that gardeners think about less often, and that some\u00a0may even\u00a0ignore entirely. This is layering in time. For gardens with long histories, or for gardens in historic settings, this type of layering comes with the territory. At Ninfa, the Italian garden set within the ruins of a medieval village, layers of time reaching far back into the past provide structure, both to climbing plants and to the garden as a whole.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Ninfa

Located south-west of Rome, the garden of Ninfa was built over several generations. This means that both the setting and the creation of the garden are\u00a0layered in time.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

At Sissinghurst, the traces of history seen\u00a0in the tower and the surrounding brick walls that date from Elizabethan times were a major attraction for Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, the couple who created this iconic 20th c English garden.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"When

When Vita and Harold bought the property, the central doorway of the tower was boarded shut. Vita fell in love with the property as soon as she saw it because of the intense presence of its slightly shabby, dog-eared history.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

In North American gardens, surviving traces of history like those at Ninfa and Sissinghurst are less common but they can be found. At Ashintully, a garden in Tyringham,\u00a0Massachusetts, the columns of the original house on the property still\u00a0stand, although the house was destroyed in the 1950s. Rising up from a tangle of vegetation, these columns act\u00a0like a timeline to link\u00a0the present day garden to a not-too-distant past.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"These

These columns, the front terrace and foundations are all that remains of the Marble Palace, as the\u00a0grand\u00a0house at Ashintully was called. It had 35 rooms, ten baths and 15 fireplaces.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

At Glen Villa, my garden in rural Quebec, the foundation walls of an old resort hotel that burned to the ground in 1909 add that layer of time ….<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Glen

Glen Villa Inn was said to have 365 rooms, one for every day of the year. I think the owner counted broom closets.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

… as does an old mossy well, now partly hidden in the woods.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"This

This well provided water for the first\u00a0summer cottage built on the property. That cottage was torn down when\u00a0our house\u00a0was built in the late 1960s.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I’m extremely fortunate to have these traces of history all around me. They contribute significantly to\u00a0the property’s special character, and while I’ve made no attempt to restore them to their original state, I’ve highlighted\u00a0them whenever I can.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"We

We found these pieces of farm equipment rusting in the woods and brought them to the edge of a path where they bear witness to the property’s agricultural past.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The American writer and cultural geographer J.B. Jackson wrote an essay memorably titled \u00ab\u00a0The Necessity for Ruins.\u00a0\u00bb His point was that genuine\u00a0remnants of the past, rather than the reconstructed pioneer villages and cowboy towns with modern-day\u00a0hitching posts that mimic\u00a0\u00a0the past, situate\u00a0a landscape within a continuum; they show unmistakably that the past and present are linked\u00a0in meaningful ways.<\/p>\n

The passage of time is an essential element\u00a0in every garden. The changing seasons, the growth and death of individual plants, the fallow times\u00a0when ideas take root — these are the aspects of time that we as gardeners acknowledge and work with every day. The changes brought about in a garden simply by the passage of time can’t be ignored. But the layers of history that underpin the garden can.<\/p>\n

To ignore those layers of time is, in my mind, to miss an opportunity. Unearthing the\u00a0strata of time and making remnants of the past explicit features in the present does more than give\u00a0a garden a gauzy romantic cloak. It\u00a0adds depth. And I firmly believe this can be done in any garden, whether\u00a0the signs of history are evident\u00a0or not.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Inverted

Inverted branches stride across a field, recalling the first inhabitants of the land that now makes up Glen Villa.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

How? There are lots of ways. One easy approach is to use objects that carry\u00a0the weight of historical connections and connotations. This approach should\u00a0come with\u00a0a warning label, though. For while a cupid in one context\u00a0may be appropriate,\u00a0the perils of the garden centre gargoyle and similar\u00a0context-less items\u00a0loom large.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"This

I’m not a big fan of stone cupids but this one, perched\u00a0on a garden wall at Mt Cuba, a garden in Delaware, suits its setting.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ordinary household objects carry the same dangers but can work well when used thoughtfully. These old doors were languishing in the garage of a house in Ottawa. Instead of throwing them away, the owners cleaned them up and positioned them on the hillside behind their house. Arranged as they are, to me these doors suggest a passage into another time. They make me feel like magic could happen, that I could walk through them, like the children in C.S. Lewis’s stories walked through the back door of the wardrobe, into another world entirely.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"What

What do the doors suggest to you?<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

This little hockey gnome, spotted last June when I was\u00a0in Toronto for the Garden Bloggers Fling, may be much less magical than the doors. Still, as a personal memento, he offers another entry point into the past. Or so I choose\u00a0to believe.\u00a0\u00a0Because why else would the gnome be there, unless the owner\u00a0was once a hockey legend, or at least a player who loved the game?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"A

Did other Flingers notice this little gnome dressed in his hockey jersey, ready to step out on the ice?<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Using a gnome\u00a0in a\u00a0garden is\u00a0risky, I agree, however tiny the gnome may be. Kitsch is lurking, and kitsch in a garden is something to avoid. \u00a0But taking\u00a0risks in a garden is not. Pushing limits can lift a garden out of the ordinary and make it more personal. Layering with time can add the heft of history to the aesthetics of any\u00a0garden, making it richer and more substantial.<\/p>\n

Or so I believe.<\/p>\n

Do you agree?\u00a0Do you think about the layers of time that play a role in your garden? Do you use\u00a0or ignore them, and do you do this deliberately or has it happened by accident? Do you include old varieties of flowers or plants that have a particular relationship to the site? Do you use personal mementoes or objects that relate to your location? Or do you think I’m crazy to ask?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When gardeners mention layers, or layering, they are often\u00a0talking about propagating a plant. Tucking a flexible shoot of a shrub underground and leaving it to form roots is one method of layering. Separated from the original, one shrub becomes two or more, depending how many branches were\u00a0layered. Layering can refer as well to different vertical…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12590,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,38,82,23],"tags":[49,529,445,37,530,531,45,46,532,509,533,534,388,535],"class_list":["post-3453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-design","category-glen-villa","category-miscellaneous-2","category-travel","tag-abenaki-walking","tag-ashintully","tag-garden-bloggers-fling","tag-glen-villa","tag-glen-villa-inn","tag-glenv","tag-history-made-visible","tag-j-b-jackson","tag-layering","tag-mt-cuba","tag-ninfa","tag-ottawa-gardens","tag-sissinghurst","tag-toronto-gardens","category-24","category-38","category-82","category-23","description-off"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}