Miser and Now, Issue 6, Summer '05

Culture and Cultivation:   The role of the Garden in society

Introduction

This essay discusses the position that gardens occupy in aesthetics, visual culture and, more generally, society.   I will discuss what a garden is, the history of gardens and whether gardens can be art.   This leads to a discussion of the meaning of gardens and what kind of art the garden could be.   As a result of these discussions I argue for two claims.   When gardens are fine art they are firstly, 'relational' .   And secondly that gardening is an ethico-aesthetic activity with eco feminist aspects.

1   What is a garden?

1.1   Definitions, Examples, and Paradigms

What is a garden?   Can we give a definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions?   I think that this is unlikely.   Just consider the variety.   There are Zen gardens, kitchen gardens, allotments, English country gardens, water gardens, zoological gardens, botanical gardens, knot gardens to name a few.   Gardens can be large or small, geometric or natural, bound or unbound, wild or tamed, with flowers or without.   They can contain blossoms, trees, shrubs, flowers, lawn, rocks, sand, fountains, canals, ponds, temples, ruins, follies, statues or can contain none of these.   Thus, gardens can differ enormously in appearance and purpose.

Gardens have numerous practical and domestic benefits.   Gardens yield many products- fruit, vegetables, herbs, and flowers.   These in turn contribute to products as varied as food, dyes, medicines, building materials, textiles, alcohol, opium, shampoo and fragrances.

Gardens also attend to our aesthetic needs.   Think about the subtle patterns and textures of a traditional Japanese Kare Sansui (dry garden).   Consider the fragrances of an English country garden - they can be intoxicating.   Consider the humming of bees.   And what about beautiful birdsong? There is also the enjoyment one gains from moving one's body through the space.   Gardens often require us to move in particular ways, whether it be to jump from step to step or to climb up a viewing tower.   Gardens are full of sensory delights.

As well as providing visceral pleasure gardens also evoke thought.   Zen gardens are places for meditation retreat and thought.   They are highly formal, almost like abstract sculptures.

So, gardens differ significantly in terms of features and functions.   How does this affect any definition of gardens and their proposed status as art?

To help us in our understanding of what a garden is we could look at a dictionary definition.   The Oxford English dictionary offers as definition of 'garden':   'A piece of ground usually partly grassed and adjoining a private house, used for growing flowers, fruit, or vegetables, and as a place of recreation'.

This definition is not really of any help to us since it is too narrow.   Many of those things we ordinarily think of as gardens are not 'used for growing flowers, fruit or vegetables'.   Zen Gardens have none of the plants mentioned.   Then there are Zoological gardens which are devoted to the care and display of animals and have little or no regard for plants.   Eighteenth century English landscape gardens were often restricted to grass, trees and shrubs.   They had few flowers prior to the importation of exotics such as rhododendrons and azaleas after the plant hunting expeditions of the nineteenth century.   Moreover, many people today fail to cultivate their gardens.    Despite the area being nothing but a patch of dry earth or overgrown grass and weeds we still call them gardens.

Neither must a garden be 'a piece of ground'.   Due to land and food shortages during the Second World War people grew vegetables on the roofs of their houses and sheds.   Roof gardens occupy no ground.   There are also the Hanging Gardens of Babylon which were raised up on terraces.   And hanging baskets and windowsill boxes could be seen as kinds of mini gardens.

Nor must a garden be adjoined to a private house.   Allotment gardens are not usually joined to living space.

Mara Miller gives the following definition of a garden:   'A garden is any purposeful arrangement of natural objects (such as sand, water, plants, rocks etc.) with exposure to the sky or open air, in which the form is not fully accounted for by purely practical considerations such as convenience'.

Miller's proposed definition accommodates a large variety of gardens and is wider than the dictionary definition quoted earlier.   However, we can think of 'garden candidates' that do not satisfy Miller's definition.   For example, Miller's requirement of exposure to sky or air seems to exclude greenhouses or conservatories which can contain gardens.   And what about the gardens at the Chelsea Flower show- some of these gardens are inside.

Gardens are unique, site specific, transitory and momentary, perpetually changing and in flux.   The fact that gardens are constantly in flux may be a problem for definition - for what exactly is the garden?   How can something be identified if it is perpetually changing?

These questions lead to the question: how can something that has no final form be an artwork?   This question highlights a preference which many aesthetic positions, such as Kant's, have:   That there should be a single, final piece of object based work, which is autonomous, separate from reality, and everlasting.   Gardens as art do not satisfy these preferences.

1.2   The history of green spaces

In the eighteenth century gardening was considered a fine art alongside painting and literature.   In 1770 Horace Wolpole said 'Poetry, Painting, and Gardening, or the science of the landscape, will forever by men of taste be deemed Three Sisters, or the Three New Graces who Dress and adorn Nature'.   In the nineteenth and twentieth century gardening declined.   Gardening today is not a full-fledged sister to painting and poetry and very few artists make major stat ements in this medium.

1.3   Gardens and the development of public visual culture

Perhaps the most important eighteenth century garden was the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.   Throughout its history the London Pleasure Garden was important in the formation of public visual culture.   The Vauxhall Gardens were a place for the public to enjoy the 'socioscopic' pleasures of seeing others and being seen by them.   It was a place for social events such as fireworks, music, and art exhibitions, much like the Tivoli in Copenhagen.   Today the busy Vauxhall Cross road junction stands on the site of the legendary garden.

So, in the eighteenth century gardens were important spaces because they were places of entertainment and they also provided a social space where people could meet.

1.4   Allotments

In the nineteenth century the most important cultivated green space was the allotment.   The origin of the allotment is debatable.   Small patches of land detached from houses have existed since the beginning of agriculture and so in this loose sense allotments date back to prehistoric times.   But if we define allotments more narrowly as individual plots of land let under a collective arrangement for purposes that are partly social (and not just economic) the date can be pinpointed to 1795.   Sir Thomas Estcourt of Shipton Moyne let allotments to his estate labours.   He wanted to find ways to increase food security and also to relieve the poor rates (bettering the conditions and increasing the comforts of the poor).   But Sir Thomas Estcourt had few immediate followers.   However, by 1830 there were about one hundred allotment sites, this increased to two thousand by the mid 1840's.   By 1873 there were about two hundred and seventy three thousand plots and as many as six hundred thousand plots by 1914.

1.5   Women and gardens

There were many gardens created by women in the eighteenth century.   However, the women who were allowed to participate in gardening were usually aristocratic or at least from the upper classes, and what they were allowed to do in the garden was limited- for example women often designed the interior of grottos.

In the early twentieth century women were able to participate more fully in gardening activities.   This coincided with the emancipation and education of women.   Gertrude Jekyll is an interesting example of a female artist- gardener.   Jekyll studied as a painter, became a craftswoman and then became a gardener.   Jekyll was able to bring to gardening what she had discovered in her fine art training.   She carefully considered space, colour, form, texture and structure within the garden.   Jekyll was interested in the work of J.M.W Turner and was also strongly influenced by Michel- Eugene Chevreul's colour theory (a theory which also influenced the work of Monet and Cezanne).

The colour scheme of Gertrude Jekyll's garden at Munstead Wood exhibits her complex understanding of colour.   Her border began with white flowers amongst grey, green and silver foliage.   Next were white, pink, grey-blue and pale blue flowers. This built up to a central crescendo of yellow, orange, mahogany and scarlet.   This order is then reversed and goes back down the spectrum.   I think that Gertrude Jekyll's approach to the process of gardening and her understanding of formal elements gave gardening fine art status.   Jekyll used nature as a fine art medium, she painted with living things.   I will discuss this claim in the following section.  

2   Gardens as art

Why were gardens considered art three hundred years ago but are not considered art today?   There seems to be a fundamental conflict between the nature of what we call gardens and certain features of what we call art.

2.1   Gardens and the Institutional Theory of Art

The fact that gardens are not considered art in the twenty first century is strange because according to some current theories of art gardens ought to be considered art.   According to George Dickie's Institutional Theory a garden is a work of art as long as it is made by an artist and is an artifact which is offered as a candidate for appreciation by a member of the art world.   So, gardening as fine art is possible, or at least it is not excluded.   If a gardener saw himself or herself as part of the art world then what they presented to the art world would be art.   Gardens-as-art could be one of the art systems within the institution of the art world.   And if culture had progressed differently then gardening could well h ave been a dominant art system.

2.2   The preference for Distance and Disinterest

Perhaps gardens have been excluded from the category of art because they challenge some of the assumptions upon which much art theory is premised.   There is a preference for a single, final and unique 'work of art', a discrete object of aesthetic experience.   There is a preference for artistic or authorial control by an (human) agent.   There is a preference for immateriality or independence from physical conditions.   And there is a preference for autonomy, disinterest, distance and art which is for art's sake.   Gardens do not satisfy these preferences.

Gardens are dependent on the physical environment and are not dependent on authorial control.   They do not need gardeners to cultivate them.   Gardens are more affected by the weather, the seasons, and even the planets.   Neither do they satisfy the preference for autonomy since they are spatially and temporally continuous with the real world.   Also, gardens are not just something to look at (there is no art object as such) but also something to be involved in and surrounded by.   Neither do we look at the garden with disinterest since the garden is not removed from our purposes and our needs.   We use the garden for growing food and for recreation.

Since Kant the focus of the distinction between art and all other things has been the idea of aesthetic disinterest.   There is a kind of otherness of art from the rest of reality.   For Kant the basis for the distinction is whether we have a pragmatic interest in the existence of the object as opposed to observation or reflection or intuition.   Our interest in its existence depends on whether we need to use it to achieve some pragmatic purpose.   Thus, Kant defines a work of art by reference to its lack of a certain kind of relationship to the external world.   Its relationship to the external world and to reality is negative.   Thus, according to Kant art has no practical use.

Gardens as art cannot be understood by a theory which sees works of art as distant.   Alternatives to Kantian based theories have been developed by those wanting to promote a more interactive model of art.   'Social sculpture', 'environmental aesthetics', 'participatory aesthetics', and 'relational aesthetics', are just a few alternatives to Kantian based theories.   Later I will discuss some of these models and show that gardening as art i s an example of relational art.

2.3   Environmental aesthetics and artists' gardens

During the twentieth and the beginning of twenty-first century artists began to work with the landscape and with nature in a different way from the artist-gardeners of the eighteenth century.

During the early to mid twentieth century artists' gardens became popular.   Perhaps one of the most interesting contemporary artists' gardens was Derek Jarman's.   Jarman's garden, located in a desolate landscape, shows a combination of horticultural knowledge, a painter's eye for colour, shape, and texture, and a theatre designer's eye for drama as well as ecological conviction.   Jarman saw his garden as a garden rather than as an artwork but I think it is an example of a borderline case.   Jarman did not declare his garden art, but it was a place where he could experiment with design, colour schemes, planting schemes, and types of sculpture.   Jarman used his garden as though it was an experimental artwork.

In the mid to late twentieth century artists began to make landscape art.   In the late twentieth century environmental art (Richard Long's work), landscape art (Christo's work), and earthworks (Goldsworthy's work) became popular.   Such works explored the natural environment in similar ways that gardens did in the eighteenth century.

In the twenty first century we have seen some important 'garden artworks'.   Between 2001 and 2003 the artists Ivan and Heather Morison had an allotment near Birmingham.   Their allotment was not initially thought of as an artwork but the Morisons saw it's potential as art or as a place where art could take place.

3   Relational Aesthetics

3.1   Examples of Relational artworks

Relational art, as defined by Bourriaud, is 'a kind of art that takes its theoretical horizon the sphere of human interactions and its social contexts, rather than the affirmation of a symbiotic space that is autonomous and private'.   N55 and Superflex are artists collectives who are involved in relational aesthetics.

The Danish artists collective Superflex are currently involved in the production of 'Guarana Power', an energy soft drink that is produced in collaboration with a guarana farmer's cooperative from the Brazilian Amazon.   The farmers have organized themselves in a reaction against multinational corporations.   Such corporations have a monopoly on the purchase of the essential ingredient- guarana berries- which has driven the price of the berries down by 80%, whilst the cost of their products to the consumer has risen considerably.   The multinational corporations are only interested in profit.   Superflex take a counter economic position by purchasing the berries at a fair price.

Superflex's project emphasizes the relationship between art and people.   Guarana Power exists in reality and has an impact on the world.   It exists for the world and it gives a fair deal to people.

N55 argue that if one cannot respect the rights of other people then one cannot respect art, because art is inextricably bound up with people.   Artists must be aware of people, the rights of people and the influence of concentrations of power (for example, mass media, government, and science) and thus must be concerned with politics.   According to N55, aesthetics, first and foremost, must be an examination of possibilities to exist in as small a concentration of power as possible and to organize ourselves in a way that respects each others rights.   Such a way makes space for people and has significance to them in their daily life.

How do N55 put their ethical theory and philosophical principles into aesthetic practice?   All their works have real possibilities for use.   They make art that has the possibility of being used functionally in a social setting, and that articulates social ideals.   To give some examples; the N55 SPACEFRAME is N55's home.   This is a hexagonal building which floats in the harbour in Copenhagen.   CITY FARMING PLANT MODULES enable people to grow plants in cities.   The plant modules can be arranged in multiple formations on pa vements and in public spaces.   This challenges the idea that one has to own large pieces of land in order to grow things.

3.2   Gardens as Relational artworks

Gardens can be seen as relational artworks.   Gardens promote interaction; they involve living things - people, plants, and animals; they are concerned with humanity and they are functional.   Gardens provide an environment for experience rather than being objects of experience.   Gardens as art, show that art is not completely independent from everything else.

Gardens are a part of our daily lives.   We all come into contact with them (or at least green spaces) everyday - when we look out of our window, when we walk to the shops, when we garden ourselves.   Gardens play an important role in society.   They play an important role in the development of public visual culture, they provide a place of recreation, a place for ecological concern, and gardens enable us to exist in the world by providing us with many essential products that are necessary for life.   Gardens are a fertile ground for the exploration of social relationships, and moral, political and economic systems.

Gardens as artworks occupy an important position in the public sphere.   On my allotment I hold events.   For example, I had an 'exhibition' where I invited people to make work, do interventions, and take over the allotment space.   People made communal chairs, a portable music machine, a dance floor, wrote stories about allotments, made log piles for bugs, and a rickshaw to take people to and from the allotment.

Gardens are unique amongst the arts because only gardening involves caring for living things.   Painting, sculpture, and literature deal with inanimate objects.   The garden is spatially and temporally continuous with reality, as such it is a part of the real world as it is, or a model of the real world as we would like it to be.   The garden is a compelling vision, something quite different from what happens in painting or poetry.   The very existence of the garden seems to show that this utopia is a valid vision.

Gardening places us in the world and gives us a real experience of the world.   A garden is not a final, unique, autonomous object of beauty which is remote from us.

4   The meaning of Gardens

4.1   Environmental ecology

Gardening is essentially a concern with ecology.   When gardening, one is connected to the world and one is taking responsibility for the world; it makes a difference to the physical environment.   From gardening one flows out into the world, there are no walls and the lid is off.   Essentially one is enabling something to exist in the world and enabling oneself to exist in the world.   By growing plants, flowers, produce, and caring for the world one is connected to and engaged with something that really matters.   It is an empowering activity.

Thus, gardening is an intensely political and ethical act.   One place where we can see the direct moral implications of gardening is in the sphere of food production.   The state of food production has become a complete disaster.   Our food is no longer from the wilderness but from the factory.   By using the products that we grow ourselves in our gardens, allotments, community gardens or wherever, we are taking responsibility for our food and product consumption.   Allotments and gardens are places of moral integrity, economic stability, environmental concern and a place of communal activity.   Allotments are suffused with humanity.    In the allotment community there is a sense of togetherness, each person is connected to each other and connected to the earth.

4.2   Social ecology and gardening as an ethico-aesthetic activity

Gardens and ecology have wider social implications.   Felix Guattari puts forward a version of social ecology called 'ecosophy' which is a combination of social ecology, mental ecology and environmental ecology.   Ecosophy proposes that we should protect the Earth, society and our own rare and odd minds from the encroachments of Integrated World Capitalism.   Life on earth is threatened by the ecological disequlibrium caused by capitalism.

Guattari argues that along with the ecological disequilibrium human modes of living are progressively degenerating.   Our human relationships have been striped to their bare minimum; domestic life has been plagued by mass media consumption; family life and married life is often oppressive, having a fixed standardization of behavior; community or neighborhood relations are often non-existent.   Our relationships with others are increasingly remote and machines are taking over an increasing number of tasks that were done by humans.   We get our cash from cash machines, watch T.V, and use the Internet.

Guattari argues that in order to fully understand these issues and in order to rectify the ecological disequilibrium we must not look at environmental issues from a purely technocratic perspective but from an 'ethico-political' perspective.   We need to look at the relationships between the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity.   It is the ways in which we live on the planet that are important.   Adopting social ecosophy will involve a reinvention of the way in which we live as individuals, as couples or in the family, in an urban context, at work and so on.

I think that gardening is one way of addressing and rebalancing the disequilibrium.   Gardening as art can be understood as an ethico- aesthetic discipline.   This involves an examination of the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, ecology, politics, individual subjectivity and intersubjectivity.   Gardening provides a remedy to the degradation suffered by the environment and by society.   It is concerned with the world and the people in the world.   Gardens provide a model of how we should live; a model of social, environmental and economic stability and harmony.   They are a microcosm of the macrocosm.

4.3   Gardening and eco-feminism

As well as seeing 'gardening as art' as a relational and an ethico- aesthetic activity I also see it as an eco- feminist activity.

Ecofeminisim is a version of political ecology.   Ecofeminism is the position that there are important links between how one behaves towards an oppressed gender group, race group or class group and how one treats the natural environment.   In patriarchal societies, culture and reason have been perceived as male attributes in opposition to the female attributes of nature and emotion.   Within this reason/nature dualism, reason is deemed superior.   Historically nature has been deemed inferior and has been given negative cultural value.

Correspondingly the woman nature connection has been negative.   For example 'Woman is a violent and uncontrolled animal' (Canto).   'A necessary object, woman, who is needed to preserve the species to provide food and drink' (Aquinas).   'However man rules in science and in art/ The sphere of woman's glories is the heart' (Moore).   Women have been seen as less than human.

One essential feature of ecological feminist positions is that it gives a positive value to the connection of women with nature.   Ecological feminists consciously position themselves with nature and see this as a good thing.

Gardens have always played an important role in the lives of women.   Gardens have been perceived differently by the genders.   The garden has functioned as a physical and mental space in which women have attempted to assert their control, define their identity, struggle with sexual feelings, and embrace or escape the world.

Conclusion

I have argued that gardens are a place where culture and cultivation can merge, a place where different 'cultures' can co- exist.   I have explored the relationship between horticulture and visual culture throughout history and have shown that gardens occupy an important position within aesthetics and in society.   I have shown that gardens can be art and I have argued that when gardens are art they are fundamentally relational and ethico-aesthetic.

Bibliography:

Ashby, Arthur W, Allotments and Small Holdings in Oxfordshire (Oxford University Press, 1917)

Bennett, Sue, Five Centuries of Women and Gardens (National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2000)

Bourraud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics (Les Presses du reel, 2002)

Crouch, David and Ward, Colin, The Allotment.   Its landscape and culture (Five Leaves Publications, Nottingham, 1997)

Dickie, George, Art and Value ( Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001)

Guattari, Felix, The Three Ecologies (The Athlone Press, 2000)

Miller, Mara, The Garden as an Art (State University of New York Press, 1993)

N55, N55 Book , (Pork Salad Press and N55, 2003)

Parker, Martin, Utopia and Organization (Blackwell Publishing, 2002)

Ross, Stephanie, Ch 8 Gardens, earthworks and environmental art, 'Landscape,Natural Beauty and the Arts, ed. Salim Kernal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Ross, Stephanie, What Gardens Mean (The University of Chicago Press, 1998)

Warren, Karen J, Ecofeminism-woman, culture, nature , Ch 3 Taking Empirical Data Seriously- An ecofeminist philosophical perspective (Indiana University Press, 1997)

Whiten, Faith and Geoff, The Chelsea Flower Show (Cassell Publishers Limited, [1982], 1988)

Nicolas Borriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Les Presses du reel, 2002)

Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (The Athlone Press, 2000)

Indeed the Victorians treasured the song of their favourite birds (blackbirds were a particular favourite) so much that when they emigrated they took wild birds with them.   They thought they would miss the blackbird's repertoire.

Mara Miller, The Garden as an Art (State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 15

Figures and dates taken from:   David Crouch and Colin Ward, The Allotment.   Its Landscape and Culture, (Five Leaves Publications, Nottingham, 1997)

Sue Bennett, Five Centuries of Women and Gardens (National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2000), p. 114

Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, (The Athlone Press, 2000)