I am a ten-year-old boy. It is early January and I am driving in a car, in the snow, with my mother. We live in a small western town in Colorado, where the foothills of the Rocky Mountains begin to give way to the alkali flats and sage brush barrens that, in their turn, eventually break up into the red rock country and canyonlands of central and southern Utah. We are driving into our small town where there is a pet shop, and at the back of this shop there is a bank of warm and brightly lit aquariums, filled with brilliantly exotic tropical fish. It is a magical wall of color and light, like something in a movie, and I have always been fascinated by it. I now have an aquarium like this at my boyhood home. I got it for Christmas a week ago and have set it up, carefully following the directions. The water is purified and heated, and today I am going to buy my first fish. I am very excited in a way that only ten-year-old boys can be. I am a newly minted ichthyologist. Ick-thee-ologist: my ten-year-old tongue tries out the new word I have just learned from a book, thick with fantastic pictures of tropical fish, that came with the aquarium.
The Monkeys’ raucous hit “I’m a Believer” is playing on the radio and I love it. I smile. The catchy song fuses with my happiness and excitement. For the rest of my life, whenever I hear that song, this day will be called vividly to mind, and I will (briefly) be ten again. I have a garden at home too, but it is very small and now, in January, it is blasted by our harsh western winter: a patch of ground around the base of a small Russian olive tree, with a few irises and some destroyed remains of annuals I scrounged from my mom and some neighbors. Some common red geraniums and some coleus with their amazing foliage. I planted this first garden last spring and this is my first of many winters to come as a gardener. While we drive through the blanketing snow on our bright tropical errand, my mind wanders back home to that tiny patch of wintry ground and I think about each individual plant and how it is faring, what it will be like when the spring comes, and then summer, what else I can plant, how I can make this garden better, more interesting. I am lost in alternate reveries of tropical waters and winter gardens, summer gardens: the mind of a ten-year-old boy in his interior world that is simultaneously small and large, precisely defined but also ecstatically unbounded.
Half a century later, I am an international television executive, of all the improbable things, and I work for a big media company. I married and we have raised two children, now in college. I have been educated far beyond my station in life, lived and studied in Australia and Europe, worked in government and media. In the course of a long career I have met and worked with all sorts of unusual people: presidents, cabinet members, members of Congress, heads of state, ambassadors, movie stars, television personalities and some our present age’s most entrepreneurial business people. But I am still somehow that boy, pottering about in his little garden, tending his small earth. We live now in a historic, pre-revolutionary small town in southern New Jersey, in a rambling Arts & Crafts bungalow set in about an acre of mature gardens that are a joy to behold, to live in and to be the guardian of. This is the story of that garden, and what it was like and how it came to be. Inevitably too, it is obliquely the story of what happened to that ten-year-old boy, and how he came to the present day. Said another way, it is the story of how a garden grew and how a gardener grew as well, and how they formed and cared for each other.
Gardening for most people, seems to be about growing nice flowers for the house or vegetables for the kitchen table, a way of staying active perhaps or of having something to do outdoors on the weekend. They consider it a somewhat eccentric pastime, as flowers and vegetables are so much easier to come by at the grocery store, and indeed they are. Some people, who are somewhat more reflective, may perceive some of the esthetic side of gardening and intuit that it has something to do with beauty, art and design; but again, they will generally only be seeing the external result of gardening. What most people completely overlook is the most important and satisfying part of gardening: its interior aspect, that it is a way of internal living more than mere external activity, that it is in short a spiritual discipline with profound metaphysical qualities.
And so this book is about the garden interior. It is about what goes on in the heart and mind of a gardener and how gardens change, educate and raise up the gardener as much as the gardener forms, tends, and raises up the garden. It will be part memoir and part garden journal, part nostalgia and part foodie journal. It will be eclectic and idiosyncratic, and made up of many parts and pieces and ornaments, just like any good garden is. Hopefully it will also form a coherent whole and so make a kind of holistic sense too. It will be an attempt to explain those gardeners for whom the purpose of gardening, the point of it, is not the external effect – the flowers and plants and vegetables, or the general landscape and all that a passerby sees in strolling causally past the open garden – but rather what no one sees and what is far more subtle and interesting, really: and that is, what is going on inside the gardener’s head and in the gardener’s heart.
Our gardens make us more than we make them, and that is the simple, profound truth of it. The plants will come and go, we may move from garden to garden, our skill levels will change over a lifetime and the local conditions where we find ourselves planted may change radically. But the garden interior is subtly accretive and durably everlasting, its beauty and glory unseen and unknown to others, in many ways not even understood by the gardener himself. But the garden interior of each of us is real all the same, and it is gorgeous indeed, and it rejoices Him who is the gardener of all.
