In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens — a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree — the act of leaving parts of the garden untended, and calling attention to its margins, seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom on the part of the gardener. The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence — antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment.
―Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education
Beautiful place and wonderful thought 🙂
The garden is in Latina, Italy, about 2 hours out of Rome. I am thinking about writing about it… want to go!
YES Please 🙂 What an Inspiring place to write it would be 🙂
Now you’ve got me thinking about lots of liminal spaces: “transition zones” that are not boundaries so much as the necessary fluid chaos that allows order to be experienced. When you recognize the liminal, it’s an easy next step to the sub-liminal, super-liminal, extra-liminal. . .
(Gonna go riff now!)
Riff away! We have plenty of transitional areas that aren’t boundaries… and we can plant some for later if we are running low. Thanks!