The Garden

Eleven Rooms

Chapter 13: The Garden

The garden is the room without a ceiling. The garden is the room whose walls are the building itself, the wings of the hospice enclosing the courtyard the way arms enclose a body, the enclosure not a confinement but a holding, the building wrapping around the garden the way a hand wraps around a seed, and the seed is the garden, and the garden is the center, and the center is the reason the building has the shape it has, the open hand, the fingers radiating outward from the palm, and the palm is the garden, the palm is the earth, the palm is the place where the ground is visible and the sky is visible and the rain falls and the sun falls and the seasons are present in a way that they are not present inside the building, because inside the building the temperature is seventy-two degrees and the light is controlled and the air is filtered, and the control and the filtering are necessary, are the building's service to the dying, but the garden is the place where the control is released, where the filtering is removed, where the world is admitted without the mediation of glass and mechanical systems, the world raw, the world as it is, and the as-it-is is the garden's gift to the building and to the people inside the building.

Miriam designed the garden on a Saturday morning in late October, the morning after the materials meeting with James, the morning after the conversation about cork and glass and acoustic plaster and the real things that the dying deserve, and the garden was a real thing, was the most real thing, was the place in the building where the real was most present, because the garden was the earth, was the actual earth, the soil and the plants and the rain and the insects and the birds and the worms in the soil and the microorganisms in the worms and the chemistry of decomposition and growth that was happening continuously, invisibly, beneath the surface of the garden, the garden alive in a way that the building was not alive, the garden biological, the garden a system of living things interacting with the soil and the water and the air and the light, and the system was the garden, and the garden was the system, and the system was what Miriam was designing around, was placing at the center, was making the heart of the building.

She had always put gardens in her hospices. Every building since Ridgeline, her fourth, had a garden -- not the landscaped perimeter, not the ornamental plantings that surrounded the building's exterior, but the interior garden, the courtyard, the room without a ceiling, the space that was both inside and outside, that was enclosed by the building but open to the sky, that belonged to the building but belonged also to the weather, to the seasons, to the particular climate of the site, and the belonging-to-both was the garden's essential quality, the quality that made the garden the most important room in the building, more important than the patient rooms, more important than the kitchen, more important than the corridors and the common areas and the staff spaces, because the garden was the room that connected the building to the world it had displaced, the room that said: the building remembers what was here before, the building acknowledges what it has replaced, the building is not an imposition upon the land but a negotiation with the land, and the garden is the evidence of the negotiation, the place where the building and the land meet and agree.

At Orchard House the negotiation was specific, was historical, was about the orchard. The land had been an orchard for forty years. Apple trees. Varieties she had researched after the site visit -- Gravenstein and Honeycrisp and Braeburn -- the trees planted in rows, the rows spaced twenty feet apart, the trees pruned and sprayed and harvested for four decades, the orchard a working landscape, a productive landscape, a landscape organized around the calendar of fruit -- the blossoming in April, the fruit set in May, the thinning in June, the ripening through July and August, the harvest in September and October, the cycle annual, the cycle the orchard's clock, the clock that had ticked for forty years and then stopped when the trees stopped producing and the orchard was abandoned and the trees were removed, most of them, cut to stumps, the stumps left in the ground, the root systems still present beneath the surface, the roots reaching outward in the soil the way the building's corridors would reach outward from the garden, the roots and the corridors the same gesture, the reaching.

Six or seven trees survived along the northern boundary. She had seen them on the site visit, the unpruned trees, the wild trees, the trees that had been released from the discipline of the orchard and had grown according to their own inclination, the branches reaching where the branches wanted to reach, the form natural rather than agricultural, the trees becoming what apple trees become when they are not managed, when the pruning stops and the spraying stops and the human intention that had organized the trees for forty years withdraws and the trees are left to the governance of their own biology, and the biology produces a different tree, a wilder tree, a tree with more branches and smaller fruit and a form that is irregular, asymmetrical, the form of a living thing that is responding to its conditions without the intervention of a plan.

Miriam wanted the surviving trees in the garden. She wanted to transplant them from the northern boundary to the central courtyard, to bring them inside the building's embrace, to make them the garden's primary occupants, the living things around which the rest of the garden would be organized. She called an arborist in Bend, a woman named Elena Voss who specialized in the care and transplantation of mature fruit trees, and Elena Voss had examined the trees and had determined that four of the seven could be successfully moved, the four with the healthiest root systems, the four whose roots had not been compromised by the removal of the adjacent trees, which had been done carelessly, with a bulldozer rather than a saw, the bulldozer tearing the stumps from the ground and disturbing the soil and severing the roots of the nearby trees, the carelessness a small destruction that Elena Voss could read in the soil the way Thea could read a patient in the blankets and the hands, the damage visible to the trained eye, the trained eye seeing what the untrained eye missed.

Four trees. Four apple trees from the original orchard, each approximately forty-five years old, each with a trunk diameter of eight to ten inches, each with a canopy spread of fifteen to eighteen feet, each with a root system that extended roughly as far as the canopy, the roots occupying the same volume of soil that the branches occupied of air, the root system a mirror of the canopy, the tree symmetrical around the ground plane, the above and the below equal, the visible and the invisible of the same size, and the equality was a structural fact that Miriam appreciated with the architect's appreciation for proportion, for the balance between the seen and the unseen, for the correspondence between what is above the surface and what is below, the correspondence that governs buildings as well as trees -- the foundation below, the structure above, the below supporting the above, the above depending on the below, the correspondence the architecture.

She drew the garden. She drew it on the trace paper, the same roll, the same pen, the garden drawn at the center of the building plan, the courtyard that the building's wings enclosed, the space thirty feet by forty feet, twelve hundred square feet of earth and air and sky surrounded by the building's walls and windows and corridors, the garden visible from the patient rooms through the garden-facing windows, the garden visible from the corridors through the glass walls that separated the indoor circulation from the outdoor space, the garden visible from the kitchen and the common area and the family rooms, the garden the thing that every room in the building could see, the thing that connected all the rooms to each other through the shared view of the same trees and the same earth and the same sky.

She placed the four apple trees. She placed them not in a grid, not in the rows that the orchard had imposed, but in the arrangement that the arborist recommended for the trees' health, the arrangement that gave each tree adequate space for its root system and its canopy, the arrangement determined by the trees' needs rather than the architect's geometry, and the determination was a concession, a yielding, the architect yielding to the tree the way the architect yields to the light, accepting the thing that is already there, the thing that has its own requirements, its own needs, its own non-negotiable conditions, and the tree's conditions were the root space and the canopy space and the water and the soil depth and the light, the same light that the patient rooms required, the same east-facing morning light that would enter the garden as well as the rooms, the light that did not distinguish between the inside and the outside, the light that treated the garden and the patient room as the same thing, which they were, which was the design.

Between the apple trees she drew the paths. Decomposed granite, the color of the high-desert soil, the paths wide enough for a wheelchair, wide enough for a hospital bed, because the garden was a room and the room should be accessible to all its occupants, including the occupants who could not walk, including the occupants who would be wheeled into the garden in their beds on warm days, the beds rolled through the corridor and through the glass doors and onto the decomposed granite paths and positioned beneath the apple trees, and the positioning was the thing, the moment when the patient who had been inside the building was suddenly outside the building, was suddenly under the sky, was suddenly in the presence of the trees and the wind and the birds and the unfiltered light, and the suddenly was a transition, was a passage through the glass doors that was as significant as any passage through any door in the building, the passage from the controlled to the uncontrolled, from the managed to the wild, from the building to the garden, and the garden received the patient the way it received the rain, without selection, without filtration, openly.

She drew the plantings. Around the apple trees, beneath the apple trees, in the beds that bordered the paths: lavender, rosemary, sage. The herbs of the Mediterranean transplanted to the high desert of central Oregon, the herbs that would survive the Bend winters -- cold, dry, the temperatures dropping below zero in January, the snow accumulating on the garden floor, the garden holding the snow the way it held the rain, the way it held everything, and the herbs would go dormant in winter and return in spring, the return the garden's version of the cork's resilience, the coming-back-after-being-stripped-away, and the dying would see the herbs in summer and fall, the lavender flowering in July, the rosemary green through October, the sage gray-green and fragrant through the first frost, and the fragrance would enter the patient rooms through the operable windows, the garden's smell mixing with the kitchen's smell, the herbs and the cooking, the outside and the inside, the mixing the garden's contribution to the building's atmosphere.

She drew the water. A small rill, a channel of water running along the eastern edge of the garden, fed by a recirculating pump, the water flowing from a stone basin at the garden's northeast corner along a shallow channel cut into the decomposed granite, the channel six inches wide and two inches deep, the water flowing slowly, the flow rate calibrated to produce the sound that moving water produces, the sound that is not loud and not quiet but present, the sound that enters the ear without demanding attention, the sound that occupies the background the way the air conditioning occupies the background, continuously, unobtrusively, and the sound of water is the oldest sound, the sound the body recognizes before the mind identifies it, the sound that says: there is water, there is a source, there is the thing that sustains, and the saying is the garden's quiet speech, the garden speaking to the patient in the bed by the window, the garden speaking in the language of water and wind and birdsong, the language that predates architecture, that predates all buildings, that was here before the orchard and will be here after the hospice, the language of the world that the garden preserves inside the building.

She drew a bench. One bench, positioned beneath the largest apple tree, the tree that Elena Voss had identified as the healthiest, the tree whose canopy was the widest and whose trunk was the thickest and whose roots were the deepest, the tree that had stood on this land for forty-five years and that would stand in this garden for decades more, the tree that would shade the bench, and the bench was for sitting, for the families who would come outside to sit beneath the tree while their person was inside in the bed, the families who needed the garden the way the patient needed the room, needed the space that was theirs, the space where they could be outside and breathe and cry and be quiet and look at the sky and feel the wind and hear the water and smell the lavender and be held, be held by the garden the way the patient was held by the room, and the holding was the same holding, the garden and the room performing the same function, the function of enclosing a person in a space that cares.

The bench was made of the same white oak as the interior trim. The bench was simple -- a slab of quarter-sawn oak, three inches thick, supported by two legs of the same oak, the legs mortised into the slab, the joinery visible, the construction honest, the bench showing how it was made the way the building showed how it was made, the structure visible, the care visible, and the bench would age in the garden, would weather, the oak turning silver-gray in the sun and the rain, the silver-gray the color of age, the color of endurance, the color of a thing that has been outside for years and has not failed, has not rotted, has not collapsed, the oak's natural resistance to decay protecting the bench the way the building's structure protected the rooms, the protection quiet, continuous, the protection the material's gift.

She finished the garden drawing at noon. She looked at it. She saw the four apple trees and the paths and the plantings and the rill and the bench, and she saw the building around the garden, the wings enclosing the courtyard, the patient room windows facing the garden, the corridors flanking the garden, the kitchen overlooking the garden, and she saw that the garden was the building's center and the building's reason, the thing the building was built around, the way a sentence is built around its subject, the subject being the thing the sentence is about, and the garden was the thing the building was about, was the earth and the trees and the sky that the building existed to enclose without sealing, to protect without controlling, to hold without confining.

She thought about her mother. She thought about Lin in Room 6 at Evergreen House, the room that did not have a garden view because Evergreen House's garden was on the west side and Room 6 faced east, and the east-facing was right, was the correct orientation for the light, but the garden was not visible, and Miriam wondered, sitting at her desk on Northwest Glisan Street looking at the garden drawing, whether Lin missed the garden, whether Lin thought about the backyard on Hawthorne Street, the backyard where she had grown tomatoes and basil and the roses that David pruned every February with the engineer's precision, the roses cut back to three buds per cane, the cuts angled at forty-five degrees, the angles consistent, the pruning a small engineering project that David performed annually with the seriousness of a man who understood that the angle of the cut determined the direction of the new growth and the direction of the new growth determined the shape of the rose and the shape of the rose determined the beauty of the garden, and the beauty was the engineering, and the engineering was the love.

She did not call Lin. She sat with the garden drawing and she thought about the relationship between the garden she was designing and the gardens she had known -- Lin's backyard, the courtyard at Ridgeline, the rooftop garden at Cedar Creek that had been a compromise because the site was too small for a ground-level garden, the garden at Lakeview that had been too shady because the building's orientation blocked the morning sun, the mistake Miriam had made at Lakeview, the mistake she would not repeat at Orchard House because Orchard House was oriented correctly, the building's wings reaching east and south, the garden open to the east and to the sky, the garden receiving the same morning light that the patient rooms received, the garden and the rooms sharing the light the way they shared the building, the light democratic, the light falling on the cork floor and the decomposed granite path and the apple tree canopy and the lavender and the bench and the water, the light the thing that connected the inside to the outside, the room to the garden, the dying to the living.

The garden is the room where the living things are. The patient rooms hold the dying. The kitchen holds the cooking. The corridors hold the walking. The garden holds the growing. And the growing is the counterpoint, the balance, the other side of the equation that the building embodies -- the dying on one side, the growing on the other, the building holding both, the building being the structure that contains the full range, the departure and the continuation, the ending and the persistence, the patient in the bed and the apple tree in the courtyard, and the apple tree does not know about the patient and the patient may not know about the apple tree but the building knows about both, the building holds both, and the holding-of-both is the architecture, is the garden's gift to the building, is the reason the garden is at the center, is the reason the building is shaped like a hand with the garden in the palm.

Miriam rolled the trace paper. She capped the pen. She placed the garden drawing with the other drawings -- the floor plan, the sections, the elevations, the window details, the materials specifications -- the accumulated paper of the design, the paper that was becoming a building, the drawings that were becoming rooms, and the rooms would include the garden, the room without a ceiling, the room whose floor was the earth and whose walls were the building and whose ceiling was the sky, and the sky was the ceiling that Walter had asked for, the ceiling that was not too low, the ceiling that was infinite, and the infinite ceiling was above the garden, and the garden was beneath it, and the apple trees stood in the garden and reached toward the ceiling that was the sky, and the reaching was the growing, and the growing was the garden, and the garden was the center, and the center held.