So why are there gardens for which time has stopped, gardens in which you are transported to another era with such ease you barely notice the shift, gardens through which you walk as if gowned, cloaked in the very air of the period? Again, the answer is time and space. When the physical space of the garden is large enough, when the passage through requires that we submit ourselves for a substantial piece of time, our world and our time falls away. Without the distance such time and space affords, we remain connected to the present circumstance and never have the chance to leave ourselves behind.

Although the rest of the Park is seldom without sound and I am not so removed from the world that I don’t notice traffic moving on all sides, the fifteen-minute walk one end to the other is all I need to experience that shift. I focus on the trees, magnificently old, and the way the light floats through the leaves in Summer or falls to the still ground in Winter. There is enough time and enough space for me to see them as they were. I don’t know how many minutes or how many steps set the threshold for enough, but the poor little rose garden has neither. It has been severed from its past and cast adrift in our present. Without the anchor of time, it is mere relic.

There is a sadness to relics, a melancholy born of death. We marvel at the civilization that created the object, but even as we admire we know we are looking into a culture that time has swept away. We can uncover the bones, reassemble the shards, study the architecture, and duplicate the jewels, but we cannot bring the culture back to life. A garden, though, is supposed to be alive, and so the pain of witnessing its living death is all the more acute. If we cannot, for want of space, be pulled back to the time of the garden’s origin, we must move the garden forward in time.

There are two components to this understanding of time and space: that of keeping the garden grounded in the esoteric sense, and that of grounding in the very real sense. To me, taking care to provide sufficient physical space is easy, and yet it’s the very thing that seems to confound people. You’ll have no confusion, though, if you keep this image in mind: when you buy most plants, they’re two-year-old toddlers. Just as the toddler human will outgrow his crib seemingly overnight, the toddler plant will outgrow its earthen equivalent. We can replace the crib with a full-sized bed to accommodate the child’s growth, but if we have not provided the plant with ample space it has nowhere to go. Imagine a gangly teenager in a trundle bed and you get the idea.