My home is more than a house, it is part of a true garden in the Medieval sense of the word.
From the unique entry arbor and custom-made gates to the back fence, the entire property is space set apart from the outside workaday world. Neither I nor any visitor can get in without crossing a deliberate threshold; inside is a special feeling of being myself. As it should.
Pardon the deconstruction, but as far as gardeners are concerned, a landscape is a space carved out of natural features to accommodate buildings, pavement, and other human-centric use areas, and usually includes plants for practical and aesthetic reasons.
Where horticulturists learn to propagate and grow and nurture living plants for their beauty or useful benefits, landscape architecture students are taught to use plants as objects; even the classes called “plant materials” as if they are the design equivalent of brick, stone, concrete, and furniture.
A garden, on the other hand, implies more of a protected enclosure for growing and tending plants, and a place for disconnecting those who enter it from outside cares and concerns. There is a reason we “go into” a garden; the clue is in the root word “ghordos” meaning a guarded or enclosed area; it is the root for courtyard, even the hort in horticulture. Going back farther, the ancient gher means “to enclose” and fens, the root word for defense, is where fence originates. Yard is just slang for garden.
Not all that long ago, because free-roaming livestock and wandering people were a thing, most of us had fences. When I was a kid, there were still lots along the main streets and between properties, usually picket, hairpin woven wire, and later chain link. You can still see great examples in our own governor’s mansion, and most cemeteries. Of course, as with so many other social signals, the more decorative the fence, the more prestige it conveyed.
In America the front yard fence started falling out of favor largely because of the stylistic influence of wide-open suburbia and its wall-to-wall lawns; older ones were eventually removed, new ones never put up. As we retreated into airconditioned dens and private back yards, they disappeared along with spacious front porches and the idea that our front gardens were portals into our personal private space.
It’s swinging back into style though, especially in newer upscale home developments. And it doesn’t have to be a real barrier, just the hint of security, privacy, and ownership, a social signal from just being there visually. Even a partial fence, a stand-alone gate in the hedge, an arbor delineating the front or side yard from the more private back, can be highly symbolic.
And it isn’t just a Western culture thing; when studying Eastern garden concepts in Japan I noticed that the symbol for “garden” includes a closed square. Most traditional Japanese gardens have a narrow entry and outer gate, called sotomon, that functions as a transitional space through which visitors symbolically leave the secular world of mundane cares and workaday stresses and enter the garden within. There they seek an inner calm, called roji.
It all has to do with transitioning from one space to another, betwixt and between, neither here nor there. Like passing through an airport or crossing a bridge, there is a sort of liminality (from Latin limen, “a threshold').
And this is how my garden is set up. My entry arbor and gate, my sotomon, sets me and mine apart from the world. My way of thinking is, if I don’t feel private and secure, it isn’t guarded.
Felder Rushing is a Mississippi author, columnist, and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to rushingfelder@yahoo.com.
