Garden of Gold

It was Sir Walter Raleigh who got me started on the garden of gold (I am always chasing Sir Walter and his moonbow).  His 1595 voyage to South America in hopes of finding El Dorado and regaining the favor of Elizabeth I, his ‘Cynthia’, was disastrous:  he found no gold, his eldest son Wat was killed, and upon his return he was accused of fraud in overstating the voyage’s prospects, a charge that eventually led to his execution.  He knew it might happen; knew that he was in danger as soon as he stepped onto English shores and so composed as masterful a document of spin as any political party ever used to torque a bad election result.

In his account of the  ‘Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, with a relation of the great and golden city of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado) etc. performed in the year 1595”, Raleigh attempted to divert attention away from his failure by describing lots of things that he had heard about, but not actually seen, including this description:

“Yea, and they say, the Incas had a garden of pleasure in an island near Puna, where they went to recreate themselves, when they would take the air of the sea, which had all kinds of garden-herbs, flowers, and trees of gold and silver; an invention and magnificence till then never seen.”

Like Eldorado itself, it is a myth grown large in the retelling, but one that is nonetheless based in fact. 

There WAS a Garden of Gold. 

At Coricancha, the sacred precinct of the Incan capital Cuzco,  grew a supremely artificial and precious garden that honored not a decorative landscape tradition but a productive one:  the cultivation of maize.  

“They had also a garden, the clods of which were made of pieces of fine gold; and it was artificially sown with golden maize, the stalks, as well as the leaves and cobs, being of that metal.” 
The Second Part of the Chronicle of Peru, Pedro de Cieza de León, 1532-1550

The only eyewitness account to survive is that of Pizarro, who is also the only one to speak of how the Garden of Gold was used, in a ritual 'growing' of the golden food:

"Away from the room where the Sun was wont to sleep they made a small field, which was much like a large one, where at the proper season they sowed maize. They sprinkled it by hand with water brought on purpose for the Sun.  And at the time when they celebrated their festivals, which was three times a year, that is when they sowed the crops, when they harvested them, and when they made orejones; they filled this garden with cornstalks made of gold having their ears and leaves very much like natural maize all made of very fine gold which they had kept in order to place them here at these times."

Maize was clearly the garden's patron saint, its centrality is apparent in all the accounts.  But they differ as to the other features of the garden:  de Leon describes twenty golden sheep and lambs, along with figures of shepherds to keep watch, while Garcillasso de la Vega (c. 1600)  recounts a complete landscape of flower, fowl,  and creeping things:  

“That garden, which now supplies the convent with vegetables, was in the time of the Incas a garden of gold and silver, such as they also had in the royal palaces. It contained many herbs and flowers of different kinds, many small plants, many large trees, many large and small animals both wild and domestic, and creeping things, such as serpents, lizards, and toads, as well as shells, butterflies, and birds. Each of these things was placed in its natural position. There was also a large field of maize, the grain they call quinua, pulses, and fruit trees with their fruit; all made of gold and silver.”

And the enclosing garden wall was covered with a band of gold all around its perimeter, to reflect the sun.  de la Vega's mention of the convent is telling; it is likely around the time of its establishment (c. 1571) that the garden disappeared into the yawning, insatiable maws of the Spanish galleons.

So in fact, the garden of gold was already gone by the time Raleigh penned his apologia.  As with all great troves, there are of course rumors that it was buried, that it was hidden, that it might still be found.  But for now only a few stalks of maize remain.  

Incan gold and silver stalk of maize from the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

 

Garden History Giveaway Winner!

Another favorite from Frances Benjamin Johnston...the 'House of Usefulness' school window at the National Cash Register Company in Dayton, Ohio.  From the Library of Congress.

The random number generator at random.org selected comment 20 as the winner...so Gardens for a Beautiful America goes to Bell and Star!  Please email me your postal address to receive your book.

And thanks to everyone for the very kind comments...fingers crossed they will keep me posting more regularly.  Watch for more giveaway opportunities to come! 

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Garden History Giveaway: Gardens for a Beautiful America, Frances Benjamin Johnston

I love the way the title of this book sits in American garden history.  America's strongest landscape tradition is not of its private gardens but of its national parks; and 'Beautiful America' is most often, even today, its unique wildernesses.  In 'My Country 'Tis of Thee', the nation's de facto anthem, it is

"Thine inland seas, Thy groves and giant trees,Thy rolling plains;Thy rivers' mighty sweep,Thy mystic canyons deep,Thy mountains wild and steep,--"

of which we sing, and where stronger 'garden' histories arise (of the garden as opposed to the natural or presumed natural landscape) they are generally in more urban regions of what remains a sparsely populated country, for its size. 

from the online history of Frances Benjamin Johnston at clio, which also lists her main biographical sources

But Frances Benjamin Johnston--pioneering photographer, photojournalist, visual artist, whose garden photography, 1895-1935 is the subject of a truly beautiful new book by Acanthus Press--was a city girl and saw the making of gardens as a way to improve urban conditions, presaging modern trends like the urban farming movement and guerilla gardening.

She was a member of the first city garden club, The Society of Little Gardens, founded in Philadelphia in 1915, which promoted 'the love of growing plants and making gardens within small city limits'.  Her goals are still laudable today:

"...to turn unsightly backyards into gardens, to beautify all waste places, to plant trees near important buildings and on long treeless streets, to encourage window-box planting, and to be observant of the workings of the park department, in order that we may make city life richer by fostering the love of beauty..." 

 (gardenhistorygirl detects a bit of suspicion of the nefarious park department there), and her photography was part and parcel:

"...we feel that it is very necessary to have photographs for successful developments so that people can clearly see the possibilities of their own backyards, and receive inspiration". 

Laura Stafford Stewart house, 205 West 13th Street, New York, New York

Grey Gardens in the Hamptons in 1914, later to be famous as the home of Big and Little Edie

A celebrity photographer, FBJ shot the wedding of Alice Roosevelt, portraits of successive US Presidents, and produced vanity garden spreads for wealthy homeowners as well as photographing gardens for 'magazines of class'.  But she used that access and patronage to further her own goals, to do things like documenting vanishing colonial architecture or the success of the agriculture college in Hampton, Virginia, where Booker T. Washington went to school. 

Cupola House, Edenton, North Carolina;  in the Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

from MoMa:  Agriculture. Plant life: Experiments with plants and soil Frances Benjamin Johnston (American, 1864–1952)

1899-1900.

In these efforts she was catholic in her taste, photographing both hovels and plantation houses. Her garden photography, though heavily weighted toward the rich and famous, shows this same expansiveness, an appreciation of the beauty to be found on the stairs to a basement apartment, as in my favorite photograph of the collection, the Janitor's Garden.

1922

"The most ardent and enthusiastic horticulturist I ever met was an eastside janitor who gave the best of the sunlight  that filtered into his gloomy basement to his window boxes filled with 'Old Man' and stunted geraniums and who rescued the faded Easter plants thrown out on the ash-heap...'  FBJ, 1926

Most of the photos are something of a Social Register for Gardens, with hand-coloring in FBJ's preferred Ruskinian idealism to boot.  So you'll find the Vanderbilt estates here, and some of England and Italy's most famous gardens, but I am more enamored of the Rhode Island Farmhouse and the sandbox in the back of a doctor's townhouse and the California adobes (present day Californians could learn much from the appropriateness of these landscapes to their settings). 

FBJ 1917

I had seen some of these images before, but without proper credit to Frances.  Now they're all appropriately catalogued, thanks to years of efforts on the part of the book's author Sam Watters.  They are freely online at the Library of Congress, which  holds FBJ's archive,  but it is much nicer to have them along with the informed discussion of the American Garden Beautiful that the book provides.

The lovely folks at Acanthus Press have made a copy available to give away to you, dear readers!  Just leave a comment to this post by midnight CST on Monday, May 14 to be eligible. You can leave any sort of a comment, but of course I always like to hear nice words about the blog.  Nice or not, though, all comments will be numbered and the winner selected by random number generator on Tuesday.   Bonne chance!