about

Knapp is a master gardener certified by the University of Maine and holds a certificate in landscape architecture from Harvard. She designs, writes and teaches in Portland. Her design courses are offered, in both the Spring and Fall semesters, through the University of Southern Maine/CCE. She has been featured in newspapers, magazines and on television, and is currently at work on a book.

GARDEN AS PASSION

I used to be a working chef. I tell you that because chefs are more than just really good cooks; we live, eat, sleep and breath food. I still cook, of course, mostly because I don’t know how to stop. I still create recipes and talk to fellow foodies and host dinners so that I can use my friends to test the new creations. I still can be counted on to have a bag of roasted garlic in the fridge, and usually some roasted shallots as well — the small ones, so there’s lots of caramelized bits — and I still make the best scones you’ll ever taste. I tell you this because when I was injured and had to stop being a chef, I was lost for a long while. I didn’t think there could be, ever, anything I’d love as much as I loved that life.

I was wrong. Mercifully, wonderfully, wrong, and I can tell you the moment I knew I was a goner as surely as I could tell you the moment I fell for this lover or that, what he looked like and what he smelled like and the very first things we said. I knew it the moment I heard myself trying to explain to a friend why the Fibonacci ratio works for land design, and why people universally seem to gravitate toward the golden proportion. I knew he thought I was nuts, and I knew I didn’t care; I was in gardener heaven. In the nerd section, to be sure, but heaven nonetheless, the heaven of passionate immersion.

I used to read cookbooks the way other people read novels, cover to cover and usually in bed, curled up with M.F.K. Fisher or my prize possession, a 1927 copy of Fannie Farmer, reading about the science of cooking. By my bed now is the 1956 copy of Landscaping for Western Living I found at a Salvation Army a few weeks ago, and I became so enamored of a book called Designing for Human Behavior I’d checked out of the library that I hunted down a copy for my own. It’s not for the faint-of-heart, by the way; the bulk of it is dull as ditch water. There are parts, though, there are parts, and in my quest to understand why we respond to our environment the way we do, I’ll settle for parts.

It doesn’t talk about landscape architecture, really, just about architecture proper, but the thing that makes me craziest about my profession is that we don’t treat spatial design outdoors the way architects treat spatial design indoors. We don’t take into account the forms we see, in the land and the existing structures, when we design the gardens or choose the materials.

We talk about sunlight, the quantity of it or the quality of it, but we don’t talk about ambient light, and how that will make the space feel as people walk through it. How it will change throughout the day. What it will look like as the sun, slowly, slips behind the moon. How the cool of the evening will be washed into the granite steps, and how the morning dew will pool in the dips and turns of the stone, the quartz fault lines shimmering just below.

We talk about curve, but we don’t talk about curvaceous, about luscious and full and round. About the shocking sensuality of an Oriental poppy, the lush roundness of it or the perfect circle of jet buried at its core. We don’t talk about double peonies, with row upon row upon row of curved petals in pink so pale it’s nearly white or so deep it’s like blackberry sorbet. We don’t talk about stacking those curves, the one upon the other, across the lawn or down the hillside like clouds, like waves, like ripples in a pond or bubbles blown by a giggling five-year-old.

We don’t talk about arc in counterpoint to line, a full-on arc, from edge to edge with a radius, with a depth of curve that reflects the height of the building it’s designed to match. We talk about globe and sphere, but only in tree shape and never in shadow, equally round, equally grand, a shadow that kisses but never covers the far edge of the walkway as it turns toward the door. We don’t talk about what it means to reach but never quite touch, or about what it means that the shadow line hits that mark only once a day, and only for a matter of minutes. About what it means to stand quietly there and watch it happen, and then watch it shift, and then go about your day. About what it means that this occurs only at a particular time of year, or about what it means to watch that shadow line recede as the season wanes and the sun drops low.

We talk about perspective, but only in the literal sense of proportion and never in the figurative point-of-view. We don’t talk about the fun of configuring a garden that changes someone’s mindset, or state of mind or state of being. We don’t talk about the power of the garden to alter who we are. About the power to lift us out of ourselves, to ease sadness, to instill calm, to transfix with beauty, fleeting.

We talk about walkways that turn, ever so slightly and for no apparent reason, but we don’t talk about constructing a walkway that turns the walker’s head. About the difference between an S-curve, that doesn’t cause you to look in another direction, and an actual 90º turn that does. About the power of the turn, and what it means to reposition someone physically, to build into the design an opportunity for pause. That pause leads to reflection, and reflection to serenity, and serenity to the very essence of the garden.

I talk about all of it. I talk about it here, in my classes and to my clients. I probably talk about it in my sleep, but that’s another story. Welcome, fellow gardeners, to the love affair that never ends. I wish you passionate gardening.
c.2007

THE LANGUAGE OF DESIRE

If I asked you what you wanted, would you be able to answer? It’s a powerful thing, wanting. Gardens, both in myth and in reality, are all about longing. The things that address our longings, whether we have acknowledged them or not, are the things that make the garden successful. The opposite, of course, is also true; the things that fail to hit the mark or, worse, hit raw nerves need to be acknowledged up front. A garden that misses your true desire, no matter how beautiful, will never be right for you.

Recently I asked a student who was having trouble with a particular section of her design whether she liked the tree she was trying to design around. She said yes, but actually shook her head no as she was saying it! I see this a lot; it seems that if we think we are supposed to like something, we tell ourselves we like it despite our gut reactions. You can put all the plant material you want around something you hate, but there’s no way to disguise it. If you don’t like that particular thing, you don’t like it, period, and for purposes of design it really doesn’t matter why. It only matters that you say, I don’t want that, because the internal no cannot be overcome.

The ‘don’t want’ list is the easy part; the ‘want’ list is much more ephemeral. Items on this list are composed of memory and dream, of past and future, and they are often oddly conflated. I wear a ring that reminds me of my grandmother despite the fact that it looks absolutely nothing like the ring she wore. They’re both aquamarines, and that’s about it. Mine is pale, simple, set in white gold; hers was the darkest aqua I’ve ever seen wrapped in an elaborate, yellow gold setting. So why are they the same in my head? It took a few years to figure it out, but it goes back to the tin of peppermint candies she kept on her kitchen table, in which was a mix of the ordinary red-striped ones that I didn’t much like and some others that I really, really did. Whenever I visited I’d dig through the tin to find them, and they were always there, thin, oblong, in clear cellophane wrappers. Can you guess their color?

So I wear an aquamarine that looks like a Crystal Mint, and want is satisfied. I don’t just have Grandma’s ring I have Grandma, and Grandma’s kitchen, and the memory of cinnamon toast and soft-boiled eggs in pretty, porcelain egg cups. You couldn’t have just cereal for breakfast in Grandma’s house; you’d be dead by lunch without an egg. I have a fair recollection of the perfume she wore, with hints of lily-of-the-valley, and a vivid sense of the lilacs to the left of the kitchen door. I suspect it’s my desire to be close to her that drives my gardening; I can nurture and tend the same way I was nurtured and tended.

I can also be productive, which is terribly important to me as a Yankee, and my product is beautiful, which is terribly important to me as an artist. What do I want? To feel connected. No great surprise that I emphasize whole-property design. I want everything on the property to have a cohesive, visual connection, so that everyone who enters the property has that same emotional experience.

So how do you go about the task of defining want in terms of the landscape? If, like me, you’re living in an area that appeals to you geographically, all you need do is identify the qualities of the colors and shapes and scents in the things that surround you every day. When I moved back to Maine years ago, I realized how very much I’d missed the salt in the air; you can smell it even a mile inland. I missed the birch, how they gleam in the moonlight, how they bend, laden with snow, how they rise in Spring when the weight of Winter is passed. I missed the pine — the graceful white and the rugged, gnarled pitch — but I also missed the rugosa and the bayberry, and the beach grass along the dunes.

Quick, then, like a Rorschach, what do your instincts tell you that means in terms of landscaping for me? How does that inkblot of ephemeral want translate to a statement of practical, plantable want, a want that I can take to the nursery and say, Give me these, please. Here’s my analysis: I want graceful materials that are also rugged and resilient, and I want materials with strong, clean scents that perfume the air and linger in my head, on my clothes, on my skin. Why does the scent need to cling? Perhaps it’s as simple as being wrapped in something I love, perhaps it’s an inability to let go, perhaps it’s like wearing a lover’s shirt or sleeping on his side of the bed when he’s gone. I don’t know why; I just know that’s what I want.

Oh, and I want things that rustle when the wind comes up, or shifts as it did just now. I’m writing this out on the deck at a friend’s house, about half a mile from shore, and the wind has turned. It’s coming off the water now, picking up salted energy. If I walk down I know the waves will be up, and I’ll hear another sound I adore, and I’ll see the crest, and I’ll watch the water pour over the sand and pull away, pour over and pull away, pour over and pull away.

Those rhythms, which are such an integral part of both my internal and external landscapes, have a design quality to them. I can use the same motion that I see in the curve of the wave, the line of the shore, the angle of the rock against which the water beats. They have a design quantity, too, in the number of steps I take to move from this point to that, in the number of things I move past, left and right, as I go along. There is a quantity of color, and a quantifiable effect of color, and of scent, and of sound.

The garden of desire is built first from language. What do you want?