The View Out the Window

Someone we’re friendly with commented once that I spend more time gardening than anyone he knows. I wasn’t sure how to take that, and it could be that he didn’t know how he meant it. But after thinking about his remark for a few years—existential questions can take a little while to grapple with—I’ve decided I’m fine with this.

The ongoing project of my gardens has entailed significant time and effort, which could be considered a sacrifice, since all I earn from my work on them is enjoyment of the end results, as well as enjoyment of the process of getting to those results. Mostly, though, I think this investment of my free time, muscle power, and spare cash has been worthwhile. Because I have to say, there’s a whole lot of scenery out there that, personally, I find flat-out depressing, so if I want to immerse myself in a place that doesn’t otherwise exist around me, I have to create it. As that famous line entreats us, we need to be the change we want to see in the world. Or, to borrow a term from fiction, I’m doing a bit of world building. Plainly speaking, I’m making my own damn view.

My front-yard gardens sit in the foreground of the view from here. Behind our house, gardens-in-progress now occupy various areas along the full length of our narrow village lot. But looking out from both the front and back windows of our house, we also have, in the parlance of landscape design, borrowed views—views we didn’t make and that we can’t control, except by choosing to allow them in or to block them.

I do have preferences regarding the scenery I look out at. If someone said, giving no other context, that from where they live they have “a good view,” my brain would go right to an image of rolling hills scattered with wildflowers and dotted with mature trees that lead the eye slightly upward to a broad sweep of blue sky. Maybe I could see mountains in the far distance and, somewhere in between, a barn. I love barns. In fact, when I look out the window of our house, this is more or less what I do see: a restful tree-covered hillside that leads up to an escarpment and, beyond that, to clear sky often featuring cloud formations so beautiful, I stop what I’m doing and just stare. No wildflowers, but close enough. We also see, in both directions, the simple geometry and clean lines of the old houses and their former horse barns or carriage houses. I consider us very lucky in this regard.

Someone else might instantly imagine a setting of palm trees and a mile-long sandy beach, or snow-capped mountains, or bay-side cliffs. I tend to picture these vistas as being what people see out the plate-glass windows of a ski condo or a beach house. In a rural area, though, any of this might just be what’s outside the front door.

Whatever the particulars, the line of sight is wide and unobstructed, and the focal points are entirely or predominantly natural rather than human-made. In short, if you’d expect it to appear on a wall calendar, it’s a good contender.

In the urban realm, I prefer to zoom in for the close-up. It’s heartening to me that cities are managing to hang on as places where the soles of people’s shoes actually touch the ground, because it’s mostly when I’m on foot that small details catch my attention and make a walk along a city sidewalk into a field trip. Maybe not so much in the newest parts of metropolises, which veer toward buildings so tall, so monolithic, that for blocks at a time I find there isn’t much at street level to captivate me. But in cities, or sections of them, that are more human scale, I’ve always found such pleasure in taking notice of what could so easily be overlooked, or what I myself had previously overlooked in my own, familiar neighborhood. Of course, not every sight in a city is pleasing. Ignoring that would be a kind of blindness.

There’s also the opposite view, from inside to out, and that can actually be pretty cozy. Four streets over from where we used to live, a remarkably beautiful nineteenth-century townhouse that we were fortunate enough to spend time in sits across the street from a historic church, and had we lived in that house, I would have situated myself with a book on the lovely second-floor window seat and never left. From the first floor of the decidedly less high-style rowhouse we did in fact live in, though, we had some of our own fine views, like when we were already in for the night and could feel all snug and smug as we’d watch cars circling the block, looking for a parking space. Or during an old-fashioned blizzard, when we had nowhere we needed to be and could just watch the fat snowflakes fall as silence descended on the neighborhood. So as not to be too precious about it, I’ll add that a long-ago apartment of mine about a ten-minute walk farther downtown had one window that looked out to a brick wall, although this wasn’t as bad as it sounds, since at least the view was predictable.

Modern high-rises hold no allure for me, visually or otherwise, even New York City’s Midtown skyline, which is arguably the most famous view in this country. I’ve simply never understood the fuss over a cluster of towers entirely lacking in the delicacy that the word skyline connotes. At least I didn’t until, at a museum exhibit, I saw a photo of 1950s New York, and there it was: the skyline. The beauty and grace of it took my breath away. The memory of that in the collective unconscious is probably still what draws people to live there. That, and the collective dream of making money.

I feel like the somewhere-in-between of the suburban landscape, at least how it’s constructed these days, isn’t really about the views, but it would be good if it were, given that it’s where the majority of Americans now reside.  

I know I’m not alone, although sometimes I feel that way, in thinking that what we look out at matters. That it influences our outlook and our outcomes. In her book A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home, Frances Mayes, known for writing about her relocation to Italy, remarked that landscapes are not inert, that what surrounds us affects us. She wrote, “In Tuscany I learned again that a powerful landscape never can be just a backdrop because it’s working on you, sculpting you into a shape of its own.” I don’t recall now whether she meant the natural topography or the vernacular built environment, but either way it forms the foundation of daily life, since it’s fixed in place. Not permanent, of course, since nothing is. Even trees have lifespans. And here in the United States, where we collectively seem to value new for the sake of new, the intended useful life of edifices seems to be getting shorter and shorter. We who live in old houses, however, are taking one for the team. You’re welcome.

And if these landscapes aren’t just static stage sets we live our lives in front of, it can also be said that their effect isn’t unidirectional—our interactions with them are a give-and-take. Which ratchets things up a notch: not just a landscape but an environment. A general milieu, even. That sounds serious. 

A streetscape is its own kind of landscape, and I shaped ours when I planted in front of our house. One of the reasons I decided to front-yard garden—yes, I consider that an action verb—is that people walk past our house all the time, as we are among the fortunate few to have a public sidewalk lining our street, and I wanted passersby to have something pleasant to look at. So I transplanted the majority of my perennials and small shrubs there, and have been acquiring more to fill in the gaps. Maybe it was an egotistical impulse, a need for acknowledgment. I can admit that. But maybe these gardens are also my homegrown way of subverting the system, since although I recognize that ornamental gardening is a luxury, I also believe that it isn’t frivolous and that beautiful surroundings shouldn’t only be a privilege of money. Regardless, though, of what prompted the effort, this landscape most definitely works its power on me: the gardens make me happy when I look at them, and simply stated, they’re a crucial piece of my personal puzzle. Without them, I would be a different person. I’d say that’s a pretty significant impact.

Our son spent his early years in the historic downtown area where our small rowhouse was, and as a toddler one of his favorite activities was looking out the windows of our living room, onto the sidewalk just below. Framed by dramatic wide wood moldings, the windows were very tall, stretching from a couple of feet above the floor to nearly the height of the ten-foot ceilings. On the contrary, our son was, at the time, very short, and his eyes only barely cleared the windowsill. This made for a funny sight, though also a poignant one. I was moved by his interest in seeing who was walking by, whether neighbors he knew by name or strangers he didn’t. This social awareness fostered by living in close proximity to so many people has gifted him with the ability to talk to someone he doesn’t already know. Which didn’t seem noteworthy until we moved the hop, skip, and a jump to our current town and discovered not everyone can do the same with such ease.

And there’s a scene at the end of the film Local Hero where the main character has returned to his apartment in a high-rise in Houston, Texas, and he’s feeling forlorn, missing the tiny village in Scotland he’d been in for his work. In Houston, he’s a small dot in a big picture, an unnamed face in a window, in a city full of anonymous faces behind walls of glass, whereas in that Scottish village where he’d been ever so briefly, he was known. And in that different location, he saw the possibility of a very different life.

The movie’s message was as clear as the village’s night sky that so enchanted the main character, who upon stepping back into his regular life found that the bright lights of the big city had dimmed, at least in his eyes. A different movie might have turned that on its head. After all, one person’s quiet, peaceful village is another person’s prison of boredom. People’s values and ideals differ. The thing is, one setting isn’t inherently better than another. Life has evolved in both tundra and the tropics. People live full, meaningful, and productive lives in both very large cities and very small towns, or can whither from loneliness whatever the landscape. It’s just that the Devil is in the details. Or God is. It depends.

Making things trickier is that we sometimes want conflicting things simultaneously from where we live. I know I do. I guard my privacy and need time by myself but also want to be within screaming distance of other human beings, should the need arise. This was, in fact, one of my criteria when we were house hunting. And although I felt really cranky when our neighbors’ bright-blue trampoline became the visual center of our backyard landscape, once they shifted it out of my direct line of sight, I lightened up and began to cherish the sound of their young kids talking and singing as they contentedly jumped the afternoons away. Also, I relish the quiet of this small town, but I’m aware that in retreating here, I have to work that much harder to prop open a window to the larger world.

Frances Mayes, in that same book, described her first love with regard to landscapes. It was an “unparalleled Robinson Crusoe beach….No buildings in sight—no houses, condo complexes, no mini-marts…, no high-rise, highway, not even another lone walker.” Me? I think that sounds nice for a week-long vacation, but that level of solitude seems unrealistic in such a crowded world. Also, I might want to meet a friend for coffee every once in a while.

I do wonder, though, if part of what ails us is that maybe we’ve forgotten that a landscape is something we should be able to love, or even want to. It does seem like our society has gotten better, or at least had until recently, about conserving natural areas for posterity and for the sake of the flora and fauna living there in real time. Better, anyway, than we were in, say, the 1970s. Viewsheds of historic estates now open as museums have been on the receiving end of that kind of attachment and affection, or at least respect, and have been protected through legal battles and political intervention. In his book At Home: A Brief History of Private Life, Bill Bryson detailed some of the machinations behind “the survival of the peerless view across the Potomac [River]…so that today [it] remains as agreeable and satisfying as it was in [George] Washington’s day.” But conversely, not long ago, while visiting a local museum of a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old house, I glanced out the parlor windows and saw only a stretch of highway. Apparently there wasn’t sufficient interest in saving that view.

It would be grand, though, if everyone’s home were deemed entitled to a dignified setting, not just the former residences of the prominent and wealthy, or those who make their home in pretty much the same places bears and other large wildlife do. We shouldn’t grant our streetscapes an exemption from being visually appealing, or at least interesting, and, like the ecology of any environment, they should function as part of a healthy larger whole. As well as, like a garden, be cultivated and tended. I concede that this is a complex subject. I also concede that the bears were here before we were and should probably be given their pick of place.

Some of what’s ugly and unsalubrious in what we’ve surrounded ourselves with is probably a normal part of the cycle of transformation: buildings degrade, populations expand and decline, tastes change, and our day-to-day lives mostly look a lot different from those of our grandparents. Our landscapes, built or otherwise, reflect all that. Some of this alteration is pathological, not beneficial, but it certainly isn’t new. I remember being saddened as the eponymous little house in the children’s picture book The Little House was engulfed by the changing world around it. That book had a happy-ish ending, but outside the realm of fiction, it seems like the same story is told again and again.

My husband and dog and I—and the kid, too, when he’s home—live now in what I have to acknowledge is a nice neighborhood. The houses on our street are pretty, personal safety is not a daily concern, and the front yards are kept up, or at least made tidy, because in nice neighborhoods, tidiness is indisputably the dominant ethos. But even on our nice street in our nice town, the view includes things we cast a stinkeye at, like the cell-phone tower that’s quite clearly visible from our side yard but that I can’t complain about without being a hypocrite, the dangerously distracted drivers on our state road, the invasive species on the contiguous properties that are always threatening to creep or leap onto ours, and the slew of across-the-street neighbors who have never said hello to us no matter how long we gaze in their direction, as well as our new-ish neighbors next door who have decided that our existence is now intolerable to them. It’s telling that the most common landscape plant here is arborvitae, the bigger the better. True, there are worse problems to have. But my point is, every town or city has an underbelly, it’s just that in some places it’s more visible than in others.

Maybe just as with our personal appearance, part of the trick of our collective appearance is balancing how we look on the outside with who we are on the inside. Our old neighborhood was mostly a great place to live, but it wasn’t immune from problems. We personally did not fully escape the street crime around us, including nuisance acts committed by people who, I am guessing, didn’t behave in their home neighborhoods the way they sometimes behaved in ours. And yet on a quiet Sunday evening in summer, we could sit and enjoy our back patio and hidden cottage garden, and could hear a pin drop. And we’d frequently see fellow owners and renters alike out sweeping the sidewalk, to keep our block looking clean. And we would nearly always run into someone we knew when we walked out the front door. These kinds of things are not in our cultural lexicon when it comes to cities, but they should be.

On the other side of that coin, my husband and I once spent a day at the beach in a place that’s among the wealthiest in this country, and though my memory of those hours is a happy one—except for the part where I was keeping an eye out for sharks—I remember feeling oppressed by the stillness and lifelessness of the town around us. And when I’ve paid my admission fees to visit historic houses of the fabulously wealthy, my interest has usually been piqued more by the utility areas and servants’ rooms than by the ballrooms and ostentatious living quarters. Grandeur leaves me cold.

Rich or poor, though, it’s still someone’s home, and you can’t judge a book by its cover.

I think a lot about placemaking. I think about it on the homemaking scale, like how to stay warm in our not very warm house, or where to plant the flowering dogwood I bought, so as not to block our sightline to the now-mature Eastern redbud I’ve nurtured since it was a sapling. I also think about placemaking on a larger scale. Like why structurally sound old houses are knocked down to accommodate chain stores that there are already plenty of. Or why even in rural settings the persistent hum of highway traffic permeates the soundscape. Or why our towns and cities can’t seem to grow without our landscape being engineered so ruthlessly and steamrolled so thoughtlessly. Because I worry that we’re not leaving ourselves enough intriguing roads to travel down to discover what’s beyond the next curve, said curves having been removed for safety reasons or to accommodate large-footprint development projects. I worry as well that we’ve mapped our landscape too granularly. I’m not saying it isn’t very cool—I use Street View all the time—but maybe in finding everything, we’re losing too much.

I think, too, about what environments people thrive in, or, since I can’t speak for other people, although I have my opinions, what environments my family and I will thrive in. Like how much messiness and chaos I can stand before I lose my patience or my ability to think clearly. Or how for our son, who is a cross-country skier, living somewhere cold and snowy is nonnegotiable; and how I need at least a small patch of ground somewhere close by to dig in; and how my husband craves scenic back roads to ride his bike on. Our dog just needs to be wherever we are, preferably all in the same room at the same time, petting her.

As any gardener or farmer knows, plants grow better when they’re given all the good things they need than when they are not. And maybe the best litmus test for our landscapes is how healthily we grow within them, and even bloom, without, we hope, encroaching on someone else’s garden.