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by Nathaniel Popkin
September 25, 2008
Here, in this lush, quiet, deeply observed and carefully researched book (winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction),
we are reminded of all that is heaving below our feet. In this city of discovery, the author Sharon White, a professor of writing at Temple University, sifts
through Philadelphia dirt, Philadelphia seed, bark, and leaf, through Philadelphia marsh, and river water, grass, and burrow, and finds the gardeners of our past,
people like John Haviland, Henry Pratt, Deborah Norris, William Logan, and John and William and Anne Bartram, and Mary Gibson Henry. And in so doing takes comfort
in her own life, with husband and son, in a city that felt at first foreign, hard, and unforgiving.
I have no connections here, no friends or relations, my history doesn't touch this creek or this river, their patch of ground in the mid-Atlantic.
But intrinsically she senses that in Philadelphia, it's our burden to own, to connect. The city obliges the instinct to explore, and the author carries forth:
But isn't it still a wilderness of sorts? The bones of the wilderness still there in the brooks flowing in pipes under the city, the soil that pokes up with its
own history of the old wilderness soil, rerouted, recycled elements . . . And if I could, if I were strong enough, rip the fabric of the city at the edge and peel
it away to rocks that were there all the time. Wilderness just under the surface. Breathing its clear breath right into my face.
White, a poet, underscores her book with a natural rhythm, and the sentences fall like drops of rain. She steps back and forth, into the shadows and out, out to
the heavens and into her flower boxes, into geological time -- and geological space -- and out into the contours of our memory. Much as Beth Kephart in
Flow, White
mixes carefully studied observations of our nature -- rivers, creeks, woodlands, and the human presence -- with the voices of people who came here, sowed seed,
explored, rotated crops, carved magic, public gardens, and fell deeply into the rhythmic trance of the land itself.
As much as Vanished Gardens makes a nice companion to Flow, and indeed to a range of wonderful new writing that grapples with this city's encounter
with its past,
it reminds me most of the poet Kathleen Norris' 1993 Dakota: A Spiritual Journey. In that book, as this, the author observes the seasons, tests religious
faith,
explores the contexts of place, and comes, finally, to acceptance and perhaps, contentment. Both authors use discreet essays to uncover emotional truth. And both
books are, indeed, personal spiritual journeys by outsiders, with the places emerging as surprisingly forceful, meaningful, and entirely captivating.
In White's narrative, this recognition comes as a rush, like an epiphany, or the prick of a thorn (the chapter is called "Rose"):
I want to be charmed by the city but I'm not. Not by the woman with the perky little dog who greets me on her travels, not by the man sleeping in the park as I run
several times past, his encampment a brown sheet, a brown paper bag, a shopping cart with a symbolic fan that's real, propped on its side, a few possessions near
his head, boots, a shirt -- by the third time around the baseball fields he's stretching, one arm help up to the sun. Not by the cluster of birds in the dead fruit
tree, starlings and sparrows and crows, companions in the morning that's heating up with each circle around the fields. Not by the man rousing himself on a bench
or the other adjusting his shoes near his feet, not by the handmade table propped by the Sisters behind their convent on two stumps, not by the single rose blooming
in their garden. Not by the falling leaves of the sycamores, crumpling in the dry heat, not by the fountain spewing silver water, not by the little boy learning to
walk right in front of our door, not by the blue jay calling in the morning or the fat spider strung up on the clematis and tomato on the deck. Not by the two
matching children with backpacks, both miniatures of their tall mother or the church smelling cool as I walk past up the street. Not by the word "lucky" scrawled
in a sidewalk, not by putting one foot and then another into the letters as I walk.
She gets it, this new city of hers, and there is joy, a kind of raw sensual pleasure in her discovery. There's a limit too -- I suspect to the memoir form more
than the author's own imagination. Some of my sensing of this limit is a response to the writing itself. There are too many sentences that feel like an
exhalation, and that default begins to feel manipulative. (It's something Norris mostly avoids in Dakota.) I'm being made to feel something, but what I'm
feeling too often is the lightness of the author's touch and not the brush of a leaf, the splash of water, the grief of loss.
But the trouble is in the medium. It's a memoir, which makes it ultimately all about the author. Kephart solves this problem by making the Schuylkill River her
main character; the river is both historical and contemporary, and all the old voices flash around it. That distance between author and subject allows for humor,
honesty, and anger. White, on the other hand, and aside from a few neighbors she mentions and others she talks to in passing, is the contemporary point of
reference in Vanished Gardens. It may have been ultimately more powerful, I think, to connect the treasure trove of past gardeners, with their unitary
Anglo-heritage, not just her own life but to the polyglot of real gardeners here, today. It would have been even more revealing. The reader certainly senses her
interest in this contemporary scene. Let's hope she's still finding joy in discovery, because there's a whole lot more to sift through.
–Nathaniel Popkin
nathaniel.popkin@gmail.com
For Nathaniel Popkin archives, please see HERE, or visit his web site HERE.
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