Time and the Garden

By Emily Maeda

The garden exposes a different way to comprehend time. In its seasons, cyclical and returning, we experience the simultaneity of time—to sit and dwell in the garden’s past and future as it is experienced in the present. Each cycle brings its own composition of color, texture, and experience, and each plays its role in the holistic beauty of the space.

Let us imagine sitting in the winter garden. What is there to see? From all appearances the winter garden is dead. The main color our eyes perceive is brown. The plants stand in bedraggled appearance, retaining the vestiges of their leaves but with withered and drooping form. The shrubs are denuded of their leaves. The trees stand in their winter form, strong and tall. For years, maybe even centuries,  this look has been avoided in garden design. Designers have been taught to rely on evergreens and to have their garden spaces cleared of any dead plants in order to look “neat and tidy.” But in a naturalistic garden, this winter scene—the opposite of “neat and tidy”—is filled with endless beauty and interest. 

Look at the picture of this garden and notice the structural elements of the garden slowly emerge: The solidity of the rocks, the angles and arcs of the patios and paths, the tree silhouettes, the branching structure of the shrubs, the seedheads of the grasses. As you look longer, colors begin to appear—the tawny yellows of bouteloua, the red of schizachyrium, the blues of helictotrichon sempervirens, the almost black of baptisia. Then the textures become apparent: the ephemeral heads of the grasses, the polka dot seedheads of rudbeckia, the eyelashes of bouteloua, the wispy tops of hydrangea on their spindly stems. The longer we look, the more we see. The longer we wait, the more the garden reveals.

Years of growth fill in the bare places; shrubs die and fill in with new shoots. The feather reed grass from one side of the garden seeds itself to the other side. The false sunflower prolifically seeds throughout the hydrangea creating a most unlikely combination. The paths now hide behind plants, the patios are enclosed in tree branches, the walls are softened by cascading vines. Birth, growth, death and decay are woven into the story of the garden, and we as its stewards share in that experience. We participate in the toil, the work, the tending—and in its time, the garden reveals its beauty.