THE SELF-TAUGHT GARDENER: Editing the view

I often think good gardeners are at heart editors or mathematicians, or perhaps artists, because in the long run gardens are about composition, which is about adding or subtracting items from the landscape, and continually editing the vision that the gardener has for his or her property.

This past weekend, we were invited by a friend to see the garden of James Dinsmore in the Hudson Valley. It was a study in composition and the artful use of addition; the garden covers acres of farmland that were virtually barren when James and his partner built their house many years ago. Now, it calls to mind both a Hudson Valley landscape painting and the work of a 15^th century Florentine landscape designer. Over the years, James planted what must be thousands of trees (most ordered bare-root from a nursery in New Jersey and only a foot or so tall when first planted). What has evolved is a garden that takes its inspiration from the cross-axes gardens of the Italian Renaissance, with James cleverly using hardy conifers to mimic allées of Italian cypress, all leading into a variety of perennial gardens with their own individual themes and personalities.

The garden of James Dinsmore appears as if it has been around for ages, but in fact was created by the owner himself using small bare-root trees.

Touring the garden was great fun, but it was even more fun to see pictures of the land before it was planted—straightforward farmland with sandy soil and very little that made you think you were in the Hudson Valley beyond the mountains in the background. James recounted his story of mowing the grassy fields into quadrants and then subsections, and then slowly adding trees and eventually perennials along the paths and axes he created. Forty years hence, you assume the landscape was always what you see now but you cannot help but imagine that another forty years from now what will be there will be something different. As trees grow, gardens evolve, and this thought stuck with me as I headed home to tackle a few things in our own garden on Sunday. As lovely as the landscape was that we saw, a garden is not fixed in amber; evolution is part of its continued success.

These hardy conifers call to mind the Italian cypresses of Italy and the gardens of Northern California where James grew up.

I feel like, in some way, the garden I inherited was a version of James’s garden a decade or two hence. I had also been given the good fortune, as a writer and an editor, to rework the garden not only to my vision, but to something necessary given its age. A good editor knows what to excise, and what to enhance. With that in mind, I grabbed my chainsaw, and removed a magnolia which I had loved over the years, but which, when sitting on a chair on the terrace the other afternoon, I had come to realize was extraneous. The magnolia was redundant (another of the same variety sat 20 feet away) and, more importantly, deleterious to the view – a newly planted Alaskan cedar and a lovely old specimen of dogwood were hidden from view by the tree, as was the weeping hemlock at its side that the magnolia seemed to overwhelm. Three cuts and I could begin to see what had been there all of the time and, just like an editor moving on to the next chapter, I began to look around the garden to see what else could be subtracted from the landscape to improve it and, like any gardener and writer of any value, what could be added to complement what was left behind.

Another view of the magnolia before I chopped it down. Once an essential part of the garden, it had outgrown its place and blocked the view of a kousa dogwood in bloom, as well as some new plantings beyond.

After removing the magnolia, the dogwood and the weeping hemlock come out of their roles as wallflowers and take center stage. The dogwood may require some pruning to give it balance in the years ahead and to keep it from overshadowing the hawthorn that sits to its side.

I thought back to James’s garden and wondered what changes it will call for forty years from now, and hope that it will have someone willing to see all of the glory of its bowers and the splendor of its trees, all the while having the knowledge to know that a little editing is not an insult to the creator of the garden, but a sign of respect for maintaining their vision of what it could be.

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A gardener grows through observation, experimentation, and learning from the failures, triumphs, and hard work of oneself and others. In this sense, all gardeners are self-taught, while at the same time intrinsically connected to a tradition and a community that finds satisfaction through working the soil and sharing their experiences with one another. This column explores those relationships and how we learn about the world around us from plants and our fellow gardeners.