Barely visible under the overgrown pink dianthus and purple violas in my backyard is a bronze sundial with the inscription, Time Began in a Garden. Pretty sentimental. But the Good Book tells me that time as we know it got off to a flying start with a woman, a slinky critter, and a nice chunk of garden real estate. I’m convinced this way of beginning the world wasn’t accidental, and it’s not all about the flowers.
Ghosts in the Garden: Reflections on Endings, Beginnings, and the Unearthing of Self
New World Library
144 pages
$14.38
Native American writer N. Scott Momaday understood the importance of creation when he wrote persuasively in Way to Rainy Mountain that, “Once in his life man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, to dwell upon it.”
I took this to heart when I relocated to the suburban sprawl west of Chicago. Amid the strip malls, the tollways, and the power lines, I found the Morton Arboretum, a 1700- acre park dedicated to the preservation of trees and a glorious tallgrass prairie. Since then I have spent countless hours in that particular landscape in all four seasons, looking at it from as many angles as I can find and wearing out several pairs of hiking boots and sneakers in the process. It’s a sanctuary, a place for reflection, meditation, and prayer, for puzzling through difficult midlife questions. As the Calvinists might say, I found a place to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”
Although I doubt Beth Kephart would put it quite that way, in Ghosts in the Garden: Reflections on Endings, Beginnings, and the Unearthing of Self she writes about her similar attraction to landscape and its ability to help her make sense of her life. For Kephart, the magnet was a 30-acre tract of pleasure gardens on the grounds of an estate known as Chanticleer, in southeastern Pennsylvania, which she visited weekly.
Just turned 41, Kephart is living the frazzled life of a writer on deadline, simmering with questions about middle age, her 20 years of marriage, and parenting her son Jeremy, diagnosed as autistic (about whom she wrote so eloquently and poignantly in A Slant of Sun and Seeing Past Z). How have I spent my life? Where am I going? What does it mean to let go of some things, and preserve others?
In 36 quiet meditations (some only a paragraph, most only a page or two long), Kephart offers deceptively simple thoughts on time spent on the grounds of Chanticleer. For years, she drove by the ruins of the estate but paid no attention: “I was crowded into the space of my life, writing and mothering and mothering and writing and holding on hard to the depleting idea that time is an enemy and that things had to get done.” Kephart’s time spent at Chanticleer signals a shift in her interior landscape—a pause in activity, a purposeful disconnection. The garden serves as both sanctuary and incubator.
“Chanticleer,” she writes, “is a pleasure garden, so beautiful that it suggests the alchemy of danger, and the flowers there are tangled up inside each other, except where they’ve been disciplined in rows.” Here, as throughout the book, the reader immediately sees Kephart’s account of her interior life reflected in her perceptions of the garden, the inner and outer landscapes locked in an often-melancholy tango.
To understand Chanticleer, she finds, is to understand its history, and how the landscape has changed over time. As she walks, she conjures “the click of whelk in a wampum belt,” the “echoes of the Lenni-Lenapes and Quakers.” Chanticleer also harbors a legacy of violence, as when its last owner, Adolph Rosengarten, Jr., was murdered. “My thoughts, as I walked, were of ghosts,” she writes, and later: “I already understood that we were ghosts just passing through … right now will be a memory soon.” The poignant fleetingness of life, so vividly expressed in the cycle of the seasons, reverberates throughout the book, more in tone than in specifics. At Chanticleer, Kephart confronts aging, and strikes an uneasy truce with the knowledge of her own mortality.
The biggest drawing card for Kephart, she says, was the calm she felt walking the byways of the old estate. Her worries subsided. The frantic demands of deadlines receded. “I grew more concerned with gains and gratitude than with losses. In the garden, my age felt like a blessing. In the garden questions that had haunted me for years found quiet resolution.”
As she mulls over her future, she realizes the value of memory in midlife: “sometimes it’s the going back that takes us forward.” She tunes in to the weather, to birdsong, to the seasons. After a lifetime spent immersing herself in the production of words, she finds comfort in her inability to identify the myriad flowers, trees, and birds. In winter, when the garden is closed, the memory of the garden becomes enough. She sifts through seeds, dreaming of spring.
Landscapes need people, and those she meets on her walks become as important as the trees and the stream in understanding herself. An elderly woman, worried that she is missing the best places in the garden, asks Kephart, “How do you see everything?” And Kephart replies, “Leave the path. Leave it. Absolutely.” The gardeners who tend Chanticleer are exemplary in the generosity with which they share their knowledge: “No hoarding of secrets here, no claiming beauty as one’s own … a gardener will broaden your perspective, if you allow a gardener to.”
When writing about gardens and about midlife, the temptation is to resort to overblown prose and flowery metaphors. While Kephart loves metaphors, seeing them as a “sideways step that shortens the distance between the unknown and the familiar,” her small book is delightfully spare. The garden is by turns a painter’s canvas, a sacrament, a sacrifice. It is music: “the sonata is the garden by the serpentine stream, where ferns uncoil early and camas blues the mood.” If one wished for anything more, Kephart might have been a bit more vulnerable about her interior life, and offered observations about the darker side of nature. Instead, this is a restful book, often tinged with pensiveness. The beauty of the gardens never dims; the only ugliness or violence is the brief mention of Rosengarten’s murder.
Superb black-and-white photos, taken by Kephart’s husband William Sulit, further illuminate her descriptions. Sulit is a Yale-trained architect, and his background comes through in the composition of his photos, be they of flora, landscape, or objects. (An appendix with titles for the photos, especially those of plants, would have been helpful.)
Of her time at Chanticleer, “some would say I accomplished nothing,” writes Kephart, adding, “the opposite is true. I would say that I was learning to trust what I could not set in language, keep, control, or hold. I would say that I was learning to surrender. To stop warring with myself, to stop needing to be right, to come to terms with shifts and change, to sit on a hill and count my blessings.”
Gretel Ehrlich wrote in The Solace of Open Spaces, “Keenly observed, the world is transformed.” This transformation, as Kephart so compellingly illustrates, goes both ways. When we observe creation, our lives are transformed in our understanding of who we are and where we are going—and in knowing more deeply the Maker of the world around us, in whose image we ourselves are made. “What happened to me at Chanticleer can happen to anyone anywhere—to anyone who takes a detour from routine and stops, at last, to search for answers to old questions,” Kephart writes. We do well to heed her advice: “Don’t wait too long to see.”
Cindy Crosby writes about nature and the spiritual life in By Willoway Brook: Exploring the Landscape of Prayer (Paraclete). She also writes the Bookmarks review column for Christianity Today magazine.
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