Cruden Farm

An elderly visitor to Cruden Farm recently said that she was leaving feeling ‘stronger’ after having spent two hours walking around the garden.

Her companion, grasping her friend's arm, offered “...yes, it is a garden from which one draws strength”. What are the qualities of gardens that might allow people to draw strength from them?

There are, indeed, some elements that can be teased out. There are the obvious ones to do with being outside, with being in contact with nature and beauty. This is the drawing of strength by being refreshed ... the restorative effect of being in a garden. This is all well documented.

The discussion below is more speculative and attempts to pursue the emotive and physical response that people have to gardens in general and Cruden in particular.

Part of the answer to the questions posed above relate to the physical structure and unity of the garden which, in turn, relates to the guiding hand of Dame Elisabeth, while others relate to things ephemeral and esoteric.

In discussing ‘strength’ in gardens, trees seem to be a central theme and they are to be a constant thread, but not the only one, in this instance.

Trees have a solidity that is palpable. We appreciate their size, embrace their presence and somehow internalise their strength when receptive to it. We are, indeed, emboldened by them. We seem to appreciate them physically as much as visually and emotionally. How can this be?

Trees are a feature of Cruden Farm, and whether it be through the eyes of children, through the prism of Robert Vischer, through echoes of an Oriental world view or lessons provided by the visual arts we can find some clues about drawing strength.

It is a constant delight to take children around the Cruden garden and to witness their response to the trees. We talk about a tree’s roots descending far into the ground, their branches reaching far into the sky and stretching far out to the side. This they understand and they will enact it, just so, with toes clenched, pushing deep into the ground and arms outstretched reaching to the heavens above and to the horizon on the sides.

Children can experience this with ease — for us adults it is a little more difficult. We are more rigid in our thinking (and certainly more reticent to act it out) but we can feel it through the echo of our own childhood if we choose to remember.

In mythology, this is the World Tree, the ‘axus mundi’, the centre uniting the heavens above with the underworld below, the still point around which the universe revolves. Here the tree is a centring force. Do we find comfort here? Robert Vischer was a German philosopher who invented the term ‘Einfuhlung’ (aesthetic sympathy) later translated in English as ‘empathy’ in the late 1800s.

This idea developed from an older concept that linked thinking and bodily feeling with an appreciation of objects. For example, it is said that a body swells when it enters a wide hall; it sways, even in imagination, when it sees wind blowing in a tree. It is the experience of a rhythmic continuity between self and the other, between ‘outside’ and ‘in’. The suggestion here is that we objectify the self in external, spatial forms (in this case trees), projecting it into and becoming analogous with them, merging subject with object.

We become the tree; self and world unite. Trees, or groups of trees, then, are like botanical cathedrals — cavernous and protective and uplifting — and it is to this that we respond in an ‘empathetic’ way. Perhaps.

Some of the major specimens at Cruden include Elms, Oaks, Eucalypts, Cypress, Beech, Melaleucas, Acacias and Maples. The majestic Quercus firthii, the Macedon Oak, standing some 30m high and just as broad, with delicate weeping foliage, is a perfect example of a tree that takes one's breath away.

Vischer might suggest that, when we walk amongst botanical giants such as the Macedon Oak, their solidity makes us feel a little stronger, their rootedness and sure foundation makes us somehow feel more grounded, their great height somehow makes us feel that anything is achievable. There is no doubting that visitors to Cruden Farm are immediately struck by the trees, and remember them as a defining feature.

Strength, of course, is not all about solidity, it is also about balance and yielding. A tree will yield to the wind, releasing the pressure, adapting to the conditions, dancing with the gusts, bending to the will, not having its spirit broken and not acquiescing to the challenge of standing proud. It can do this because of its sure foundation, its rootedness. So watching trees in the wind can remind us of the importance of, not only standing strong, but also of bending, yielding and giving which, in turn, brings its own strength.

A principle of good garden design, which relates to balance and scale in art, is light and air, the concept that less can be more in relation to planting. The proposal here is that light and air in the garden can provide strength. In visual art terms a powerful example can be provided by the white of the paper as an integral part of a watercolour ... somewhere for the eyes to rest before moving on and a counterpoint to the wash of colour.

In a garden, air offers respite from the entanglement of our botanical characters, and room for the wash of sky. Rest is also gifted by the tranquility of water or the choreographed movement provided by a sweep of grass in the wind. There is plenty of air and light and space at Cruden Farm and it is an integral part of the aesthetic. It is precisely these things that provide rest for the eyes as one tries to take in the whole. The sweeping lawns, the lakes and dams and the negative spaces are viewed as a stage for the rest of the garden, providing a refuge from the detail and a visual path from one discrete area to another.

They all provide the opportunity to draw breath, a strengthening exercise in itself. Then there is beauty in the minutia — the individual bloom, the play of light on a leaf, the expectation provided by a bud, the interaction between bee and flower, the colour, the dew drop, the curve of a berry and any number of other specifics. It is the beauty itself that can lift the spirit; a beauty that can be at once transient and fleeting or more permanent.

The act of gardening itself can heighten this effect. Horticutural therapy is a well established discipline and one that is achieving great results among a whole range of groups with differing needs and backgrounds. The foundation of this discipline will provide many rigorous answers to the question of the emotional, physical and psychological response of individuals to gardens. It may well be that, after walking around Cruden Farm, visitors exit through the farm gates strengthened in some way. It is interesting to contemplate what that might mean in real terms — from where, indeed, this strength is drawn and how it might be internalised.

I watched the two ladies take in one last visual sweep of the garden just after their comments to me about feeling ‘strengthened’. Locked arm in arm, the two old friends turned, crossed the threshold and walked away to their old Datsun in the carpark. I wondered if they looked a touch more upright, perhaps a bit more sure-footed, a little more prepared to ride the bumps as they finished their visit to Cruden. They were certainly laughing, talking and smiling all the way, a strengthening act in itself.

 

Photography by John Christie.