The Depths of a Mature Garden

Jul. 9, 2012 By Susan Barsy in Travels Tags: amusements, appreciation, beauty, Dunn Gardens, Olmsted Brothers, parks and gardens, Seattle, snaps 4 Comments

During our visit to Seattle last week, my friend Wendy offered to take us to Dunn Gardens, a little-known place in the Broadview neighborhood northeast of downtown. The gardens, which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, were designed for the Dunn family in the 1910s. The landscape architecture firm Olmsted Brothers designed the grounds and selected all the original plants. Click on pictures to enlarge.

The gardens occupy a residential compound of some 10 acres, surrounding a main house and two other dwellings. The land offers a view of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains, which the growth of vegetation is gradually obscuring. The gardens were designed around many second-growth firs standing on the property at the time of its purchase. The massive trees lend the garden an atmosphere of seclusion and repose.

While still faithful to their original design, the gardens have evolved under the stewardship of three generations. Some plants and plantings have been added, while others have been gradually allowed to fade away, as the owners have observed plants’ changing characteristics and needs.

Several thousand plant species, many in a state of perfect maturity, contributed to a varied woodland tapestry, whose patterns and textures were too complex to apprehend on a single visit. On this afternoon, we marveled at magnificent stands of Himalayan lilies foregrounded by wisteria and boughs of pink dogwood. Starbursts of alium punctuated beds layered with grasses, sedum, and small ruby-colored lilies. The woods teemed with ferns, oxalis, hellebore, and solomon seal.

Rare and one-of-a-kind rhododendrons bred by Edward Dunn studded the forest. There were many amazing plants, but they were harmoniously incorporated into a naturalistic design.

Even the most formal parts of the grounds, like this one formed around a rectangular lawn, had an appealingly off-hand quality. The stone stairs leading out of it were one of my favorite things.

The established structure of the place supported a riot of plant life that was visually intoxicating. A Chicagoan could only envy the lushness and vitality of it all,

the plants growing upon plants,

the petals and leaves.

A superabundance of plants dripping from every ledge,

and crowding every crevice.

The Forest in Spring

Apr. 11, 2012 By Susan Barsy in Travels Tags: amusements, Berrien County, blue-eyed mary, Cass County (MI), forests, nature, snaps, spring flowers, trillium 1 Comment

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If we can, my husband and I scoot out to Michigan each spring to see the woodlands in flower. The numerous nature preserves in Berrien County and neighboring Cass County are surprisingly unvisited, yet their display of blooms and foliage is spectacular. These pictures are from our various springtime visits.

The West in Winter

Feb. 24, 2012 By Susan Barsy in Travels Tags: agriculture, Empire Builder, land use, snaps, The West, trains 2 Comments

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A couple years ago, Bob and I took a train to Seattle in the winter. It was a couple of really beautiful days. I’ve already written about how much I enjoy getting out of the city and seeing the countryside, even the unspectacular parts. Everything always looks so much more interesting and often poignant from the train, perhaps because every sight is so fleeting and because you are cut off from it in so many ways. There is a remove, there is silence, there is no hope of any further understanding or engagement.

Perhaps this feeling is more intense when traveling across the relatively uninhabited Upper Plains, as we were. The expanses were so great, and there were very few distinctive topographical features. So the great beauty and subtlety of the landscape, the wonderful repetition of a few elements and their recombination in endlessly varying tableaux, were all the the more striking. The irregularities of the land, the distinctiveness of each collection of rusting junk clustered around the homesteads, the geometry of the fields and farms . . . entrancing. When I looked at my pictures when I got home, I was glad that they captured the pastels and the grainy nubbles of the earth covered with the fading winter light and a skiff of snow.

Back Where It All Began

Feb. 10, 2012 By Susan Barsy in Autobiographical, Travels Tags: Boston, citizenship, Colonial Era, education, Freedom Trail, historical understanding, political engagement, reading 3 Comments

Boston is the city where it all began, in a way. I don’t mean the Revolution or anything; it’s just that Boston was the scene of my earliest encounters with history. When I go back there, I recall how, when I was eight, my parents used to drag me around the Freedom Trail.

I was too young to appreciate anything, yet still I remember the rough and cobbled pavements, the graveyards, the starchy white steepled churches, traipsing the windy narrow streets of Beacon Hill. We went to Plymouth Plantation one Thanksgiving, where we saw what looked like colonists dipping candles and sawing logs. To a child, the Mayflower, whose replica we toured, looked quite large—wildly large—instead of vulnerable and tiny. We went to the old iron works at Saugus one time, where the bellows fanned a fierce fire to help make iron. These sights were all just mysteries then: I had no use to make of what I was seeing. I was happy enough to see a cranberry bog and to listen when told that a person falling into the bog would be preserved for a long while, or that cranberries were a good crop to raise because they were happy even when the weather turned frosty.

One day: it was a school holiday, my parents drove us to Lexington, where we saw men battling with long guns on the common. We went to the houses around the square, where my mother read to me of how the wounded had dragged themselves to these dwellings, where they died, or where women gave them heroic treatment and saved them. The air was cold as we traipsed along the road the British took, the road along which the clever revolutionaries were hiding.

Those Boston memories remained a mish-mash, just a part of the history of my own family, of my own childhood, of something inconclusive about my life as a girl.

It was many years before I developed any interest in history. Eighth grade required history; I found it boring. I did read a lot historical biographies—about Crispus Attucks and Betsy Ross, and people like Edison, who invented things. I liked the covers of these books, which were all part of a juvenile series that stretched out invitingly on the bottom shelf of the children’s section in the public library.

I was in my mid-twenties before I grasped what history was good for. I realized that history was a structure for understanding the world that we see. Knowing history partly unlocked everyday mysteries, like racial conflict or inequality, or who ended up with valuable property. Everything in the newspaper and in government made more sense with a back story.

There was a time, a few years back, when I commuted on the El every day. I would get on the train in Ravenswood Manor and, on the long ride downtown, had plenty of time to notice what people were reading. For the first time, I became conscious of the popular thirst for history. To discover so many tired commuters plowing through histories in their spare time amazed me. In the corner would be a young man hunched over a 900-page book about a Civil War battle. Hanging on the strap, a fashionably dressed young woman happily engrossed in Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea. Once, I was on the Red Line underground when I noticed a man in front of me reading a Library of America volume. He was many pages into it, and, when we were stopped, I asked what it was. He showed me the cover: Henry Adams’ History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, an acclaimed but seldom-read work originally published circa 1890 in nine volumes. The man told me, with evident emotion, that he was sad to be finishing. It had been that outstanding.

Historians place great importance on being right, but readers value the structure of stories. History’s gift to us is the freedom to imagine the fragmentary scenes of our own lives in relation to larger narratives of society and country. These stories are many, their threads connecting us to the ship, the bellows, the shots, the common.

Tracking the American

Feb. 7, 2012 By Susan Barsy in Travels Tags: Americanness, amusements, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, museums, snaps 2 Comments

I’ve been in Boston, attending the opera premiere of a friend and museum-hopping. The timing was good, because I was able to visit the newly reopened Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum as well as the newish ‘Americas’ wing at the Museum of Fine Arts.

The American galleries at the MFA gave me a lot to ponder and even more to admire. I’d been wanting to see them ever since reading this review by Holland Cotter. The galleries themselves are sumptuous: beautifully colored, . . .

. . . some even brocaded.

They showcase one of the world’s strongest collections of American art–some four stories of it–, which has been beautifully arranged and curated.

Wandering the galleries is like skimming the entire span of our history, from Puritans to Pollock, and back centuries more. The extent and variety of the MFA’s holdings and the space now devoted to them avoids the conflation of eras so common to American exhibits in many museums. One has the sense of proceeding through distinct periods of time, each with its own styles and cultural preoccupations. The displays thoughtfully integrate a wide variety of objects–including architectural elements (such as house timbers), furnishings (such as Puritan dressers), and even ships’ models–which help to convey the openness and cosmopolitanism that have been part of the American aesthetic from an early time.

Much has been made of the way the Americas wing incorporates into its narrative artifacts from indigenous Latin and North American peoples. Yet what surprised me was how quickly, in a chronological viewing of the galleries, the impression of cultural diversity slips away. Once beyond the Revolutionary-era galleries, with their obligatory nod to rebellion, any hint of conflict or painful heterogeneity evaporates. The story remaining is the triumphal cultural progress of upper-class New England, a class eagerly absorbing, modifying, and mirroring the cultural practices of continental Europe, England, and Asia. Except for a few rooms of folk art, the lives of other Americans–whether black, red, or working-class white–are pretty much missing.

Museums have what their benefactors give them, so in that sense we can’t fault the Boston museum. But I wondered whether its holdings were really so lacking in any material depicting the lives of ordinary people. Many museums use smaller works on paper to round out grand canvases that skew social reality. Boston, in the nineteenth century particularly, was a center of social reform, political radicalism, and industrial innovation, where experience was reflected not just in sculpture and painting but in such new media as lithography and photography. Including more such works would have better represented the output of American artists and the totality of subjects that drew their concern. Doing so could only enhance the appeal of the Americas wing.

Gallery: The Passing Year

Dec. 26, 2011 By Susan Barsy in Travels Tags: agriculture, California Zephyr, land use, resources, snaps, The West, trains 3 Comments

A few photographs to go with the essay.

The Passing Year

Dec. 25, 2011 By Susan Barsy in Travels Tags: California Zephyr, land use, resource scarcity, resources, snaps, The West, trains 6 Comments

Can it be? Are we there already? Suddenly it’s Christmas and we’re gliding helplessly toward January. 2011 is nearly past, its events crystallizing into memories. No longer anything to be experienced, only sensations and impressions to be recalled. The end of the year, my birthday (which is on Christmas), and the holidays themselves, with their connotations of hope and new beginnings, invite retrospection, a consideration of where we’ve been and where we might be going. Yet I don’t feel like writing anything political today. The sort of analysis and judgment that comes so naturally to me seems somewhat out of place on this, my birthday. How much better to dwell on the more irreducible memories of a recent journey.

I love getting out to see the countryside. This fall, my husband and I took a couple of overland journeys, traveling out into the West by rail and car. Mid-October found us boarding the California Zephyr, an amazing train that takes you across the Plains and Rockies, then down toward San Francisco via the Sierra Nevada and the Sacramento River Valley. The passengers’ excitement was palpable, their reserve broken down in the face of scenery so spectacular and varied. Strangers addressed one another in tones of excited exclamation, in tones that were hushed and confiding. People hurried to breakfast early, then rushed to take up posts in the observation car, their eyes trained out the windows, cameras at the ready. The land was like a drug we couldn’t get enough of: it was vast, it was awesome, it was enthralling, overwhelming. It was great, for a change, to feel proud and happy. “The United States are endless; they’re endless!” I heard an Englishwoman saying.

Yet the truth is far more complicated. To ourselves, the United States are a half-known place, some parts thriving and well-cultivated; others poor, undeveloped, ill-used; still others useless, exhausted, polluted, sterile. The frequent sight of worn-out factories and public buildings, collapsing farmsteads, wildlife in flight, and rural junkyards full of rusting machinery bespeak the exhaustion of an era and an earlier mode of living.

Back when it was known as the New World, there was no predicting what kind of place this would become. The arrivistes who came here across the centuries from Asia and Europe had wildly differing hopes, conceptions, and ideas. They were variously hunters, explorers, traders, colonists, and missionaries. Many of their odysseys were ephemeral or concluded disastrously. In the end, the people who enjoyed the most success were those able to enter into a direct relationship with the place, who got past their own fixed ideas and entered into a creative relationship with their surroundings.

Foreigners who came here with pre-conceived goals—whether it was to trap fur, find gold, or convert “natives” to Christianity—had a limited use for the place and tended greatly to undervalue its potentialities. The benefits of their forays were miniscule compared to those of the Indians who worked out an elaborate rapprochement with the land, or the Virginians who later learned the ins and outs of tobacco cultivation from the Indians. Lacking access to the most desirable oceanfront land, mid-Atlantic settlers rejoiced to have discovered what they thought of as “the best poor man’s land” in Pennsylvania. These were the people who tended to stay: the people who saw value where others couldn’t. In time, their ingenious interaction with the land and its materials gave rise to new foods, new habits, new industries, new livings.

Two hundred years later, much of the US still has a half-settled, half-developed, incipient character. The proper uses of the land are still being tried. With each decade, the population continues to redistribute itself, providing a register of Americans’ shifting perceptions of geographic advantage and opportunity. We are still working out how the nation’s natural endowments can best support our life as a people. Even in the face of globalism, however, the land beneath our feet remains the basis of security, prosperity, and innovation. The nation’s resources, varied and vast but not limitless, require careful stewardship and cultivation. Politically, the proper use of this great inheritance remains a central and complex but under-explored theme.

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