EAT MY LOTUS

NOT Sheffield Park and Gardens.

Back in the day I had a girlfriend who, on one occasion, insisted we visit a place in East Sussex called Sheffield Park and Gardens.  I went along and I didn’t complain, at least not too much, but at the time I could think of few things more boring or more staid or (god forbid) middle aged than going for a walk in a garden.

Well, if we’re lucky enough to survive, middle age has a way of happening to us whether we want it to or not.  And these days walking in a garden seems a great pleasure.  I accept that it remains bit staid but it’s seldom boring, and I suppose that’s because I’ve trained myself not to be bored.

I didn’t take any photographs of Sheffield Park at the time, but all the current images show this path and bridge, and I’ve just about convinced myself that I remember them.

More than that, I discover that Sheffield Park and Garden now has a section called Walk Wood, a piece of woodland acquired as a windbreak for the main garden, and at the moment it contains work by a local artist named Keith Pettit who, according to the website, “has created a collection of sculptures that form a new trail through the woodland.”

I’d like to see that, but I happen to find myself living some five and a half thousand miles away.  But now that I like gardens, I’ve been able to console myself by visiting at Lotusland, a 37 acre garden up the coast by Santa Barbara.  The last owner Ganna Walska (1887-1984) certainly made it what it is today though the overall estate was established in 1882 by Ralph Kinton Stevens who named it "Tanglewood" and turned it unto a lemon and palm and olive nursery. This, I gather, is how it looked in 1896:

The estate changed hands quite a few times until Madame Walska bought it in 1941 the intention of naming it Tibetland and using it as a retreat for Tibet monks.  Her then husband Theos Bernard who was a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism and called himself “the first white lama.”

There are still signs of their plans:

And although there’s nothing resembling a “sculpture trail,” there are these things French “grotesques,” from a previous estate Madame Walska had outside of Paris before the war.  When the Nazis came, she fled, and her gardeners who remained buried the grotesques and madam’s Rolls Royce in a hole in the garden, where they remained until the end of hostilities when they were excavated and found to be intact.

         These days Lotusland owned by a trust and is open to the public, but you have to have reservations and unless you’re a member – which is a pricey business – you’re only allowed to walk in the garden as part of guided tour.

Our guide was excellent and the group was small and I knew what I was getting myself into, but even so it was still a bit constraining.  In a two hour walk you cover about a mile and a half, so there’s inevitably as much standing about as there is walking, which is not entirely what the psychogeographer ordered.

         Hard to imagine that Madame Walska was much of a walker, though she  did take a daily stroll around her garden, and I imagine came back with a list of improvements to give to the gardener.  One also imagines that a walk with Madame Walska would have been a rather theatrical affair.

FROM BOWLING GREEN TO THE MARIE ANTOINETTE

I don’t know much about political and racial infighting in New York in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, but I do know that the Encyclopedia of African American History describes Charles William Anderson (1866-1938) as “the black Karl Rove of his day” – which sounds hard on anyone - and also as Booker T. Washington’s “eyes and ears and nose and dirty trickster.”

His fortunes rose and fell over the decades but for a very long time he was a man who had to be dealt with in New York politics, and one person who dealt with him was James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), the author of the social history Black Manhattan, a songwriter, teacher, and a national organizer for the NAACP.

Johnson writes in his autobiography Along This Way,

“I sometimes visited Mr. Anderson at his office in the Custom House to talk over Club matters.  (I’m pretty sure this was the ‘Colored Republican Club’) These visits were generally in the afternoon, and he would at times, say, ‘You’re not in a hurry are you?  I’ll be through in a little while, and we’ll walk along and talk.’  These walks that seemed like nothing to him taxed me terribly.  His antidote for fatigue was to stop in somewhere and get a pint of champagne.  I frequently had to rebel against walking another step.  I remember that on one afternoon we started from Bowling Green and ended up at the Marie Antoinette Hotel at Broadway and 66^th Street.  In one of our talks, Mr. Anderson suggested that it would be a nice thing for me to go into the United States Consular Service; he felt sure that President Roosevelt would be willing to appoint me.”

The walk from Bowling Green to the Marie Antoinette would have been a little over five miles (the hotel is long gone), so not an especially heroic walk, but a long way if you’re not ready for it, I suppose.  And I do wonder how many places there were in Manhattan at that time where a black politician could order a pint of champagne.  Perhaps quite a few.  But Anderson was right: Johnson was duly appointed a US Consul, first to Venezuela and then to Nicaragua, between 1906 and 1912: interesting times.

Despite his “rebelling” against Anderson's enforced walk, Johnson knew at least something about the pleasures of walking.  Here’s a passage about New York from his novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)

“As I walked about that evening I began to feel the dread power of the city; the crowds, the lights, the excitement, the gayety and all its subtler stimulating influences began to take effect upon me. My blood ran quicker, and I felt that I was just beginning to live. To some natures this stimulant of life in a great city becomes a thing as binding and necessary as opium is to one addicted to the habit. It becomes their breath of life; they cannot exist outside of it; rather than be deprived of it they are content to suffer hunger, want, pain and misery; they would not exchange even a ragged and wretched condition among the great crowd for any degree of comfort away from it.”

GOOD FENCES, SO-SO NEIGHBORS

When I first moved to Los Angeles there was a book in all the bookstores titled The Secret Gardens of Hollywood  by Adele Cygelman, and I looked at it and did think of buying it because I like gardens and I like secrets, but it was $45 and so in the end I didn’t, but that title stayed on my mind.

Then, as I walked and explored the city, I soon learned that a very high percentage  of gardens in these parts are in fact “secret” gardens, at least to the extent that they have high walls and tall hedges, fiercely impenetrable gates, and they turn their backs on the world, creating a private space that can’t be seen by the passing polloi: that would be me.

This applies more to the hills than to the flatlands, and more to the rich than the poor, and there are exceptions in all directions, but the general principle remains sound, I think.  There’s even a thing that the local garden nurseries call a Hollywood hedge – like this:

And here's one in my own neighborhood:

But another thing, and in a sense it’s the same thing, a great many properties have a thin sliver of land that’s outside the fence or hedge, and the proud home owner doesn’t think much about it, certainly doesn’t think of it as part of the garden, and so it gets ignored and neglected, and “nature” takes over.  

On the other side of the gate or wall or hedge, there’s order, and outside there’s chaos.  Both obviously have their place and their attractions, but as a walker you see far more chaos than you do order.  You can pick the symbolism out of that one till the cows come home.

Mr Brad Pitt lives on the other side of this mess:

FITTEST?

My friend Tammy sent me an article from the BBC titled “What you can learn from Einstein’s quirky habits,” subtitled “More than 10 hours of sleep and no socks – could this be the secret to thinking like a genius?”  - To which Betteridge’s law of headlines (and I suppose subtitles) surely applies: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.  It was one of those “geniuses do the darnedest things” type of article, but it was sent to me because of old man Einstein’s walking habits.  This is him in Princeton:

The article ran, “Einstein’s daily walk was sacred to him. While he was working at Princeton University, New Jersey, he’d walk the mile and a half journey there and back. He followed in the footsteps of other diligent walkers, including Darwin who went for three 45 minute walks every day.”

I must say I first read that as Darwin doing forty-five walks of 3 minutes each which would have been really off the wall, but he wasn’t quite that eccentric.  In fact three walks a day doesn’t strike me as eccentric at all, though it may suggest he had a lot of time on his hands.

Darwin’s son Francis drew up a timetable describing his father’s typical day in middle age and later.  One walk before breakfast, one before lunch “starting with visit to greenhouse, then round the sandwalk, the number of times depending on his health, usually alone or with a dog,” then another at 4 pm  “usually round sandwalk, sometimes farther afield and sometimes in company.”  There was also a fair amount of work, rest, and having his wife Emma read to him.

So yes 3 walks of 45 minutes, more or less, sometimes shorter, sometimes longer.  The “sandwalk” also referred to as Darwin's “think path” was, and I believe still is, a gravel track around Sandwalk Wood a piece of land Darwin rented then owned, adjacent to his house. Darwin walked circuits on the path. Today it looks like this:

The sandwalk is only a quarter of a mile round trip, so you could get around it quite a few times in 45 minutes, and apparently Darwin set up a pile of stones at a certain point on the circuit so that he could kick away one of them each time he passed.  That way he wouldn’t have to interrupt his thinking by counting the number of circuits he’d done, although you might also ask why he needed to count circuits at all. 

I’d have thought somebody would have taken a photograph of Darwin walking but if they did I can’t find one, though there is this fine one of him on a horse:

As for Einstein, the BBC article continues, “No list of Einstein’s eccentricities would be complete without a mention of his passionate aversion to socks. ‘When I was young,’ he wrote in a letter to his cousin – and later, wife – Elsa, ‘I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in a sock. So I stopped wearing socks.’”

Now you and I may have thought that shoes without socks was just an annoying hipster affectation, and definitely no good for walking, but wait, there’s more in the article,  “Later in life, when he couldn’t find his sandals he’d wear Elsa’s sling backs instead.” Now this is way more than eccentric, if you ask me.

As you see in the picture above he is indeed wearing what appear to be women’s shoes, although not sling backs, and whether they’re his wife’s or his own or somebody else’s I can’t say.  And at other times …