Perennial Wisdom

My writing begins with a cut – a thought, an experience, an image, a sentence that brings blood to the surface of my skin, whether in pain as a wound or in joy as a rush of red. It seems these days I am finding the knife as much out of the garden as in it. And so I am thinking of changing the title of my newsletter from “Out in the Garden” to “Perennial Wisdom,” preserving the “brand” but somewhat changing the focus.

I realize as well that I need to re-design my website since I am no longer primarily in the business of providing help with garden design and installation. A re-design of the website and re-naming of the newsletter would seem logical twin tasks.

I would be very much interested in getting feedback from my wonderful readers as to this possible change of title and direction.  I always appreciate the responses I get to my postings and I am inspired by the connection I have with you.  And so at the beginning of this New Year I look forward to hearing from you and to possibly making some changes.  Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy “Site Visit.”  It was written in response to a class I took a few years ago at the Berkshire Botanical Garden. It is a good example of what being out in the garden has taught me.
Site Visit

I am standing in the back yard of one of the sites on Walter Cudhohufsky’s “Traveling Design Clinic.”  Ten of us have enrolled in this class and we have been on the road visiting sites in need of help since 9 o’clock.  Now it is afternoon on this beautiful September day but most of us are not enjoying the weather.  The scene is unimpressive at best, boring and dreary at worst.  A large deck projects out over a gravel patch and looks down a grass slope to scrub brush.  The two sides of the yard are lined with blue spruces which, from my perspective, are about sixteen blue spruces too many.

We shuffle, scrunch, and twist as Walter keeps pressing his point: “We are not leaving this site until you can find the positives.  In your professional life, if you can’t find the positives, don’t take the job.  But please note, there are always plenty of positives.  You just need to keep looking.”  We look again, dig deeper (those blue spruces create a great privacy screen, the scrub brush provides habitat for wildlife) and finally come up with a list that satisfies him.  But I am thinking, Finding the positives that must be there would be a good way to approach the backyard of my life.

At the first site we visited, I got a hint about the direction this class would take.

Walter prepped us this way: “First impressions are crucial and you only get them once.”  When we arrived at the site, we took a few minutes to jot down our initial impressions, but instead of asking us to share these notes, Walter asked us to tell him what we saw on the site.

“Effective design starts with a response to existing conditions,” he said, “so the first thing you have to do is see what is there.”

Hands flew up as everyone rushed to share what they saw, thinking, Wow, this is easy, why was I so nervous.

“I see a large maple that looks to be diseased.” “I see a fence that seems to have no point to it.” “The driveway comes too close to the house.” “There is a problem of proportion between barn and house.”  Then a smart one, anticipating the later lesson about positives, offered, somewhat weakly, “I like the way the path leads to the front door.”

But Walter was shaking his head and not just because of the negatives.

“I want description, not judgment,” he said.  “If you start with judgment – the fence has no point, the tree is diseased, the driveway’s too close, the path is nice – you will rush to design before you even know what you have to work with.  You will want those value-laden adjectives at some point in the process, but not now.”

And then he delivered my favorite line of the day: “Preconceived notions are the enemy of good solutions.”

While the rest of the class struggled to supply him with observations stripped of judgment – “three white pines in a clump,” “clapboard house with wrap around porch,” “side lawn slopes down to stream” – I began to wonder if things might not go better in my life if I made an “inventory of the actual” before coming to judgments and designing solutions.

I came back from my reverie to hear Walter talking about feelings.  He was asking us to think about how the space made us feel.  He directed us back to our first impressions as a source of vital information and told us that after we made our inventory of what is there we needed to make a catalogue of the feelings the site inspired in us.

“Feelings are crucial,” he announced. “They drive the whole process, they keep it vital and local.  If the driveway makes you anxious because it is too close to the house, honor this feeling and see where it takes you. Chances are it makes your clients anxious too.”

By the end of the first site visit my head was churning and there were four more sites to visit.  By the end of the day I was exhausted from trying to absorb the lessons: See what is there. Maximize the positive. Honor your feelings. Use a level 2 solution for a level 2 problem; use a level 5 solution for a level 5 problem. Good design means providing generous landings.

As we leave the last site, it is clear that Walter could go on but he knows we can’t.  I head to my car to drive home when someone shouts: “Preconceived notions are the enemy of good solutions.”  We all do a high five in the air and swear that we will return for the sequel in two weeks. But I am thinking I have learned enough.

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