Saturday's Reflections

My first memories of a garden may not technically be considered a garden. Central Park is the first memory in my mind of an experience within a park or a garden. I lived in New York City at a very young age. I was about three years old and my mother was taking me around the park in my stroller. I found a large maple leaf that I immediately assumed as my own. At one point, I accidentally dropped the leaf. My mother didn't notice and wound up running over the leaf with my stroller, crushing it and breaking it apart. Hysterical tears followed; I was so upset because that leaf was *mine*; it was my property and it was ruined.

I have to agree with Lianna as far as gardens being of nature but not natural. Wanderlust spent a good portion of chapter six outlining the history and development of the garden over the centuries, specifically about how gardens were originally executed in a way that attempted to establish control over nature. We have attempted to move beyond a more constricted and rigid interpretation of the garden, abandoning some restrictions and allowing the plant life to grow and thrive in a more free-form manner. However, the garden is still limited by human choices. Monet's garden at Giverny was beautiful, an exquisite display of a wide variety of plant life. But there is no guarantee that those plants would have grown naturally in that environment. Monet chose the plants that he wanted in his garden and cultivated them for his own landscape. He did not allow the land to lie fallow and grow as it would untouched. He tampered with the natural order of the land to create an environment that he found inspiring and appealing. This is not to say that the garden wasn't valuable; indeed, the arrangement of the foliage thriving in the garden may have been more lovely than what would have grown if nature had not been controlled. But nature was still controlled; what we observed today is not necessarily what would have occurred in nature if Monet had not stepped in and designed the garden for his own aesthetic purposes.