Boring things, living things

Wandering through Istanbul (something that had never happened to me), one can come across a very characteristic neighborhood with wooden houses. Inside one of these houses in the Çukur Cuma district, you’ll find the Museum of Innocence, conceived, founded, and managed by the Istanbulite writer Orhan Pamuk. It collects objects that have a story and displays them. There is also a beautiful novel with the same name.

For a period of my life, I found gardens unbearable. This period came at the end of another long period during which I was indifferent to them. In reality, I later realized that it wasn’t exactly the gardens themselves but rather the associations they represented. As a teenager, it seemed to me that they only served as a pretext for long and personal wars, from Paradise Lost to Vaux-le-Vicomte, all the way to the most ordinary gardens… I imagined the garden as a locus amoenus and the gardener as Samwise Gamgee, while often I saw people who, in order not to show their lack of skills, were willing to let every plant die. This was unbearable to me: I have a cousin allergic to pollen—I’m a doctor; I’ve played Assassin’s Creed—I’m a historian; I love my grandmother’s Bougainvillea, so I must be an agronomist.

I’m exaggerating, but it’s such a common complaint that it’s hard to escape, and as a teenager, it disgusted me so much that it led me to reject this environment, which has always been fundamental in my family. But the dissent I expressed was important to me: the one against culture as an exercise of power, the culture that excludes. I think this is one of the reasons why among the many activities, gardening and garden culture in general inspire a bit of fear, a bit of disgust, a bit of boredom: “no, I don’t understand anything about plants.”

Because gardens in Italy must struggle, they are in danger. All the things that have been said from the post-war period to today, I’ll make them inaccessible, building walls of concepts and experience, as if art were not also made by those who approach an ancient subject with fresh eyes, as if everything possible has already been given and said.

I am usually quite liberal when it comes to gardens. I believe that a supposed ugliness or a lack of care, are not what ruins them the most, but rather the intention and the love they have experienced… whether there is a consequentiality or not is another matter: as long as a garden makes you want to stay outside, to hide, to read and eat, to kiss, to play, then I think that garden, even if made only of Bergenia and Begonia, needs to exist, it has the right to claim its strength. It reminds me of the Museum of Innocence I mentioned earlier: a place of true stories, not idols.

Just like in Paradise in Eden.

Eden is a steppe, and in the middle was the most beautiful Garden of all, created by the best Gardener specifically for us, whom we were supposed to care for; we couldn’t manage it, we preferred to take leaves to cover ourselves and hide: we no longer saw love in the Garden, only duty. It had become an uninhabitable place for us. The good thing is that now the task is to find it again, to recreate the Garden, experimenting and, above all, following desires.

“Scintilla celeste, e impulso sovrumano vuolsi a fare un sommo poeta”1

Gardens often reflect who we are, much like homes: houses filled with books are beautiful, but if there’s never a murmur, never anything unexpected, never a scream or a buzzing bee, mold quickly takes over.