A PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION OF PLAZ METAXU · 2020. 8. 31. · and the puer aeternus, made a deep impression on IW On Psyche's Lawn Text v3.indd 13 01/04/2020 08:48. 62 ON PSYCHE’S LAWN

ON PSYCHE’S LAWN: THE GARDENS AT PLAZ METAXU © Pimpernel Press Limited 2020

Text © Alasdair Forbes 2020For copyright in the illustrations see page 304.

Alasdair Forbes has asserted his right to be identifi edas the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988 (UK).

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence permitting

restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issuedby the Copyright Licensing Agency, Shackleton House,

4 Battlebridge Lane, London SE1 2HX.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978–1-910258–81–1

Designed by DalrympleTypeset in Nicole Dotin’s Elena type

Printed and bound in China by C&C Offset Printing Company Limited

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Front jacket: View east over the main lawn from the Orexis Mount to Imbros.

Back jacket:Kedalion: an early morning contre-jour effect.

Acer x freemannii ‘Autumn Blaze’ is in full sunlight, while Fraxinus‘Raywood’ and Verbena bonariensis remain in the shade.

Endpapers:Plan of Plaz Metaxu by Denise Outlaw and Robert Dalrymple.

Half-title page:The lake, Narcissus, frozen under a mantle of snow.

Opposite title page:March sunset over the lake. The upright tree refl ected

in the water is the Ananke oak.

Page 6:Orexis from the North Wood,

facing south-west.

IW On Psyche's Lawn Text v3.indd 4 01/04/2020 08:48

Acknowledgements · 7

A Physical Description of Plaz Metaxu · 8

1 · Plaz Metaxu and its Arrière-Pays10

PRELUDETo a Tour of the Garden · 20

2 · Arrival at Iolkos22

3 · Artemis in front of the House30

4 · The Distress RetortAuxo, Hermes, Pasiphaë · 44

5 · The Axial GardenPothos, Mnemosyne, Herse, The Bolt, Kairos, Orexis, Ananke, Hesperos · 72

IntermezzoBy Way of a Waterfall · 108

6 · Towards a Poetics of the LawnEpidauros, Ithaka, Imbros, Kairos · 110

7 · Towards a Poetics of the Garden LakeNarcissus · 132

8 · The South GardenHades, Eleusis, Ariadne, Lerna, Rhodos · 152

IntercessionBy Way of a Caesura · 184

9 · The North WoodAlsos, Philyra, Corenzuela · 192

10 · The Pastoral LoopEos, Pan, Hesperos, Themis, Kedalion · 208

Appendix Chronology of the Garden’s Development · 238

Notes and References · 251

Bibliography · 284

Index · 290

Picture Credits · 304


1 View north-west across the valley and garden from the ‘Dragon’s Teeth’ in Eos.


9

A PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION OF PLAZ METAXU

PLAZ METAXU IS A GARDEN IN DEVON, IN THE South-West of England, that has been created since 1992. It occupies a west-facing valley, and extends over 32 acres, nearly half of which is a pastoral landscape grazed by sheep. A stream fl ows east–west through the valley, entering the garden in the orchard, then taking the form of a canal in front of the house, where it is fl anked by a gently terraced lawn. Behind the house, there is a series of enclosed gardens – a walled garden and two courtyards that were formerly the farmyards. The main garden unfolds to the west of the house and is centred on the lake, made in 1994. The extensive lawns around the lake are fringed by areas of woodland, hedged enclosures and sheltered walks, themselves linking adjacent groves. Below the dam of the lake, a last formal area is bounded by a ha-ha. The stream, which is diverted around the lake in the main garden, here returns to its original course before fl owing on down the centre of the valley to a fi nal pond with a cascade. While open to the west, and to the sky, the valley, from within the garden, is largely self-contained. Extensive panoramas do, however, occur, from either side of the valley, on the high walk that has been landscaped within the encircling pastures. This expansiveness adds an important dimension to the garden, as does the reciprocity of contact (which is vital) between the garden and its surrounding fi eldscape.

Garden PlanA plan of the garden can be seen on the endpapersat the front and back of this book.

AREAS of the garden are identifi ed by the NUMBERS 1–39.

FEATURES within the garden areas are identifi ed by the LETTERS A–U.

These NUMBERS and LETTERS are shown in square brackets throughout the text, thus: [00].


12 ON PSYCHE’S L AWN

But I never wanted the visual inheritance of the garden to crowd out its ‘poetic courage’;2 I knew that a garden should be responsible to paradise, but I wanted, like the pastoral elegists, to ‘place sorrow’ there as well.3 I valued the recreational garden, but not as much as I valued Psyche (or the soul). What could she bring to the garden, I wondered? I was haunted at the threshold (of the site, as well as of my undertaking) by a sentence I had read about her in Julia Kristeva’s book Black Sun: ‘without a bent for melancholia, there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play.’4 Too many gardens I instinctively realized essentially functioned like that: as seamless, recreational attempts on para-dise, with no acknowledgement of Psyche – or the dark, refl exive gap she introduces into experience – which is where we can pause to remember what space means to us, in a state of humble gratitude as well as troubled exile, after the fi at of Expulsion. I use a biblical reference only because the para-digm of Eden is still the dominant one in garden culture in the West. But Gethsemane, as well as Eden, was a garden. Why, then, I wondered, unlike the other arts, do gardens so seldom acknowledge that?5

Psyche is present often in the garden (fig. 3) [G];6 one of many such mythic figures or gods who have become domiciled at Plaz Metaxu, and are borrowed, almost always, from the Greek pan-theon. Many areas of the garden are named after, and dedicated to, such fi gures. This may be an un-familiar enough circumstance today to require an explanation. Of course, reference to gods (not nec-essarily of the ‘classical’ variety) was widespread, and even usual, in gardens before the nineteenth century. Today, with a few notable exceptions, such as Finlay’s reinvention of a ‘hyperborean’ Apollo at Little Sparta, such references have descended into kitsch.7 Yet ‘modern’ Western culture is not as immune to taking the afterlife of the gods seriously as the ethos of contemporary garden-ing leads us to suppose. We have only to think of Nietzsche’s use of Dionysos and Apollo,8 or Freud’s use of Narcissus, Eros, Thanatos and Oedipus,9 as key determinants of cultural behaviour, to realize how mistaken it is to suppose the gods are dead. I am not a classicist. My familiarity with the Greek gods, in particular, does, of course, derive in part from the texts, say, of Homer, Euripides and Ovid

(in translation), but it is also mediated through other channels: Renaissance art and Poussin, for example, or the poetry of Hölderlin (for Chiron and Mnemosyne, say)10 and Rilke (Orpheus).11 An abid-ing inspiration has also been archetypal psycho-logy, especially the work of James Hillman, which not only reads the myths into our lived experience today with moving acumen and insight, but bravely holds out (against scientifi c orthodoxies) for a ‘poetic basis of mind’, as well as privileging a polytheistic temper.12

Archetypal psychology is closer to art than it is to science in its respect for the imagination. It accords high status to the realm of the ‘imaginal’

3 The Notsegel (or Alarm Sail), representing Psyche,at the side of the lake. May morning sunrise.


PL AZ METAXU AND ITS ARRIÈRE-PAYS 13

and even, remarkably, thinks with images whenever it can, so helping to heal the rift in our psyches between intuitive and rational ways of understand-ing the world, that is also the split between a polar-izing ‘spirit’ and a more conciliatory ‘soul’.13 My fi rst encounter with archetypal psychology (many years before I started work on the garden) came through the volume Puer Papers, which included Hillman’s essay ‘Peaks and Vales’, in which he drew out the distinction between a puer spirit (puer is the Latin word for boy, and the puer here discussed is the puer aeternus or ‘eternal youth’) that identifi es – indispensably, but vainly – with the advantages of height, and the lowlier, more receptive perspective

of Psyche, or soul, whose characteristic dwelling- place is the valley.14 Perhaps starting with my studies on landscape painting (especially the work of Caspar David Friedrich),15 I had noticed how important what I then called the ‘appeal to space’ had become for me in my life, in complement to, or distinction from, the appeal to a god, or to another person. The confirmation that Hillman’s essay gave me that spatial phenomena such as valleys or mountain tops were indeed consonant with, and images for, archetypal psychological drives or prompts, and that these prompts could themselves be attributed to mythic characters such as Psyche and the puer aeternus, made a deep impression on



reminds us of the due entitlement of beauty – as when it addresses the deepest apprehensions of the soul. This is what is meant here by looking ‘justly’: that we do not look exclusively with the eyes of the living, but also in sympathy with the ‘intent gaze’ of the dead. (The preceding line in Trakl’s poem reads: O wie ernst ist der Antlitz der teueren Toten; ‘O how intent is the gaze of those who died and were dear to us.’) In other words, like Hermes, beauty does not want us to decide there is any one dimension where we belong (either here with the living or there with the dead): instead, the sublime poise of its attentiveness (perhaps the best translation of Trakl’s Gerechtigkeit) makes us momentarily open to both. The serenity of beauty is ineffably poignant, and often less disposed to tranquil relaxation than it is to the ‘magic darkness in the bright sunlight’.

The second inscription is from García Lorca. It is a slightly modifi ed version of the parenthetical subtitle to the little poem Suicidio (‘Suicide’), and reads Quizás fue por no saberse la geometría (‘Perhaps it happened because he did not know his geometry’)65 (fi g. 43).

In this case, the desired poise proved unobtain-able, though the tragic outcome is not without a hint of Hermetic puzzlement and humour. And acceptance, too. We are told that the inscription at the doorway to Plato’s Academy read: ‘Let no one Ignorant of Geometry enter.’66 The geometries at play in Hermes’ courtyard are of a subtler and more forgiving sort than Plato’s, and deprecate the rigid binarism that may have trapped the young apprentice mathematician in Lorca’s poem. Hermes excels at unorthodox problem-solving, and is quite unafraid of being thought disreputa-ble67 (one of his epithets describes him as being the ‘lover of nudity and deceit’,68 and he numbers Priapus and Herm aphroditus, as well as Pan, among his children!). Perhaps it is not beyond his ingenuity to rescue the doomed boy, even posthu-mously? Or at least to alter the way in which we read death and life as implacably opposed? Both inscriptions, in their different ways, therefore cele brate Hermes’ profound perspectivism, and the scope for redemption implicit in his liminal way of reading the world. He sets the garden out on its search for asymmetrical balances, invisible pivots and counter-normative accommodations.

In the Hellenistic period, Hermes’ career as an esoteric Magus began. He became known as Hermes Trismegistus, and was often associated with the Egyptian god Thoth.69 This was how he was known to the alchemists. I made two attempts to include Hermes the magician in the courtyard. The fi rst of these was in the right arm of the T, a rather more confi ned area than the left arm (with the Labyrinth in it). To commemorate the importance of the number three to Hermes (Trismegistus means ‘thrice greatest’) I decided to plant six standard hollies (Ilex ‘J.C. van Tol’) in the shape of a triangle (fi g. 38). All of the planting in the courtyard was problematic: the ground was extremely compacted, and had to be dug out with a mini digger. Where we made beds at the foot of the walls, we broke no fewer than 19 pipes, including the one carrying the water mains, which entered the courtyard from under one of the barns! The pits dug for plants in the centre of the courtyard created other problems. There were eight of these in all: the six for the hollies, and two others, one for a pine (Pinus sylvestris ‘Chantry Blue’) and one for an arbutus (A. unedo f. rubra). The problem was that the pits, once fi lled with good soil, acted as sumps: the surrounding ground was too compacted to allow rainwater to drain away, and so the plants all died (it took us a while to identify the problem, as the surface gravel masked the cause). Cyril, digging with a pickaxe (‘two-pole’), undertook the onerous task of connecting each of these pits individually to a

43 RIGHT Hermes: Lorca inscription: Quizás fue por no saberse la geometría (‘Perhaps it happened because he did not know his geometry’).

44 FAR RIGHT Hermes: diagonal view across the Labyrinth, extending from the obelisk across the pot to the blacksmith’s mandril.

45 Fêtes(Natof S


THE DISTRESS RETORT 63

water-carrying cross-drain, without disturbing the laid paths (fi g. 227)! All the replacement plants have survived except for one of the hollies, which no longer therefore form a strict triangle. Aesthet-ically, the loss is minimal.

The other reference to Hermes Trismegistus is in the form of a blacksmith’s mandril (on which wheels were made), which doubles as a wizard’s hat. The pun retains the note of playfulness appro-priate to the classical Hermes. Of course, every object of this kind has to earn its place aesthetically,

regardless of any other meaning it might have. The mandril, positioned under one of the buttresses, marks, on the upper path of the circuit, the entry to the area of the Labyrinth, lying opposite to the end of the retaining wall on the lower path. It also, with the pot at the centre of the Labyrinth, forms a diagonal with a small obelisk placed in the corner beyond it (fi g. 44).

The vertical accent of this obelisk, though modest, was necessary to ‘hold’ the slight slope of the space. There is a painting by Watteau in the National Gallery of Scotland, where three fi gures stand in a similar relationship to the obe-lisk, pot and mandril here (fi g. 45).70 A confi dent and forthright personage (apparently a friend of Watteau’s) stands to the left (in the position of the obelisk), while a wistful, seated musician (probably a self-portrait of the artist) plays to the right (in the position of the mandril). Between them a beauti ful young woman spreads out her shimmering silver dress, perhaps as part of the movement of a dance, in which the man on the left is her partner. The dynamic between the three fi gures is enigmatic and extremely poignant. The radiant young woman appears almost to step for-ward as the personifi cation of the musette- player’s musical idea, offering herself unreservedly to her partner. This shimmering offering becomes, in the mouth of Hermes’ oracle, transfigured into the magical darkness of which I have already spo-ken, and which may also bring to mind another myth devoted to our occult trust in music: ‘when

45 RIGHT Watteau,Fêtes Vénitiennes, 1718–19 (National Galleriesof Scotland).




THE AXIAL GARDEN 81

very medium out of which a garden is made, space: that is, to recall, removed from temporal pressures, those conditions of existence – surely, the most fundamental of all – to which space entitles us.

After leaving Mnemosyne, the axial route follows the line of the canal until, after passing under a lime tree, it comes to the stone circle of the Muses [B], where six paths meet, as it were ‘calling in’ the motives of diaspora for one last time, in an act of poised remembrance, before we must decide which one of them to pursue (fi g. 60).

Ignoring the routes leading into Ithaka or Epi-dauros, or back to the drive, we may for a moment step over a footbridge on to the canal dam to take a last look back towards Mnemosyne, an especially rewarding view in May (fi g. 61), or when the rhodo-dendrons on the south bank are out in June.

We then walk back down to where the stream fl ows into The Bolt [9]. Originally, before the lake was made, the stream cut a straight line through

the centre of the whole of the valley (fi g. 92). The area we are now in was an open fi eld grazed by sheep, but always lined to the south by the tree-lined bank that forms the boundary with the Rud-iweg (figs 63, 67). The stream had been formally channelled beside this bank until it reached a little pond, which I had enlarged (the Dreikinderteich or ‘Three Child Pool’),8 where it was sometimes blocked in the summer, to flood the adjacent meadow. The area I call The Bolt is the corridor now formed by the stream and bank to the south, with the hedges of the Herse and Imbros enclosures to the north. It runs from the canal dam to the Dreikinderteich, at which point extensive views of the lake and the main garden are fi nally reached.

The passage from Artemis and the Muses through to The Bolt is a fateful transition in the development of the garden (fi g. 62).

As with the Epidauros lawn,9 but now with a gesture of impatient anticipation rather than

61 LEFT A view back towards Mnemosyne from the canal dam in May.

62 BELOW The ‘fateful hub’ where the canal, the Muses, the Ithaka enclosure (behind the Muses), the Herse enclosure (in yew) and The Bolt (just out of sight to the left) all meet.



partnership there – between meaning and space – was the ideal one. Yet so often, because it is more diffi cult to recite or appropriate, the spatial part of this equation eludes adequate testimony in the account of human affairs. A garden tries to cor-rect this imbalance by foregrounding the spatial component in the healing process. But its intimate responsibility in this regard is not (I think) best realized through omitting a partnering ‘poetic’ conscience. The poetic requirements addressed at Epidauros deserve to be part of a garden’s reper-toire as well. Their inclusion is of vital, but deli-cate, concern. Perhaps we could say that poetics, in a garden, should help to prime the spatial impact, without, however, abusing or usurping it. Poetic tact should accompany us everywhere in a garden, but always at the bidding of a gratitude for space.

Epidauros was a bare pasture when I came to Coombe. It was a featureless meadow open to the wind running down to the tree-lined stream on its southern boundary (already described as part of The Bolt) (fi g. 92). There was no separation at that time between Epidauros and Kairos. A huge modern agricultural building stood on raised level ground to the north of the area on the site of a former ten-nis court (fi gs 218, 219). Beyond that a long bank forming a field boundary stretched away to the west, studded with occasional hazel and hawthorn bushes. The fi rst thing I did to give shape to the area (in 1993) was to plant sapling trees beyond the modern barn to give future shelter from the west (fig. 214). The modern building was taken down in 1994, and the present grass terrace made with

topsoil transported from the site of the lake, also made that year (figs 223, 221). Then the hedges, which today so defi ne the character of Epidauros, were planned. On top of the grass terrace, I planted a yew hedge to screen the new garage (on part of the site where the modern barn had been) (fi g. 93). This majestic hedge, with curved wings and tur-rets, was designed to look down over Epidauros, heightening the sense of theatrical occasion.

The hornbeam hedges needed careful placing. My method here, as with the siting of other hedges in the garden, was to pace the ground obsessively, then do drawings, roughly to scale, indoors, before resuming my pacing of the ground again! Once a promising outline emerged, I would alter the


TOWARDS A POETICS OF THE L AWN 113

height of the blades on the mower and cut its shape into the lawn. After several adjustments, I would eventually spray the lower cut grass with weedkiller, which gave a very clear impression of the outline (fi g. 128). It was lucky that in Epidauros I could use the vantage of the raised terrace to survey the outlines from above before making any fi nal decision.

The open green architecture of Epidauros groups its hedges in a ring of related but separate curves around a central empty space punctuated by two hornbeam trees (fi gs 94, 95).

This had to be a space of transition, leading from the enclosed gardens near to the house to the lawns around the lake, as well as a space with its own integrity. There are six points of access to Epi-dauros (eight if you include the narrower entrances of the Imbros and Ithaka enclosures) involving several important cross routes that need to work reciprocally whether proceeding from house to lake, or back again from lake to house. Yet despite

all these crossings and to-ings and fro-ings, Epidau-ros has to be a centred and hospitable place in its own right. The twin aspect of Epidauros is perhaps best demonstrated in the contrast between the westerly view from the foot of the drive towards the lake on the one hand, a view which raises expectation (fi gs 6, 90, 91), and the view south from the yew terrace, which is more self-possessed. It is no accident that these alternative views exploit the outer and the inner nature of curves respectively. Thus the view across Epidauros to the lake makes use of the gently repoussoir effect of the outward curves of the Ithaka [11] and Imbros [12] enclosures (as well as that of the lower hedge that skirts the wood opposite them).5 Whereas the intrinsic value of Epidauros is more dependent on internal curves, both the subtle ones of the Imbros enclosure (on its Epidauros face) and that of the upper section of the hedge that skirts the wood, and the more scene- setting symmetrical ones (that impercepti-bly enfold you) in the wings of the presiding yew

93 BELOW The Epidauros yew hedge. The hedge screens the two garages and helps provide Epidauros with its sense of theatre. Given an open, well-drained site, yew can grow as quickly as beech. The hedge was planted in 1994, and, like all the others in the garden, is expertly tended by Cyril (see fi g. 243). Cornus chinensis ‘China Girl’ is to the left of the bench, and Acer pennsylvanicum to the right.

91 LEFT View across the Epidauros lawn in October.

92 BELOW LEFT The central valley (and site of the main garden) in 1992 with the stream following its original course, before the lake was made. As in fi g. 8, the valley was essentially a bare pasture.


111 Narcissus: March sunset.


133

IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT TO EX AGGER ATEthe importance of the lake to the garden [16]. It occupies the central place to which one is always drawn to return, like Narcissus, haunted by the need to keep a vigil by its shore (fi gs 79, 5, 159). It controls the way one negotiates the garden, and it has always seemed, through its interposition of a waterscape into the heart of the valley, to establish a fateful interval at the centre of the garden where before the ground formed a solid continuity (fi gs 125, 92).1 Before the lake was there, the valley seemed unconscious: it lacked self-awareness. But with the arrival of the lake and its mirror function this completely changed, as the valley turned into a place of refl ection and introspection. And whereas before, the landform of the valley had appeared to do no more than persist, the lake, in placing at its heart a shining clearing, bestowed on the landscape a transparency and poise that seemed to give the valley a new vocation: perhaps it is not too much to say that the site was awoken out of its slumber into being a place of transmission, and offering.2

In this chapter, I shall try to look into the heart of the garden lake, using Poussin, Taoism, alchemy and, of course, Narcissus as my guides. If these references seem alien to the world of gardening, I must simply acknowledge that, although there are many beautiful lakes in gardens, I cannot say that any one of them has been as important for the introduction of the lake at Plaz Metaxu as these alternative inspirations, which seem to set out – to me, at any rate – the optimal conditions – pictorial, poetic, philosophical, mythopoeic, psychological, spiritual – out of which the quintessentially liminal beauty of the garden lake is born.

I don’t know of any monograph on the garden lake. I would like to see one. Lakes at the centre of gardens are surprisingly rare. Brown’s lakes are usually peripheral. There is a fi ne ‘apron’ lake at Claremont (a centred body of water at the foot of the amphitheatre).3 The lake at Painshill, although central to the garden, is too variform to focus attention introspectively.4 The classical example is Stourhead.5 The lake there is nobly scenic, and a tour of the garden revolves around it. But for me, despite the inward-looking character of the garden, the lake experience at Stourhead remains essentially epic rather than introspective. The

chapter seven

TOWARDS

A POETICS

OF THE

GARDEN

LAKE

NARCISSUS

‘The truth depends on a walkaround a lake.’

‘[A lake carries you] into recesses of feeling that are otherwise impenetrable.’

‘Depression is the price of silver.’



but fi rst I want briefl y to consider how the lakes in his paintings, any one of which could be said to constitute a scenic masterpiece, feature, perhaps even more importantly, as objective correlatives for how to be.

In paintings like the Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice11 (fi g. 112) or the Landscape with a Man killed by a Snake12 (fi g. 114), for instance, the lakes appear to be prescient – full of foreboding of the action that unfolds. One fears for the carefree naked youths in the background of the latter, as yet un aware of the tragedy in the foreground of the painting, as they dive with insouciance into the water that seems itself somehow already implicated in nature’s treachery (as signaled more explicitly by the snakebite).

On the other hand, in the Landscape with a Calm,13 the limpid serenity of the water has about it what one might call a blameless ephebe blue as if the human and the natural lived under a single benign jurisdiction (fi g. 115).

In the world of art, separate paintings, with serial, or at least companion, lakes are necessary to catch such different epiphanies, while in a garden the same lake will be ominous and benefi cent by turn, depending on the ambient conditions of the day or hour (fi gs 116, 117).

But because its appearance is phenomenally erratic and versatile, the garden lake is no less for that, at any given moment, potentially an exempl-ifi cation of human trials and blessings. We fi nd in the world what we are prepared to bring to it, according to the wavelength of our attentiveness, how acutely observant, how consistently sus-tained, how emotionally and imaginatively inclu-sive. Or, put slightly differently, we might say that the example of Poussin encourages us to realize that, when we are moved enough by the world of appearances, the beauty we discover there cannot but involve us in the search for what its meaning might be, a meaning that hovers tantalizingly between implicit and explicit formulations. This search for meaning (which more often finds clues than it does solutions) is, I think, as much the preserve of the gardener as it is of the painter, provided the idiom of gardening is prepared to extend its repertoire to address the full range of our imaginative concerns. Poussin is also exempl-ary in that the world he allows to reveal itself to

him is tragic as well as auspicious. Here again he sets a noble precedent too often (it seems to me) ignored by gardeners.

The positioning of the garden lake will greatly affect its sphere of infl uence. For the lake to exert its maximum power, it needs to be at the centre of the garden – that is, for its presence to be in es-capable in terms of how the garden is experienced and conceived. I have suggested, in this respect, how Poussin’s lakes appear to be where they are as if by some kind of omphalic necessity. Empirically truthful and refi ned as they are, each seems to have, in addition, a Platonic identity, to be both this lake in particular and, at the same time, as Finlay might say, ‘lake as Lake’.14 Once more, Poussin shows himself in this regard – that is, in his grasp of the ideal – not to demean the particular by turning it into a formula, but instead to dignify it by making its individual characteristics distinguished enough to be entitled to represent the entire class to which it belongs. For this reason, when we encounter a Poussin lake, we discover that the whole of our mind is addressed; the lake is satisfying both empir-ically, and as an exemplary Gestalt. The most aston-ishing Platonic lake to be found in Poussin’s oeuvre occurs in the Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe15

114 RIGHT Poussin, Landscape with a Man killed by a Snake, c.1648(National Gallery, London).

115 BELOW RIGHT Poussin, Landscape with a Calm, 1650–51(The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles).

116, 117 OPPOSITE Narcissus: these two photographs were taken on consecutive days (6 and 7 January 2010).Of course, conditions often change within minutes rather than days.

IW On Psyche's Lawn Text v3.indd 136 01/04/2020 08:52 IW On Psyche's Lawn Text v3.indd 137 01/04/2020 08:53



THE SOUTH GARDEN 171

hellebores which are planted underneath them, and all along the narrow central path (fi g. 144). In autumn the leaves of this dogwood turn a deep, valedictory claret. Wild mint has arrived here of its own accord; intermittently, there are also poppies, and Stipa gigantea (the golden oat) takes the place of Demeter’s barley.40

A wall of yew cuts across the slate path with only the narrowest of entrances through to the lower half of the enclosure. A second, parallel hedge of yew was initially planted below the fi rst one, but, owing to the damper ground here, it had to be par-tially removed. Nonetheless, the yew still clearly defi nes a caesura, or break, in the falling rhythm of the enclosure, cutting across the run of the slope. The momentary interruption is highlighted by the positioning of a large stone seat at the eastern end of the yew caesura, facing not down towards the lake, but west towards the opposite yew alcove, and beyond that, well hidden, to Hades itself. The

seat is Demeter’s throne (fi g. 228). We are told that, unable to fi nd Persephone, the distraught goddess sat for a long while on a ‘laughless rock’,41 before eventually coming to the realization that, in order to be reunited with her daughter, she must make the journey down to Hades herself. (It was Helios, the sun god, who had fi nally advised her where her daughter had been taken.) The secret affi nity between the Eleusis caesura and Hades is brought out by their shared frame of yew, and also by their mutual emptiness of plants. But whereas Hades functions as a destination (that becomes a turning point), the Eleusis caesura is, and remains, a dynamic threshold, a liminal space of pure tran-sition. The transition works in two ways: from the point of view of Demeter’s throne, it suspends us in the mood of acute loss that foregrounds the awareness of Hades, with its accompanying uncanny perspective on life; while, from the point of view of the Eleusis enclosure as a whole, it marks

144 LEFT Eleusis: the top half of the enclosure with the bare twigs of Cornus alba ‘Kesselringii’ and hellebores and snowdrops in fl ower.

145 BELOW Eleusis: the lower part of the enclosure in April. The whitebeams have not yet come into leaf.

146 FOLLOWING PAGES Fritillaries in the Eleusis enclosure are well suited to the damp conditions.



their troubled souls. The subject of the discourse is the illusory status of material appearances, an insight into the nature of reality that is reinforced by the stark contrast presented between the two sides of the painting: the right-hand image of the sleeping Vishnu on the Milky Ocean ‘conjures a time when the universe was in a state of dissolu-tion and only vast waters existed’.20 I was haunted by the boldness of the juxtaposition between the sensuous garden landscape and the austere cosmic vision that was, in its own way, just as beautiful, and, though unfamiliar and alien, somehow the garden’s necessary foil. So I asked Nick to replicate the image of Vishnu in juxtaposition with the garden logo (already one step away from natural reality), knowing the setting of the stone would amply compensate these turns towards abstrac-tion through the rich surroundings of the wood. Nick really excelled himself in carving this image. I am only warned I must not be tempted to rub the gold leaf that crowns Vishnu’s head and decorates his tunic! Cyril has made a plywood casing with which we can cover the stone in winter. So far, the

image has remained as fresh as the day on which it was carved.

Two other engraved stones face the Corenzuela bench, placed to either side of the opening, gently angled to focus the view, and backed by the dark silhouettes of the framing cotoneasters (almost always seen contre-jour) (fig. 175). The stones are a pair of identical slates identified by Nick as possible candidates for the inscriptions (which we already had in mind) during one of our joint visits to Delabole quarry in Cornwall. They have an unhewn, natural look, and are set in concrete into the ground (also being fi xed by pins). In con-text, the stones work well in subtly focusing the view. Originally, the inscriptions were unpainted, and the lettering took on strange flairs and ret-icences in response to the drips from the over-hanging trees. At times, this was magical, but after a frost-proofi ng coating was applied, the overall impact of the inscriptions became more muted and so we decided to paint the letters in as natu-ralistic a tone as possible (Nick is well practised in this sort of exercise). Now the inscriptions are

181 Corenzuela: left-hand Rilke stone: ‘Say to the constant earth: I’m fl owing.’


THE NORTH WOOD 207

always clearly legible, without, however, appearing contrived.

The slates are known as the ‘Rilke stones’ as the two inscriptions are a translation of the last two lines of the last of the poet’s Sonnets to Orpheus:

Say to the constant earth: I’m fl owing. To the running water speak: I am (fi gs 181, 182).21

When the Narcissus waterfall is fl owing, in the left ‘panel’ of the view, it pairs with the ‘Alarm sail’ in the right panel, to complement, or re-enact, the text, creating a supplementary counterpoint to the other exchanges already mentioned as germane to Corenzuela: the dialogue between sensuous and visionary realities, between the prospect and the refuge, the light and the dark, the inward and the expansive, the secret and the manifest, the remedy and the wound, the creaturely and the illuminated, the fi nite and the immortal, the open and the closed. All these corresponding affective and spatial dialogues that come into play in the secluded little grove of Corenzuela help identify its indispensable status in the garden as the belvedere that compensates the duplex cast of things.22

Orpheus holds a special place in the garden.23 When I try to describe what my style of garden-ing is, I sometimes call it ‘caesural gardening’, or I might refer to the garden’s ‘Orphic spatiality’. The two terms are intimately linked, for they both privilege a vocational acceptance of betweenness, a willingness to live, and come to terms, with gaps (or being in transit between different worlds).24 In Rilke’s version of the myth Orpheus is presented as susceptible to the gap of separation in its most forbidding form: death (both Eurydice’s and his own).25 But Orpheus isn’t only the victim of sep-aration, he is also its virtuoso ‘over-stepper’, and

vindicator: it is he who makes festive the intuition that ‘every separation is a link’.

Orpheus is the archetypal poet and musician;26 his way of living is to praise through singing.27 In fact, for him, as Rilke says – song is existence.28 Yet Rilke also defi nes Orpheus’ nature spatially, insist-ing on its wide and far-reaching character (seine weite Natur) which stretches between ‘both realms’ – of the living and the dead.29 Maurice Blanchot also uses a spatial metaphor in his famous précis of the myth: ‘When Orpheus descends toward Eurydice, art is the power that opens the night.’30 If I speak, then, of the garden’s ‘Orphic spatiality’, I perhaps am trying, in a minor way, to reclaim, from a garden’s point of view, this affi nity between space and music and poetry, which both grants to the interval its haunting elegy and, audaciously, ‘opens the night’. Put slightly differently: if Rilke recognized in Orpheus the archetypal figure of betweenness, who oscillates between worlds and ‘chooses transformation’31 as the truest response to his (and our) radically intermediate status, then I might propose that the garden’s experiment, as the ‘place that is between’, tries to return the poetic compliment to space by giving Orpheus the interval back. One can indeed fi nd an image of the lyre in the garden more or less wherever one looks for it – in lake, labyrinth and ‘lovely meander’.32 But the real homage to Orpheus derives rather from the garden’s willingness, whenever possible, to con-nect voice and place, to allow space to ‘open’, and vibrate, with the full repertoire of Orphic mean-ings. And Corenzuela, in the ways I have outlined, tries to play its part in this.

y to m

182 Corenzuela: right-hand Rilke stone: ‘To the running water speak: I am.’


IW On Psyche's Lawn Text v3.indd 232 01/04/2020 08:58 IW On Psyche's Lawn Text v3.indd 233 01/04/2020 08:58


Perhaps the ‘bleeding’ of the colour saffron from its tenuous crimson fi laments accounts for its further association with courage and sacrifi ce. In mythol-ogy, the saffron crocus was born of the blood of the dying boy (the lover of either Smilax or Hermes) who gave the fl ower his name.35 I wanted, if pos-sible, the choric space of Kedalion to foster a like rhythm of courage and kindness, as well as shar-ing in saffron’s image of sacrifi ce and light. For was this not part of what it meant for the valley to be undergoing in its own way some sort of Assump-tion (the very transformation that the Zigzag path on the opposite hillside, in one of its moods, had laid out as a structural possibility or promise)?

As I was familiarizing myself with the subdued thrill of gardening ‘high up’ (where ‘the gardens full of fl owers’ set things to light with their ‘quiet fi re’),36 the ground beneath my feet shifted from being a benchmark elevation (the kind of spa-tial privilege Kedalion had always supplied) into prompting a new form of spatial experience, a sort of shoulder-ransom, the sensation of being immaterially hoisted or lifted. It seemed the space itself was inviting me to participate in some new kind of ‘commission’, or ‘turning-point’, as Rilke might say: ‘Work of bearing is done. Now for some dance-steps!’37Perhaps because the normative and the transforming aspects of the fi eld’s shouldering function were now exchanging their identities so freely, I involuntarily thought of another Rilke poem, the very late and anarchic, yet nonetheless strangely unitive, Gong. Written in the last year of his life, this short poem of three stanzas is a fi nal celebration of that play of reversals between norm ative and counter-normative perspectives – a paean to what I have called the ‘chiastic’ intuition – that Rilke had pioneered throughout his career.


THE PASTOR AL LOOP 235

He now develops his theme with breathtaking nonchalance:

No longer for ears … sound which, like a deeper ear, hears us, who only seem to be hearing. Reversal of spaces.Projection of innermost worlds into the Open … , temple before their birth, solution saturated with gods that are almost insoluble … Gong!38

The sound of the gong here jubilantly absorbs, and lets go of, the perceptual and transcendental para-doxes that haunt our existence (if we permit them to). All the anomalies and the mysteries remain, but the gong sounds out a musical acceptance (rather than a disingenuous avoidance) of them, reach-ing, as I see it, far into a choric (non-schismatic) space that seems– within the garden at least – to be a late-coming counterpart, on terra fi rma, to the liminal beauty of the lake below (also, as we saw, even-handed in its licence to let be and to let not be).

207 LEFT Kedalion: a similar view to that in fi g. 206, but seen now in October. Purples make excellent, and even essential, companions to autumn colours in borders. Here Verbena bonariensis mediates between heleniums and Penstemon ‘Blackbird’ and the radiant corals of Sorbus ‘Olympic Flame’ and S. commixta. In the foreground, left, is the claret ash (Fraxinus angustifolia ‘Raywood’).

208 BELOW Kedalion: another view through the wood (see fi g. 168). Often, in autumn, the sun has departed from the valley below, while it continues to illuminate the trees and fl owers in Kedalion.


Documents

A PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION OF PLAZ METAXU · 2020. 8. 31. · and the puer aeternus, made a deep impression on IW On Psyche's Lawn Text v3.indd 13 01/04/2020 08:48. 62 ON PSYCHE’S LAWN