Caring to cultivate on the long row of life: An eclectic look at gardens, gardening, and the aging process (Part II)

Part II of the series:

Caring to cultivate on the long row of life: An eclectic look at gardens, gardening, and the aging process 

In the spirit of Rogue Scholarship on Aging- this is an open source research paper for your learning and enrichment. You are welcome to cite and integrate into your own learning experience – but in return, all I ask is a reference back to this web site along with title and author (http://uofugeron.wordpress.com)
thanks – Scott D. Wright, Ph.D.

Title: Caring to cultivate on the long row of life: An eclectic look at gardens, gardening, and the aging process
Author: Scott D. Wright, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Director and Associate Professor, Gerontology Interdisciplinary Program, University of Utah, 84112.

Gardens, Aging, and Film

Although Jung’s use of the rhizome metaphor supports the philosophical impression of life as continuous and unending, despite the relentless seasons and centuries of time, gardens are very much transitory and impermanent. And so while gardens can be perceived as being artistic (Albers, 1991), they may not necessarily represent the outcome that matches the Hippocratic dictum, “Life is short, art is long” (Ars longa, vita brevis) in the sense that the garden is cultivated and cared for in an effort to outlast its caretaker. For example, Harrison points out that,

Gardens are not memorials. They may, as long as they last, be places of memories or sites of recollection, but apart from a few lofty exceptions they do not exists to immortalize their makers or defy the ravages of time. If anything they exist to reenchant the present (p. 39).

Yet, one long-lasting medium for the expression of art is through the vehicle of film. And it is here that we will examine the crossroads of the use of garden imagery (symbolic and realistic) in relation to the aging process. In the growing array of films (see Yahnke, 2003) with the primary characters as older adults or aging themes ⁷ (e.g., On Golden Pond, Cocoon, The Trip to Bountiful ⁸, Driving Miss Daisy, About Schmidt, Strangers in Good Company, Foxfire, Iris, Away From Her), I will focus on three in particular that will capture the topic in this section: Wild Strawberries, Dreams, and Grey Gardens.

Wild Strawberries is the 1957 film by Ingmar Bergman which depicts the story of Dr. Isak Borg (played by the veteran Swedish director Victor Sjöström who was die soon after the filming and was paid tribute by Ingmar Bergman at the Swedish Film Academy in 1960; see Bergman, 1960) who is traveling in his car to receive an honorary degree. But at the start of the day and along the way, Borg is subject through several flashbacks and fantasies, dreams and nightmares. The symbolism is rich and heavy as Borg is forced to face his past, come to terms with his faults, and accept the inevitability of his own mortality. Erik Erikson (1978) has provided a comprehensive analysis, based on his own theoretical interpretation, of Bergman’s film and offered interesting insights into the personality of Dr. Borg and interpersonal dynamics with his daughter-in-law Marianne and host of other characters in the film. It is here that Erikson sees the emergent virtue of care as a necessary strength for “the life cycle as well as the cycle of generations” (p. 7).

For example, Erikson (1978) noted that the tensions found between Dr. Borg and Marianne and Borg’s son Evald reflect the core issues of generativity such that it is Borg who must confront his own rejectivity and the resulting lack of care and interest in his own family and many others around him (see also Weiland, 1993). The turning point for Isak Borg, and obviously the primary inspiration for the title of film, is when Dr. Borg leaves the main highway (his journey of life) and drives down a side road to revisit an old summer home (a chance for reminiscence and remembrance out of the rigid pattern of living in rote predictability).  As he walks closer and Marianne leaves to go swimming in the sea, Borg remembers a specific location that would serve as catalyst for a reawakening much like the Proustian Madeleine, but in this case, it is strawberry patch near the summer home (Archer, 1959).  And it is here that we find a richly layered symbolism that involves the magical transformation of the landscape surrounding the home into blooming plants and trees, and lush greenery. Even though the film is in black and white, one can almost imagine that large yard as colorful as Monet’s gardens at Giverny. The wild strawberries that grow along the side of the yard are the triggering mechanism to transports Borg back through time and allow him to revisit his own young adulthood in relation to Sara, his “first love.” In this film, the bounty of the earth in the form of wild strawberries is richly symbolic of the decisions made and the missed opportunities at forming intimate relationships (with Sara) and the resulting isolation and aloofness that made him think of himself as a “living corpse.”

Erikson (1978) offers his analysis of the Arcadian scene,

…one senses that this whole earthy scene, beyond its precious gaiety and its symbolic reference to defloration, points to something primeval, some garden, long forfeited by Isak (p. 8).

It is also intriguing that strawberries are prominent in the landscape of the painting by Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights, which perhaps symbolizes the domains of temptations and earthly pleasures. We shall present more on that painting in the next section. But the revisiting of the patch of wild strawberries helps to break down the walls of Borg’s enclosed garden of generational isolation, and he then begins to revel in the possibility of love and caring – and sharing beyond himself. Later on in the film, Borg is presented with the gift of flowers by his young travelers who wish to celebrate in his celebration event in his honor at the university, he has achieved an understanding of how he needs to be fully engaged with life and begin to fulfill the need to facilitate a “maintenance of the world.” At least from Erikson’s perspective, that small patch of botanical life, the wild strawberries ⁹, are at once symbolic of the epigenetic pathway and a crossroads through adulthood and into the commitments of mature caring within mid and later life.

With the title of Grey Gardens, such a film would appear to be the perfect connecting point for examining aging issues (grey) and gardens. But the film is less about gardening in the later years (per se) and more about of what was once cared for in relationships with people, home, and landscape in the past – has instead fallen into a state of neglect due to the disconnect with cultivating what is alive (not counting the cats and raccoons) in the present. Grey Gardens is the 1976 film by Albert and David Maysles and it is a portrait of two aging women (mother and daughter) both frozen in time and place, in an East Hampton home that is graying along with them. Grey Gardens is actually the name of the decaying estate that belongs to Edith Bouvier Beale (“Big Edie”) age 79 and her daughter Edie (or “Little Edie”) in her fifties. In the early 1970s, their 28-room mansion was found to be health hazard and both were threatened with eviction. They are relatives of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and it was she who intervened on their behalf so that could both stay in the mansion after a massive clean up. Both Big and Little Edie live in the past as they travel back through the decades via photo albums, vinyl records, and scrapbooks. The film opens up with Little Edie telling the Maysles about what used to be in terms of the beautiful and exotic gardens that once was. But as the camera sweeps the landscape it is obvious all has “gone wild” with thick overgrowth, vines that threaten to cover the house, and thick trees that literally create a wall of seclusion around the home.

Throughout the film, there are shots of the house surrounded by thickets of vegetation that make it appear deserted and forlorn. And during the winter months, it carries the haunting images of a Hollywood set piece where the Grey Gardens mansion is enveloped in an ivy-snarled ruin. It brings to mind Alan Weisman’s (2007) provocative scenario of envisioning “The World Without Us” where instead of the encroaching ivy that we observe in the film, Weisman speculates on the role of kudzu (the infamous weed of the South),

…without gardeners endlessly trying to uproot the ravenous stuff, long before the vacant houses and skyscrapers of Southern cities tumble, they may have already vanished under a bright, waxy green, photosynthesizing blanket” (p. 274).

In Grey Gardens there actually is a man who is introduced as the “gardener” at the beginning of the film, but it is clear that the intruding jungle of vegetation is overwhelming to him. As the mother and daughter engage in their own private world of isolation and disconnect, the botanical world encroaches. As they live in the past, the present landscape is removed from their care and attention. While they may have their memories of some glorious yesteryear, the future is left to random seclusion. Harrison succinctly states the connection between the need for constant gardening in the face of our obligations to the here and now,

If we are not able to keep our garden, if we are not able to take care of our mortal world, heaven and salvation are vain (p. 11). 

And it is with this insight do we then fully appreciate the lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet whereby the Prince sees the troubled world all around him as “an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; Things rank and gross in nature, Possess it merely” (I, ii.135-136) (see Paglia, 2005).

            Akira Kurosawa, at the age of 80, directed and then released the film, Dreams in 1990 (his 28^th film), which portrayed several dreams based on Kurosawa’s own over the course of his life.  It is a “visually stunning” film and consists of eight segments that are arranged in temporal/spatial progression and filled with cultural references within classical Japanese culture (Serper, 2001; Reider, 2005). The first and last episodes of Dreams feature two processions that symbolize the opening and closing of the life cycle: a wedding (usually leading to a new birth) and a funeral (Serper, 2001). The film also captures luminous sequences of botanical wonderment with fields of flowers (Sunshine Through the Rain), an orchard of peaches in full bloom (The Peach Orchard) and rural scenes of wheat fields (Crows) with Van Gogh (who also loved gardens; see Fell, 2001) at work painting his landscapes and antithetical segments that portrayed the ruins of ecological disasters and the break with nature.  It is however, the last segment, “The Village of the Watermills,” that will serve as the focal point of this discussion.

            The setting for The Village of the Watermills is a lush farm with blooming flowers, lush green grass, and crystal clear rivers that drive the watermills in a wheel-like fashion. It is a “paradisiacal place: a village where modern technology has not invaded people’s lives and they live in harmony with nature” (Redier, 2005; p. 265). The Kurosawa surrogate (the younger man), while walking through the village, encounters a 103-year old man, who is working on a smaller water wheel structure. The older man communicates the necessity of treating the land with respect and articulates the perils if it is mistreated. The symbolic depth of the old man imparting wisdom to the younger man is a critical link in the message of the segment which highlights that working in harmony with the land helps to create a natural cycle of living – and dying.

Thus, even the funeral of a 99-year old woman (the old man’s first love) is treated with dignity and a celebration of music, flowers, and processional dancing. The entire village is involved in the funeral: children, adults, and the elderly, male and female. The watermills turn with the river of water, which provides nourishment for the plants and the flowers, which in turn the villagers use to celebrate the wheel of life – and death. After watching this segment, there is the renewed sense of appreciation for the purpose of flowers at the gravesite and at memorial services, as we remind ourselves of the blossom that does pass, but the rhizome remains.

At the end of the segment in the film, we are left watching a slow moving river current with undulating clusters of long swirling stands of lush aquatic plants flowing, swaying with the flow of water that reflects multiple colors reflected from the surface – blues, greens, and the liquid silver of indirect sunlight. Much like an oil painting of Monet – Water Lilies – and his Japanese Bridge over his pond.

Gardens, Aging, and Painting

The interrelationship between painting and the use of garden as motif or actual object for inspiration represents an important, intense and intimate thread in the history of art. There is perhaps the most spectacular and enigmatic work of Hieronymus Bosch and his haunting imagery associated with the triptych, Garden of Earthly Delights. The Garden of Earthly Delights was painted around the years 1503 and 1504 when Bosch was about 50 years of age (Belting, 2002), although he lived well into the mid-sixties of life. Garden of Earthly Delights ¹⁰ is the middle panel (also known as Imaginary Paradise) of the triptych and captures sinful pleasures in a garden-like setting where naked figures parade about and into pools of water which can bring to mind primeval fountains of youth. Compared to the panel “Paradise” which depicts a more balanced ecosystem of sorts, the middle panel is awash in people, and the garden appears to be magically self-sustaining with little human activity involved in maintenance or cultivating its rich resources for all. And indeed, there are no children to be found in this Arcadian landscape and everyone appears to be ageless. This is a presentation of a carefree world where the garden serves as a symbolic Utopia and humankind resides paradise untouched by the “Fall” (Belting, 2002). Of course, it is the other panel, Hell, which exacts the most hallucinatory experience and presentation of nightmarish figures. Perhaps, we can think of that desperate landscape as a karmic reminder of where there are repercussions for engaging care-less activities that didn’t take into account the stewardship clause when residing in the Garden of Eden. We reap what we sow, but in this case the “Fall” may represent when all was spent in the present and little effort was taken to cultivate for the next season – or the next generation – thus leading to the hellish demise of humanity.

Another work of art relating to the cultivating theme and gardening is attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus ¹¹. The Fall of Icarus captures the moment of when Icarus flies too close to the sun (after warned not to do so by his father Deadalus) and because his wings are made of wax, he his sent downward and crashes into the sea. What is odd in Bruegel’s painting of the mythological figure of Icarus is that one is actually hard pressed to find him in the painting (his legs are barely noticeable just below the ship on the right side of the painting).  Instead, it appears the most prominent theme in the painting is the day-to-day activities of working people in the countryside who go about their business of taking care of their appointed responsibilities. Ships have places to go, the herdsman has to watch over the sheep, someone has to catch the fish, and in the foreground is the farmer cultivating the soil by plowing the field. While the great mythological figures go about their business in their world, Brueghel appears to put things into perspective that the day-to-day activities such as cultivating the garden is the greater act in the world as it is what matters most in our world. There is life and there is death and in between there is the caring for those still with us. H. Arthur Klein and Mina C. Klein noted in their book, Peter Bruegel: Artist of Abundance, that there was a head of corpse of an old man (barely visible) just beyond the plowed furrows in the painting. This could possibly be another layer of meaning within the painting that relates to an old Flemish saying, “No plow stands still just because a man dies.”

            Vincent Van Gogh loved his gardens and incorporated the flowers of the countryside into his paintings (Fell, 2001) as did Cezanne and Renoir. And it has been said that Gustav Kilmt’s garden was his refuge and help to inspire his flower paintings: “it was his wellspring from which he drew strength for all his work,” (Neret, 2001; p.51), but the primary exemplar for the intersect of painting, gardens and aging would be Claude Monet.

            Claude Monet, who is considered as one of the founders of style of painting known as French Impressionism, lived a remarkable eighty-six years of life that spanned across two centuries (from 1840 to 1926).  Monet shared a remarkable artistic journey with many others in the same historical time frame such as Manet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Rodin, Cezanne, and Degas, all of which left the world with sublime expressions of beauty and reverence. Monet, in particular, proved to be extremely productive with creating some of his most famous paintings into his later years and along with other many other painters (e.g., Henri Matisse, Rembrandt, Georgia O’Keefe) he has been the subject of research examining later-life creative and artistic style and productivity into the second half of life (Cohen, 2001; Kauppinen & Mckee, 1988; Lindauer, 2003; Ravin and Kenyon, 1998; Rosand, 1987).  But the intersect of painting and aging is not the focus of this paper; rather and instead, what is of direct relevance is the source of inspiration for Monet’s creative expression in the second half of his life from the year 1883 and during the next forty-three years until his death in 1926.

            Many people are certainly aware of the vast array of Monet’s work and many can also readily identify the unique style and composition of his paintings, such that, for example, when examining water lilies with rich textures or admiring irises with saturated colors, we come to think that those flowering plants are virtually synonymous with his portfolio of art. But then again many people may not know that those paintings were created based on the living landscape of his own home and garden located in Giverny, France. ¹² Monet was both painter and gardener and he spent the last 43 years of his long life with his close-knit family by cultivating his passion for creating color with flowering plants on a one hectare (2.5 acre) garden site and then capturing the dynamic and fluid presence of those plants onto his canvas with brushwork and oils (Howell, 2003). There is an obvious intimacy and interdependency, some might say an obsession, between Monet and his garden, which also served a muse to his motivation and desire in capturing the vagaries of light and color across his cultivated landscape. But his garden would also be a healing and therapeutic oasis that helped help him cope and adjust to the loss of his second wife who died in 1910 and when he lost his son Jean in February 1914.  In addition to his large-scale formal French terrestrial garden filled with lilacs, tulips, geraniums, hollyhocks, poppies, nasturtiums, clematis, sweet peas, and various shrubs and trees, Monet also created and developed an exotic water garden complete with an authentic Japanese Bridge covered in climbing roses and wisteria which spanned the pond that was filled with hyacinths and water lilies and at the edge were abundant irises and graceful willows. Monet was reported as saying, “My most important work of art is my garden” (Denvir, 1991). From 1908 and at the age of 68, Monet focused his artistic work almost entirely on depicting his garden, and was then commissioned by the state to create a remarkable large format series (on panels more than 6 feet high and 9 feet wide) of paintings of water-lilies (Grandes Decorations) his tour de force, that formed an enveloping circle that was to reside in a specially constructed pavilion in the Musée de l Orangerie, which was an extension to the Louvre (Denvir, 1991; Southgate, 2001)¹³. After 1912 and at the age of 74 Monet only painted summer subjects in his garden and during the winter months his worked in his studios retouching his works and finishing his canvases (Howell, 2003), but he was then diagnosed with a cataract in his right eye, and eventually would come to affect both eyes. And yet despite his visual impairments, Monet proclaimed in 1920, “I’m extremely busy with my garden; it’s such a joy to me, and on fine days like those we’ve had recently I am in raptures at the wonders of nature.”

            Monet continued to paint but his deteriroating eyesight caused him severe problems in distinguished colors for many of his final years (Howell, 2003). For example, Howell (2003) noted that the painting, The Japanese Bridge, challenges the viewer with its intense, angry colours and bold use of texture” (p. 174) and many speculated that Monet was transitioning into more of an abstract style of painting as evidenced by yet another uncharacteristic painting style as found in, The House Seen from the Rose Garden, which appears to be vague and distorted compared to earlier paintings. While there have been many theoretical arguments about whether the change in Monet’s paintings of his garden was due to “late style” or specifically due to limitations in his vision, Marmor (2006) used medical knowledge and computer simulation to investigate the impact of visual disabilities on their perceptions. Marmor (2006) demonstrated how Monet (and the painter Degas) had their perceptions of their preferred scenes or subjects changed due to disease and then affected their style of painting (Bakalar, 2007; Dotinga, 2007; Werner, 2008). And for Monet, the loss of color perception due to his complications with cataracts was a major problem (see Ravin, 1968; Ravin & Kenyon, 1998; Werner, 1998). As Marmor (2006) pointed out, Monet used his beloved garden landscape to capture the nuances of color and light, “but his cataracts severely changes and challenged the marvelous qualities of color in his works” (p. 1769). Even though different eye pathologies cause different visual limitations, we now know how low vision can affect the ability affect both the physical and mental well-being of older adults and the ability to function in a variety of ADLS and IADLS (Berger & Porell, 2008; O’Donnell, 2005). Despite these challenges, Monet stayed connected with the enchantment of his garden space and his paintings, especially of the water lilies, were his sense of legacy to the world, that to care and cultivate the beautiful is embrace a larger cosmic sense of nature and that he was able to engage this belief while still facing physical limitations and obstacles. His heroic work on the Grandes Decorations (e.g., Water Lilies: Morning with Willows) in the final years is a testament to his dedication to his craft and his desire to capture on canvas the momentary beauty of flowers, the shifting presence of water, and the ethereal space that contains it all (Howell, 2003). His dedication to bontanic beauty found among the water lilies would even find its way into Proust’s great work, In Search of Lost Time (see Karpeles, 2008). In the end, the gardener and the artist merged into a portrait of how the later years of life can find fulfillment and purpose in the organic, flowered, and verdant landscape that was cultivated by hand perceived by the masterstrokes of the mature Monet that were to be enjoyed for generations to come.

Part III will be posted next week – along with all the references -
thanks, Scott D. Wright