Gardens and Grounds Part One: A Botanical Expedition Around the World

I would like to first start, as usual, by acknowledging and apologizing, dear reader, for the lengthy interval since my last post. This time, however, I have a slightly more-legitimate-than-usual excuse, which is that my laptop has been completely on the fritz. For some time and with increasing regularity, it would have these episodes where it would act seemingly of it own volition – hijacking the controls to open new tabs, rapidly scroll through pages, open and close random applications I didn’t even know I had – with no way to stop it but a full shut down. It was like a mischievous, productivity adverse poltergeist had made its home inside my laptop. Or more likely, a less-than friendly virus.

By the end, the acts of sabotage had gotten so persistent that I couldn’t operate my laptop for more than a minute or so without it seizing control and initiating continuous scroll mode. It was thus with bittersweet resolve that I finally bid adieu to my trusty computer of the past five years and hello to a sleek new machine that has tons more storage. So now I can digitally hoard even more photographs of cats.

Speaking of excessive volumes of photos, as I was going through all my old albums to collect images for this post, I set aside a grand total of 215 files as potential candidates. And that was me being selective. As I imagine no one cares to see 200 pictures of plants – for this post is all about gardens – I’ve managed to whittle it down to around the 40-mark. So expect a part two.

Funnily, I wouldn’t have guessed that I had taken so many pictures of gardens over the years. I typically gravitate to photographing buildings and, when those are absent, natural landscapes, so I was surprised to find such a large representation of gardens throughout my images. Not that I’ve conducted an exhaustive inventory. And granted, many of my “garden” shots were taken in service of adding visual interest to the foreground of the photo’s true subject that is, inevitably, a building.

So with so many pictures to share, where to start? The most recent seems like a good place – not because the timeline is of any importance, but because it is the inspiration for this post. We thus begin our journey at the Portland Japanese Garden. I dragged Nathan here on a Saturday afternoon in May for a “scouting trip.” You see, as new and enthusiastic but inexperienced homeowners, we have been attempting to get into gardening in an effort to liven up the largely bare flower beds and patches of dead grass in our front yard.

The situation is even worse in the back. After deciding to rip out half the deck because it was taking up our entire yard, we now have a giant dirt pit behind our house that’s full of rotting wood and trash that has accumulated under the deck over the years. It’s a pretty depressing sight at the moment, but our dog at least enjoys rooting around in the dirt and regularly tracking it into the house.

As we plan to hire a landscaper in the (hopefully) near future to make something out of our mudhole, we’ve both been scouring the internet for landscaping ideas. In doing this I’ve learned that my style leans part zen garden, part prairie grass/wildflower wonderland, with a pinch of English cottage charm thrown in. In order to focus and further educate myself and get some inspiration out in the “wild,” I deemed a field trip was in order. Thus armed with my smart phone and a newly downloaded plant identifier app, we set off on our expedition to the 12-acre Portland Japanese Garden. Fortunately, and very much to Nathan’s relief, I ended up forgoing my mission as botanist explorer and simply enjoyed our time spent meandering through the grounds. They are after all quite lovely and serene, a feeling which I hope these pictures can at least begin to convey.

I’m not the garden’s only admirer. In fact, it has been hailed by former Ambassador of Japan to the U.S., Nobuo Matsunaga, as “the most beautiful and authentic Japanese garden in the world outside of Japan.” As such a statement naturally invites comparison, I couldn’t suppress the urge to compare it to the “real deal,” namely the gardens of the Chiran Samurai District in the Kagoshima prefecture of Japan.

I had the good fortune to visit this preserved complex of 500 Edo period samurai houses and seven gardens on a trip to Japan a few years ago. If we’re making differentiations here, it must be said that the Portland gardens are more extensive and varied, incorporating eight different garden styles, while the gardens of Chiran are on a smaller scale and predominantly in the Karesansui, or dry garden style. It’s a classic case of apples to oranges, and as a strict comparison wouldn’t be very meaningful here, we’ll content ourselves to say that both are lovely examples of Japanese gardens.

From the peace of the zen garden we now move to the second part of my formula for the perfectly landscaped garden – prairie elements. Characterized by native grasses, wildflowers, and perennials in restrained color palettes, the visual interest of the prairie style garden comes not from showy, exotic blooms, but from structural and textural features that translate well across all four seasons. And there’s the added bonus that such types of plants are typically hardy and low maintenance. Given my gardening track record (or lack thereof), that’s exactly the kind of vegetation I need in my life. I also attribute my appreciation for the prairie garden to a newfound and strange obsession with ornamental grasses. I’ll take a feathery fountain grass in a subdued shade over a blindingly vibrant, sickly sweet smelling flower any day. The gardens in the following pictures, at least to my untrained eye, incorporate a few of these prized prairie features.

And now for the final piece of the equation – the English cottage garden. While this style is obviously not geographically limited to England, all of the photos I’ll be sharing here are. I mean, they do it so well. The design boils down to a sense of pleasingly arranged chaos – informal, large massings of varied and colorful plants anchored by meandering paths, vine-choked walls, light-dappling arbors, and all matter of decorative objects. It’s highly orchestrated devil-may-care style at its finest – instant Instagram fodder.

While we’re talking about doing things well, I am obliged to mention le jardin à la Française, the formal garden style of France. The French formal garden is quite literally the Versailles of the landscaping world, recognizable for its geometric plan and symmetrical patterns of orderly hedges and clipped topiaries. While it might be a bit fussy and impractical for the average home gardener to replicate, the French garden is a classic style that, as the following photos of the gardens of the Loire Valley châteaux demonstrate, never fails to impress.

But of course formal gardens don’t begin and end with the French. For the last leg of our botanical journey, we’ll take a look at other formal gardens around the world. Though there are nuances in layout and differences in the types of vegetation used, we can see a common thread emerge – the liberal use of hedges, shrubs, and other carefully trimmed specimens to demarcate spaces and create borders. This rigid adherence of formal gardens to cultivating a sense of order and harmony affords a certain comfort in their predictability to those who walk their perfectly manicured paths.

While this concludes our voyage for today, it by no means exhausts my stock of flora-related photos. Stay-tuned for a follow up post which – sneak peek! – will feature Mediterranean and desert landscapes, gardens with water features, and – I promise – fewer references to expeditions, journeys, and all related tropes.