Why make something beautiful?

on starting a rose garden

cutting new beds and building new stone walls to tame a hill, a misty May morning, 2024

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

— Dr. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 1750

It has been six years since our house was complete-enough to move in, though we are still incrementally finishing. Last year was the first summer I really turned my attention to gardening.

Improving an existing garden allows one to build upon coherence, to work within a plan, and to work slowly. Starting a garden from nothing — cutting every bed, making stone walls and level sections, selecting every plant — is a little more intimidating. If you don’t want to wait a decade, big commitments are necessary. Despite the benefits to starting early, for the first years I gave the gardens little attention beyond some sporadic experiments. I had more than enough outdoor work to do just taming the nearby land back into fields and putting together a small orchard.

But I am now ready for bigger commitments. The more I expand the gardens outward from the house, the stranger it seems not to try something ambitious. Why not lay out something so big that the design will take years, something unusually lush, mass plantings of roses and small flowers and fruit, and try to make something really beautiful?

Lady of Shalott, June 2024

So I am going to create a rose garden, a little stately near the house, a little sprawling as it enters the fields. I want to make it visible enough that it can become a public adornment of my town. It should start out front, close to the road.

So far (in mostly 2024) I have planted 97 rose bushes. Not 97 different kinds, I am interested in a good deal of massing, so I often plant in sets of at least 3 to give a larger appearance. They are:

And for this coming spring I have ordered 39 more, so far:

This will take some time. These and the roses that follow will take some years to reach a mature size. I really don’t know what is manageable by one person. It is an eternal conceit of civilization to build beyond one’s grasp, to find out what is possible to maintain only by doing too much. So at least I am in good company.

I expect this to take a good deal of time in building and upkeep. Big ornamental gardens are usually considered as the work of institutions, or else retired people. But I don’t want to wait until I’m elderly to contemplate and enjoy something so sweet, and a big part of the appeal is the creation of something my children will enjoy while they are still children.

I want to make a world that is full of the work of magic for them, full of beautiful places to play and find each-other. This extends beyond roses of course, to the orchard, the meadows and streams, the barns I build, and all the hidden places those things create together.

And of course I want to make a home that is full of good work and full of good work for them to do. I believe that making beautiful things matters, that the effort is worth it, and I want them to see this with their own eyes and hands.

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There is an initial outlay — in addition to roses I have bought and planted over three thousand bulbs, mostly species tulips and daffodils, to say nothing of the other garden companions. And much more will be spread out over the coming years as budget and time sensibly permit. But I think that the beauty of most places is not actually proportional to the expense, rather its in the care and the selection. After all many places of magnificent budgets nonetheless have quite barren landscaping (in fact, when I visited the mansions of Newport, I was surprised how many had almost no flowers. Instead many had entirely shrub-based gardening, which I now see as characteristic of so many American homes). And in the nearby institutional rose gardens I do see — like Fuller Gardens on the New Hampshire coast, or the Boston rose garden near the fens — I confess that for all their advantages of labor and budget and machinery, they don’t strike me. They look more like chambers of specimens, rather than places to view as a whole. As if their curators decided to create some drawers instead of rooms.

Fuller Garden, seacoast NH

Kelleher Rose Garden in Boston

As a display of hundreds of rose varieties they fulfill their mission, but I want to avoid a focus on roses without any focus on fittingness.¹ These gardens have no affordance for seclusion, no use of shadows, no outdoor "rooms", and few companions. This makes them feel separate, almost antiseptic. Can careful work and planning alone make something better? Possibly that’s a delusional thought, but it’s one I want to try.

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One last reason. Since ancient days people have acted on an impulse to build temples and gardens and other places of inexpressible magnificence, at whatever scale they could, from the Acropolis to the roadside shrine. Perhaps our ancestors would think it strange that we, with our unimaginable riches and comforts of the future, scarcely care to build such things. I think it no surprise that we do not find nymphs, or other creatures of pure poetry, if we do not build fountains for them to haunt. The ancient impulse has always struck me as intuitive, now I have the means to try.

I want to create something that lures the divine.

If you are a paid subscriber, you are probably already adopting a rose, so thank you.

1. I think fitting in is one of the most underrated virtues of beautiful environments. I have only written about that a little, here.