IN THE GARDEN about gardening and politics. . .

The day after

I spoke to a group of people at the Garden Conservancys tenth-
anniversary celebration, in Charleston, South Carolina, an
American man named Frank Cabot, the chairman and founder
of the organization and a very rich man, who has spent some of
his money creating a spectacular garden in the surprisingly
hospitable climate of eastern Canada, told me that he was sorry
I had been invited, that he was utterly offended by what I had
said and the occasion I had used to say it, for I had done
something unforgivableI had introduced race and politics into
the garden. . . There were three of us on a panel, and our topic
was "My Favorite Garden.". . . Writer explained that she was
going to talk on the Garden of Eden but after a man described a
garden he was re-creating in Chicago after a garden in
Auschwitz, which also made use of Edenic symbolism, she
changed her speech to mention a park in Charleston with both a
Holocaust memorial and a statue of John Caldwell Calhoun that
inventor of the rhetoric of states rights and the evil encoded in
it, who was elected Vice-President of the United States twice. I
remarked on how hard it must be for the black citizens of
Charleston to pass each day by the statue of a man who hated
them, cast in a heroic pose.. . . Writer visits Middleton Place, the
famous plantation, whose rice paddies were built and operated
by slaves... Tells about Jefferson's gardening notebooks. . . What
is beautiful about Monticello is the views, whether you are
looking out from the house or looking at it from far away.
Jefferson did not so much make a garden as a landscape. . .
Writer justifies an elaborate set of terraces she has built for her
garden and describes the plantings. . .