“The Garden Path” by Michael Pollan, was originally published in the April 1997 issue of Vogue.
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I don’t think that I’ve ever visited a garden without finding something to steal. No, not the statuary or the garden tools, not even a cutting—though I confess to having swiped a few seeds in my time. What I take away are ideas: for a particularly winning combination of perennials, a vine sufficiently masochistic to handle a north wall in my Zone Five garden, or maybe some neat trick for hiding the shins of my roses. Helpful as a shelfful of gardening books may be, there’s nothing quite as instructive, or inspiring, as visiting other people’s gardens—seeing them not through the lens of a photographer, who’s apt to generalize or prettify, but through one’s own acquisitive eyes.
Like so many other good horticultural habits, this one has been cultivated by the English for about as long as anyone can remember: One of the most popular summertime sports in the British isles is garden visiting. Consulting their tattered copies of the Yellow Book, a phone-book-thick compendium of 3,500 private gardens that open to the public a few days each year, thousands of English gardeners (and nongardeners) spend their weekends flitting around the countryside like honeybees, gathering ideas, indulging their taste for envy (or superiority) and, willy-nilly, conducting the kind of cross-pollination any culture’s gardens require for their continued vitality.
Now Americans, who have never been reluctant to steal a good gardening idea from the English, have their own Yellow Book: The Garden Conservancy, a nonprofit group in Cold Spring, New York, whose mission is the preservation of great American gardens, has organized Open Days, a garden-visiting scheme based on the English model. The Conservancy started out modestly a couple of years ago, with a handful of gardens in New York and Connecticut, but the program proved such a hit that this summer it goes national; private gardens clustered in the Northeast, several mid-Atlantic states, the Midwest, California, and even Hawaii will be open to the public. And the three gardens featured in these pages are all taking part, which is what separates them from the usual run of unattainably gorgeous gardens that, for all intents and purposes, exist only between the covers of magazines. For a day or two this summer, these three, and more than 200 others across the country, will actually fling open their garden gates to anyone with $4 to spare.
