INTRODUCTION
Gardens are about time.
A cliché's banality can mask
intricate truths.
Not all gardens are about time, but many
are, and any garden implicates time. And as gardens have
a unique capacity to reveal time, so time, in various ways,
reveals gardens. This book centers on that reciprocity.
Time and gardens are both rooted in our
apprehension of natural phenomena and processes, phenomena and
processes we affect but rarely completely control. Yet time and
garden are also human abstractions, human inventions culturally
and geographically varied in expression and experience.
Diverse and multifarious entwinements overlay fundamental
commonalties.
Human experience brings time and garden
together and, while many different voices of experience are
contained herein, of course my own dominates. Like many
others I came to gardens as I approached middle-age.
Earlier I was educated and worked as an artist. I
made post-minimalist sculptures that centered on water's
simultaneous temporal and non-temporal aspects and did drawings
that portrayed the varieties of water's experience and
representation. Perhaps I was originally drawn to gardens
because they flesh out the polarities and variations my
sculptures more starkly and diagrammatically suggested, and, as
my drawings dealt with water's varied aspects, so here I deal
with the varieties of time and gardens' meshing.
I have been intrigued, captivated and at
times nonplused by gardens' simultaneous art and artlessness,
conservatism and radicalism, dynamism and stasis. Gardens
are a beloved if at times bewildering adopted country for me,
something of the immigrant who, in writing of his new land
strains and tests that country's language. The mother
tongue is never completely forgotten. It is not to be
ignored; it makes itself heard in assumptions, idioms, and
comparisons - however curious.
Gardens have the potential, like all good
art, to focus our attention. But as not all gardens are
about time, so not all gardens are art. Indeed of all art
forms maybe gardens most blur distinctions between art and
non-art, and those distinctions further shift and blur with
place and time and people. While I am not concerned here
with what makes some gardens art and others not, I begin with
the assumption that art and writings about art, in particular
as pertaining to time, can shed light on gardens. This even
though the garden may be most illumined by its differences, by
that which is inapplicable and incomparable to another art form
or work more than by that which is applicable and closely
comparable. Certainly my reason for taking this tack is
in part personal. But if one of the tasks of Aesthetics
is to investigate and articulate that which is integral and
unique to an art form, a complimentary one is to examine the
how and why of the arts similarities and differences.
Moreover, this first assumption dovetails with three
others: that examining time and gardens in this way might in
turn reflect and illumine time's relation to other arts; that
Art is in large part a cultural discourse that transcends any
one medium; and that to consciously make a garden that is about
time is to make a work of art.
Despite my long preoccupation with time I
do not like certain of its aspects- or thinking about them.
I fret over time . . . about how and what it seems to
render - simultaneously - possible and impossible.
However, considered more broadly, it attracts me.
If time is an illusion surely it is a fundamental one.
As has been written "Time is a conception to measure
eternity".
To consider time is to also consider
timelessness, that which is held as well as that which is
unholdable, that which is measured and which is immeasurable.
Gardens are concrete as well as abstract expressions of
our graspings and our grasping's limitations. They are small,
temporary, definable, sometimes bold, human constructs in a
field of indefinable, vibrant, gargantuan and fragile Nature.
They are stored, distilled, static, visual images and
muscular, sensorial, kinesthetic unfoldment in the here and
now.
Gardens ground time. In gardens time
is manifest, palpable, essential but playful. Uniquely, gardens
allow us to glimpse time's density along with its flutterings,
to catch human breath and human dance, to discern Nature's
palpitations as well as its running up and sending down.
To conceive of gardens without thinking of
time is to deny basic truths. To think about gardens
together with time is to almost touch time.
