Paradise Found: America Returns to the Garden

We all have an idea of a garden. It is the place where we wish we were, where we are at our best: generous, fertile, humble and at peace. For some the vision may be exquisitely formal, a garden of thought and geometry, traced with tulips and a perfectly taut hedge. For others it is wild and artless, with shaggy trees and hiding places and children splashing in clover. Even if we have never been there, we know what it looks like.

Maybe it is the change of season, or something in the social climate, but suddenly it seems as though all around the country people are going to any length to find their garden: to read about it, visit it and, if at all possible, create it. Mailboxes bulge with gardening catalogs, groceries grow on windowsills, cranes hoist trees onto city rooftops. From coast to coast, nursery owners say their business has doubled. Even baby boomers who did not have the remotest interest in the subject two years ago now rattle off the Latin names of their plants and comb suburban garden stores for just the right style of Japanese weed whipper.

Wrestling the wilderness is an old American sport, turning forests into arbors, fields into farms. Yet this desire to plant something is reaching into places and lives that defy fertility. Throughout the most savage reaches of New York’s inner city, community gardeners are transforming burned-out lots into verdant sanctuaries. Across the dry plains of the Midwest, botanists are finding plenty of volunteers to help them reclaim the prairies and replant the wildflowers that belong there. In a formidable climate where there are hailstorms in June and frost in August, juvenile offenders at a Wyoming detention center have some of the finest gardens around.

Amid so much activity, the stereotypes no longer fit. Through the 1970s, the archetypal gardener was over 50 and had time and money to spare: a smug matron with impeccable calceolarias, an eccentric rosarian, a spinster growing herbs. But now, says the National Gardening Association, 78% of America’s households garden, and all the recent surveys suggest that the most fervent converts are between 30 and 49 and still evenly divided between men and women. Those who once bought geraniums and parched them in college dorm rooms have discovered that they can even garden competitively.

The baby boomers get much of the attention, because they accounted for half of the record $17.5 billion that was spent last year on things horticultural. Once they have poured all the money they can into their homes, cash-flush yuppies have found that a garden can soak up limitless discretionary income. After seeds and dirt, there are goatskin gloves and Garden Weasels, wide- throated anvil pruners from Rolcut of England, not to mention $15,000 for a Sargent weeping hemlock tree. The yuppies quickly master the rituals and floral lore, swap compost recipes at dinner parties. Mulching has become elevator talk.

The touching eagerness of converts leaves some veterans bemused. Gardening, they will tell you, is a vocation, not a gift, and requires work and experience to master and love. “I see these specimen trees coming down the highway from the nursery wrapped like Egyptian mummies,” says Long Island Painter Robert Dash, “and I think, ‘God, the gardening world has got out of hand.’ “

But sooner or later, if they keep at it, the new gardeners discover what the others have known all along: the satisfactions have little to do with anything they can read, buy or brag about. “A garden is for its owner’s pleasure,” advised that wise, earthy doyenne of English gardening, Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932), “and whatever the degree or form of that pleasure, if only it be sincere, it is right and reasonable, and adds to human happiness in one of the purest and best of ways.”

Most gardeners, at the outset, seem to think that their new passion is profoundly good for them and that the world would be not just a prettier but a healthier and better place if more people joined them in the out-of-doors. There is some theory to this: the smell of basil was long thought to strengthen the heart and take away melancholy, while the scent of violets was considered an aid to digestion. It cannot be an accident that gardeners so often last so long. Cato the Censor, a fine source on growing cabbages, lived to 85, a very old age in ancient Rome. Medieval Theologian Albertus Magnus, whose green thumb led to charges of witchcraft, died at 87, while one of America’s Founding Gardeners, Thomas Jefferson, lived to be 83.

“I haven’t felt so worked out in years,” smiles the willowy Twinka Thiebaud, a caterer in Los Angeles who abandoned her mountain bike and health club when she was told that gardening might work just as well. Unlike a jog or a sit-up, she found, gardening is a purposeful exercise, a lung-cleaning, muscle-toughening activity that also decorates her house and stocks her pantry. “Every visit to the garden is the same,” she says. “I’m just wiped out in a wonderful way.”

The act of kneeling and digging and weeding seems to have an equally salutary effect on the human spirit. “He who would have beautiful roses in his garden,” wrote the great rosarian Samuel Reynolds Hole in 1869, “must have beautiful roses in his heart.” To wait as long as three years for trilliums to bloom requires considerable fortitude; to rise early and weed builds discipline; to construct a garden in one’s mind in the dead of winter fosters purity of thought. “Sometimes what you do is for others,” muses Designer Oscar de la Renta, who has transformed a Connecticut horse farm into a hilltop garden of crab-apple trees and white roses, with rows of fruit trees and swaths of delphiniums. “You may plant something you will never see yourself.” He marvels at a palm tree he discovered in Florida, which erupts into blossom only once in its lifetime. “A garden gives you a sense of continuity,” he concludes. “It gives you another sense of life.”

For those with such an eye to history, the garden represents a chance to create something that lasts. In the late Middle Ages, when plague ran rampant through Europe, explains Historian Barbara Tuchman, survivors feared that the wilderness would return because there would not be enough people alive to hold it back. “Gardening,” she says, “is a ritual that responds to a desire in people to restore order.” Even today she finds that the appeal of her own garden lies in a sense of permanence and renewal. “It says that everything is fine in the midst of chaos and bewilderment.”

Oddly, that reassurance seems to be especially important to younger gardeners who are starting their own families and, as trite as it sounds, looking to lay down some roots. When Oceanographer Melissa Denny decided a few years ago that it was time to stay home and cultivate her children, she and her husband bought a house in Everett, Wash., on half an acre of mud and blackberries. Her staunchly evergreen neighbors watched in amazement as she planted clover and rye grass, let it grow a foot high, then plowed it under. Raised vegetable beds and fruit trees began to appear. Then local children gathered, holding tricycle races on the sawdust paths. “They all come over to graze,” she laughs. “I have to grow twice as many strawberries and raspberries as I need.”

For many new parents, these playgrounds provide a chance to cultivate memories, both of their childhoods and of their children. “Now I, like a lot of other boomers, have ended my prolonged adolescence,” says Virginia Kempf, a housewife in Atlanta, “and am trying to re-create my childhood.” Her father had a vegetable garden, and her mother grew irises. “Here I am, with a two- and a three-year-old, back at my origins.” Many of her friends, she finds, are of the same mind. “They are tired of being self-absorbed. They want some roots, and they’re realigning their values.”

The garden becomes the place to go when all else fails, when all other seductions and temptations have been tried and rejected. “I let the garden guide me,” says Billy Barnes, a Manhattan talent agent. “It has changed my life-style, particularly now. People aren’t smoking and drinking anymore; they aren’t having sex. In this atmosphere, I find great solace from my garden.” Barnes has landscaped an apartment terrace that looked like a heliport when he moved in. Stands of birches, pines and apple trees rustle in the winds on the 14th-floor roof. He smiles at his lofty thoughts. “It brings my mind out of the gutter,” he adds. “If everybody could have a little plot of God’s green earth in the city, it would be a better place.”

Perhaps with that thought in mind, residents of Manhattan’s lethal “alphabet city” have transformed a rubble-strewn lot into a community garden, with poetry readings and potluck dinners and tiny plots for 107 local gardeners. Some grow food or medicinal herbs: one woman grows a lawn, just so she can come out on Sunday mornings with her deck chair to read the newspaper. “I’ve lived here 20 years, and we never used to talk to people on the street,” says Sandra Kleinman, now in her fourth year of nursing Egyptian onions and Japanese mustard greens. “I’ve never been outgoing. But the garden has changed my place in life.”

In moments of candor, even the most hardened gardeners will try to explain the redemptive potential of their calling. “When I first got here, I wouldn’t talk with anyone,” says Ted Stoddard, a tall, slender man with a serious mien and a gift for apricot trees. He is serving a life sentence for murder in Muskegon, Mich. “Prison has a tendency to make you angry. It’s like quicksand. Your rights can be jerked at any time.” But the garden provides him with a rare escape. He now teaches other inmates, though carefully, hesitantly. They will learn more through their mistakes, he finds, than from anything he tells them. “I order the seeds, and they can take what they want. It gives them a sense of freedom.”

Apart from the therapeutic effects on body and mind, designing and tending a landscape offer a chance to shape the environment to suit one’s taste or mood. “I like making beauty that isn’t sweet,” says Painter Dash, a patient and demanding gardener. “It is a hard and firm beauty.” Both painting and planting are arts of ingratiation. “You want to make something people look at, whether it be shocking, staggering, alerting, interesting. You don’t want to make it pretty.” His gardens in Sagaponack, N.Y., are rambling and studiously wild, with crooked flowering quinces, English bluebells and colorful primulas beneath flowering crab apples, plus a viburnum arbor that he will have to wait several years to see in its full, thick beauty. He rarely lets his gardens alone. “The minute you sit and say, Isn’t it gorgeous?, you are succumbing to the seduction you have created.”

There are those, of course, for whom mere exercise, solace, refuge and redemption are not enough. For them, the moment of transcendence comes that first morning when they creep into the garden and harvest the early peas. There is something primitive at work when it comes to growing food — perhaps the satisfaction of being able to provide for oneself and one’s family or being able to step out back and browse for dinner. “There are few sights quite as gratifyingly beautiful,” says Playwright Arthur Miller of his vegetable patch, “all dewy and glittering with a dozen shades of green at 7 in the morning.” He does, however, acknowledge that he could spend the time more profitably on other pursuits: Miller once estimated, only half in jest, that a single tomato from his garden might have cost about $6,000.

A decade ago, most people grew vegetables to save money. But now they are far more concerned with freshness and quality. Through some miracle of nature, a tomato nurtured from scratch has a taste all its own. Many herbivores are turning to “heirloom” seed exchanges, newsletters and catalogs to unearth the long-forgotten strains that were not bred for shelf life. “In commercial agriculture,” explains Robert Kourik, author of Designing & Maintaining Your Edible Landscape — Naturally, “the tendency is to favor production efficiency over flavor.” Some of the tastiest vegetables and fruits are available only in local gardens and are at risk of extinction.

As American palates become more sophisticated, many cooks are concluding that the surest way to acquire the proper ingredients is to grow their own. The baby boomers, says Vermont Nurseryman Shepherd Ogden, “have eaten in good restaurants and traveled abroad. Now they want to bring the culinary revolution into their homes.” He and other suppliers are quick to cater to such tastes: he offers more than 50 kinds of lettuce, including 13 varieties of radicchio alone.

As a result, today’s vegetable garden is far from the prosaic spread of suburban legend. No longer a tiny swatch of the American heartland, it is now an international gathering, full of poetry and exotic temptations. There are Mexi Bell hot hybrid peppers and Chinese bitter melons, peacock pole beans, Peruvian purple potatoes. And then the strange-sounding items, the celtuce (somewhere between celery and lettuce), the papaya pumpkin, the sweet chocolate peppers, the rustproof golden wax bush beans.

The herbalists too are becoming more adventurous in their tastes. Last year 6 million households spent $46 million growing herbs, in contrast with 5 million spending $39 million the year before. Some make tea from them, some bathe in them, some swear to their healing powers. Having mastered the basic basil, rosemary and sage, gardeners move on to lovage stems, bee-balm blossoms and lemon grass. The health conscious prize herbs as a salt substitute, while the cost conscious find that pricey, herb-flavored vinegars and oils are easily made at home.

Those who cannot make up their minds whether to gaze or graze in their gardens can always grow edible flowers. Trendy cooks now sprinkle salads with nasturtiums, lavender petals and rose petals or make cold soup out of violets and scented geraniums. Those who experiment with gourmet gardening, cautions Rosalind Creasy, author of The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping, should take care not to sample every blossom: lily of the valley and foxglove, for example, are poisonous. As for certain marigolds, they taste “like skunk,” and some carnations “metallic.” “I don’t care if it’s edible, if it’s not palatable,” she says.

The motive for many households is not just variety but purity and control over what they eat. Pests must be killed and plants fed, but the ingredients in pesticides and fertilizers often invite images of chemical warfare. Gardeners have grown cautious about what they use to defend against bugs. Jerry Baker, author of The Impatient Gardener, advises spraying the lawn with a mixture of Listerine, ammonia, chewing-tobacco juice and dish washing liquid. Others have discovered beer for immobilizing slugs, and human hair to discourage squirrels.

For those who prefer not to improvise, garden stores are doing a land-office business in beneficial nematodes, antislug mulch and dozens of bio-organic plant boosters. The ranks of converts grow by the day. Actor Eddie Albert makes speeches and lobbies farmers about the pesticides. “I am rather militant about the poisoning of our food and our children,” he says. “Gardening is the only way we can get clean vegetables.” His advice to would-be gardeners? “Keep it simple. Then get the hell out of the way. Nature wants your garden to grow.”

Ah, if only it were that simple. No matter what is growing out back, whether catnip, horehound and fleabane, or chubby cabbages and Creeping figs, or heirloom roses and masses of delicate ranunculus, the garden will eventually become all consuming, of time, money, concentration and passion. Around the time that new gardeners are feeling most warm and gratified with their endeavors, delighted with the fresh vegetables and thrilled with the view from the porch, they also discover the risks involved. “A garden,” warned Ralph Waldo Emerson, “is like those pernicious machineries which catch a man’s coat-skirt or his hand, and draw in his arm, his leg, and his whole body to irresistible destruction.”

First it disrupts the domestic routine, as eggshells and quartered-orange peels are painstakingly transported from city to country to compost heap. Everything must be saved for that site: last year’s annuals, the top of the lawn, wayward bits of hedge, all the archaeology of the planting season. Then the catalogs begin to multiply; one nursery carries more than 1,000 varieties of geraniums; another’s pages read like a gothic romance. Since all addictions have organizations, the invitations start arriving to join the clubs. There are hundreds of groups for roses alone, not to mention the American Bamboo Society and the Cactus and Succulent Society. There are some 800 books on gardening currently in print and six major magazines. The largest, Organic Gardening, has a circulation of more than a million.

Only the most disciplined can resist the urge for better equipment, new hybrids, the latest indestructible orchid. Tools that were once an extension of arm and soul are now computer driven and high tech. Smith & Hawken, purveyor of top-drawer English garden tools, has grown from two guys selling ! tools nine years ago out of a California warehouse to a $30 million business.

Paul Hawken knows his customers well. Of the new generation of gardeners, he says, “their parents had a quarter acre with a power mower and a hedge clipper. They have 600 sq. ft. behind a condo and 90 different kinds of plants in it.” But he does not disdain those who crave his lovingly designed tools made of second-growth ash. “Serious gardeners are like serious writers, painters, dancers,” he says. “For people who view gardening as a craft, buying the best tool they can get is absolutely essential.”

Once the obsession takes hold, it becomes clear that while gardening may be many things for many people, dirt cheap it ain’t. Among the quickest ways to run through a fortune is to approach the garden with the eye of a connoisseur. “Trees are my 87th collection,” admits Louis Meizel, who, with his wife Susan, owns a SoHo art gallery and a 3 1/2-acre Long Island farm. “As with all our collections, our goal is to put together the best of each kind in the world.” They have spent about $100,000 thus far, in part because they are buying grown trees, like the $12,000 Crimson King maple. Says he: “You can’t climb a tree you have spent $400 for.”

For those who are aghast at how much money their gardens can absorb, there is some consolation in thinking of it as an investment. “One thing this generation has discovered,” says Rodger Duer, vice president of the mammoth Monrovia nurseries in California and Oregon, “is that a nice garden helps sell a house.” Considerable seed money has been directed into landscaping, roughly $3 billion last year, $745 million more than the year before. Such expenditures, by some estimates, can boost the value of real estate by 7% to 15%. Young anglophiles hope that a wanton English garden with piles of ivy and wisteria will add some majesty to the estate. Never mind that few climates in the U.S. could conceivably produce the soggy consolation that England provides its gardeners. What weather cannot provide, clutter can. So there is a thriving market in gazebo kits, stone dogs with baskets in their mouths, gates, bird feeders, Gothic porches and dovecotes.

Unfortunately, such tastes often exceed what time allows, thereby ensuring that nurseries and garden-supply stores will be well stocked with shortcuts. Since in most cases a silky lawn is out of the question, there is a burgeoning market for “meadows in a can,” which promise a vast, sweet meadow right out of a picture book. This illusion too does not come cheap: a 4-oz. can of Rocky Mountain wildflower seed from Smith & Hawken goes for $18.50.

Native wildflowers are also resistant to coaching and threats. Actress Helen Hayes, a dirty-fingernails, hands-and-knees gardener, recently decided to sow wildflowers like those she remembers seeing from train windows as she toured the country with her plays. “They won’t bow to one’s wishes,” she says with grudging admiration. “They don’t want to be tamed. That must be the reason these darling, lovely little things won’t cooperate.”

There is such a thing as an instant garden, more’s the pity, but one pays a price for it. “Within the past three years or so,” observes Larry Shapira, a horticulturist and consultant at Merrifield Garden Center outside Washington, “people have started coming in who just don’t want to wait for smaller plants to become big ones. They want to go to the garden center in the morning, pick up the plant, drive the thing home, plant it, and have a drink under it that evening.”

Alternatively there are the grasses that do not need to be mowed, another favorite choice of those too busy to bother. New York City Art Dealers Carole and Alex Rosenberg cultivated a tangle of weeds at their house in Water Mill, Long Island. “I read about English gardens,” Carole explains. “They are too fussy for me.” Someone suggested ornamental grasses from the Washington-based landscape-architect firm of Oehme, van Sweden, as a solution. The Rosenbergs’ sloping lawn is now intersected and ringed with free-form gardens of 3-ft. grasses, Scotch Broom covered with saffron blossoms, blue allium balls, mounds of soft green sedums and spikes of silver-green lavender. “I wanted something to work with the wind,” says Carole, reeling off Latin names for her 14 varieties. “And it’s easy to maintain.”

Though some plantsmen are willing to sell anything that is different in order to appeal to the instant gardener, others throw up their hands at the onslaught of impatient novices. “They use perennials like annual bedding plants, taking them up every year and cutting them in half and resetting them,” recounts Connecticut Nurseryman Fred McGourty in horror. “That is the highest-maintenance form of gardening there can be, but they can’t wait for the four years for the plants to grow together.”

Despite the indignation they cause, the younger, greener gardeners are gradually learning their lessons. Those who originally bought perennials in the mistaken belief that they were less work, that one just tucked them in the ground and watched them bloom year after year, are now coming to appreciate them for their variety and texture. They are discovering the thrill of syncopation, when they manage to persuade a garden, through careful choice and planning, to bloom in waves from March through the first frost.

Others are beginning to realize that the land is something that needs to be protected more than tamed, and are taking care to plant only what belongs to their region, to seek not only beauty but balance. In the dry regions of the country, Xeriscapers are creating natural gardens with indigenous plants that require about half the water of traditional designs. To encourage the use of native plants, Lady Bird Johnson established the National Wildflower Research Center in Austin, which counsels gardeners around the country about what varieties are best suited to their region.

Gardeners, like their subjects, ripen over time, and experience eventually drives out the silliest notions about how to approach the soil. It may be true, as Painter Dash believes, that for the moment gardening has become a gorgeous new American toy, the latest vehicle for social climbing. If so, that in time is sure to change. “It is possible we will garden on American terms,” he predicts. “We will make brave and beautiful gardens, with hardier plants. And because we are a generous country, our gardens will be very generous and robust with a snap of the wilderness about them . . . perhaps aiming at what we lost.”

And in the meantime, we will revel in paradoxes, in gardens that cost nothing, and those that cost a king’s ransom, in the gardens that consume all our waking hours and those that prosper for having been left alone, in the gardens of the cities surrounded by thickets of steel, in the gardens grown out of folly and philosophy. We will approach with awe the ceremonies of the out-of-doors and become in the process less brittle, more wise, managing miracles. We may even become, as Thomas Jefferson once modestly christened all his fellow gardeners, the chosen people of God.