I find myself often
looking for ways to bridge the gap between literature and daily life, between
the vivid world of Victorian fiction and the often prosaic realities of lived
experience. One of the reasons that I am
drawn to Morris’s work is because his writings are so deeply invested in the
materiality of day-to-day living.
Accordingly, when, last summer, I became the owner of a new-to-me but
old home in the Philadelphia suburbs, I found myself turning to Morris for
inspiration and advice, particularly with regards to the garden. The home came to us with three dead shrubs,
an expanse of weed-filled dirt, and little else by way of landscaping. I have never had occasion to design, plant,
or tend a garden before (city living = potted plants), and of all the many
projects that need to be done, the one I have found perhaps most daunting is
the project of creating a garden from scratch.
Discussions of Morris’s
environmentalism have, quite rightly, most often focused on connections between
his views on socialism and his views on the relationship between humans and
their environs. Yet, I found myself increasingly
invested in the smaller, personal side of his approach to nature. What might
Morris teach me about creating my own small garden?
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Morris believed that
gardens should reflect the fact that they are cultivated and created by human
hands. In his 1879 lecture “Making the
Best of It,” he writes that a garden “should look both orderly and rich…It
should by no means imitate either the willfulness or wildness of Nature, but
should look like a thing never to be seen except near a house. It should in fact look like part of a
house.” Initially, the idea of an
“orderly” garden felt a bit controlling – why shouldn’t my garden reflect the
natural world? Yet, the more I dig and rake, the more that order seems to reflect
not control, but care and engagement.
Insofar as the natural world is our truest home, Morris suggests that we
treat it with the same thoughtfulness that we extend to our built
environment. In The Quest, he
writes that a garden should function as “clothing” for a home, a part of the
structure which it surrounds: “The garden, divided by old clipped yew hedges,
is quite unaffected and very pleasant, and looks in fact as if it were a part
of the house, yet at least the clothes of it: which I think ought to be the aim
of the layer-out of a garden.”
The idea of the garden as
an extension of a home has helped me to think about garden spaces not just as
decoration, or even just as extra living space, though of course they function
as both, but rather as a sign of the importance of cultivating and maintaining
the exterior world. In Morris’s vision,
the garden becomes a symbol of a healthy relationship between the individual
and the environment, a symbol of the environment not simply as something “over
there” (to use a phrase from Timothy Morton), set apart from the human world,
but as something that is home and that actively needs tending. In News from Nowhere, Morris envisions
the environment as a garden “where nothing is wasted and nothing is
spoilt.” As Clara points out, in the
industrial nineteenth century, the mistake humans made was “always looking upon
everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate — ‘nature,’ as people used to
call it — as one thing, and mankind as another.” In thinking of humans and nature as separate,
she argues, “it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should
try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something
outside them.” We may still often
perceive nature as something “outside” ourselves, but as we become increasingly
aware of climate change and more comfortable with notions like the
“Anthropocene,” we no longer see ourselves as being “outside” of nature. For Morris, the garden is a reminder of that
reciprocal relationship. His vision of
the environment as a garden enables us to think of our habitat as something
which requires human labor and care – we are never simply passive inhabitants
of our environs.
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With Morris in mind, I
have begun the process of “dressing” our house in our new garden. The dead shrubbery has been cleared and fresh
soil put down. It still doesn’t look
like much, but as I weed and water, I am encouraged by the prospect that if I
invest myself in the project of tending this spot of land, one day my garden might
come to look like an “orderly and rich” part of our home.
Bibliography
Jill Duchess of Hamilton,
Penny Hart, and John Simmons. The Gardens of William Morris. New York:
Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1998.
Timothy Morton. Ecology
without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2007.
