Life and Death in a Garden

30 May Life and Death in a Garden

Colors pursue me like a constant worry. They even worry me in my sleep.
– Claude Monet

The recent release from Doppelhouse Press, Even When Fall is Here is a bilingual, fictionalized, multi-seasonal, communication between now deceased landscape architect Chris Shea, Painter Erick Meyenberg, garden owner Eloisa Haudenschild, and curator and writer Ruth Estevez. In it, Estevez creates an intertextual, fictionalized narrative that brings together Meyenberg’s observations, various email communications, historical accounts of gardening by other writers, video recordings, and logbooks kept by Shea, to create a protagonist that allows the reader to explore several considerations, including life and death, native versus immigrant, and time and decay. All born out of the passing seasons of a garden.

In the rich interplay of the many sources Estevez pulls together, questions are generated that don’t have easy answers. The reader cannot escape the heavy weight of historical representations of gardens, and the significance given to them by observers and toilers alike. There is a sense that Shea regarded color as objective, arising and dissipating according to time, with no additional meaning necessary. However, the ‘man versus nature’ theme cannot be eluded. Raising the question, how do we live more fully in the seasons, the uncertainty, and the revealing?

A more contemporary question gets posed in this work in an email communication between Shea and Eloisa Haudenschild, the owner of the garden, where he describes his approach to native and non-native “immigrants” in his garden. Shea shares his own translation of what a native is in his world, arguing for the magical that can be created in “unique collaborations.” A prescient message for our times.

Designed by Jessica Fleischmann, Even When Fall is Here is a beautiful book. Created over a two-year period, the project ultimately produced a six-channel video, 45 paintings by Meyenberg, and this book. There is beauty in the instruction manual and color ranges that Shea left for Haudenschild to keep her garden alive, much of which is reproduced in this book. Although the book is a composite of the real and unreal, at the heart of it is an honest conversation—a marker of a man’s final months and legacy, and the remembering of his place in his world. A place we will all find ourselves in one day; hopefully in or near a garden.