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 | Relaxed Euphorbia, Lotusland, Montecito, California. The eccentric branch- ing of the Euphorbia reflects the colorful personality of the late Ganna Walska, who purchased the estate she later called “Lotusland” in 1941. Married six times, the former Polish opera singer had a passion for millionaire husbands, Tibetan mysticism, and extravagant gardening. —From Extreme Horticulture (Francis Lincoln Limited)
by photographer John Pfahl |
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Extreme Horticulture
Whole forests have been laid low for books on beauty and, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the sublime and the picturesque. All of these aesthetics can be configured as being uplifting, enlarging, somehow in good taste. But there are other aesthetics, not least among them what could be called the exuberant, the peculiar, the dispropor- tionate, the unusual and exotic, the outsized, the gaudy, the excessive, the appalling.
The United States, as Thomas Brayton (who in 1872 began a topiary garden whose scope would have dizzied even the sarcastic Alexander Pope), P.T. Barnum (who began his career exhibiting an African-American woman who claimed to be the 161-year-old nurse of George Washington’s father), Chesty Morgan (who had her breasts surgically enlarged to the size of, more or less, prize pumpkins), and a thousand Las Vegas designers all demonstrate, is the true home of this aesthetic. Familiar as a part of the freak show, the hot dog stands shaped like hot dogs, the roadside dinosaur statuary, this is the aesthetic that would explain why we not only like to look at really beautiful people but also really obese, tall, or tiny ones. It’s a curiosity that seems somehow connected to the botanical garden, which attempted to catalog the expanse of creation’s flora as the sideshow does its human fauna. It suggests not a nature of harmony and continuity, but of extravagant experimentation, endless variety, never-a-dull moment nature, a wide-open nature. And perhaps a democratic one.
—Rebecca Solnit, from the introduction to Extreme Horticulture.
Solnit teaches at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
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