Features
Welcoming the Handsome Stranger
by Bennett Law
Spring – Eck and Winterrowd’s “handsome stranger” – can be found once again lingering outside our doors, simply flirtatious at first, but growing ever bolder, more assertive. All across Vermont gay men rush outdoors to welcome him, attracted to his warmth, and eager to luxuriate in his determination to please. Spring is like the renewal of a love affair, one in which we don’t mind getting our hands dirty, for as the earth re-awakens, so too does our interest in the rhythms and rituals of gardening.
Readsboro residents Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd published A Year at North Hill in 1995. The book, an elegantly written and generously photographed recounting of the monthly riches to be enjoyed as a gardener in Vermont, is deservedly a perennial on the bookshelves of gardeners across the northeast. Out in the Mountains turned to Eck and Winterrowd to consider the seemingly special affinity gays feel for gardening. Why are many gay men so passionate about gardening?
“I once asked J.C. Raulston, a gay man and great gardener, why he had started gardening as a child,” explained Winterrowd. “His answer was that he knew plants couldn’t hurt him. It may be true some day that gay children can grow up without fear and loneliness, but it was not true when Joe or I were children. So gardening provides an early refuge, where everything can be calm and safe and pretty.”
Everyone seems to have a few friends (or, if lucky, many friends) who have slaved for a number of years to create extraordinary gardens – intensely personal, private spaces that are uniquely theirs. These gardeners seem driven to refashion their landscape – their particular place in the world.
Winterrowd understands this drive. “Garden-making is the impulse to create a safe, beautiful world to some degree under one’s control, away from the world at large, which has until recently seemed to many gay men to be dangerous, threatening, rejecting of their very existence. In general garden theory, gardens are always understood to be enclosed, sequestered from the greater world by fences, walls, hedges, boundaries. This first general rule of garden-making is attractive to gay men, who crave to live their lives as they wish, without prying or censor, and to shape their world as they please, without external comment or judgment.
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| North Hill authors Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd |
“I will be very curious to know, if I ever can,” Winterrowd continued, “whether all these explanations for gay gardeners, based as they are on intolerance, will fade as the world changes and, from our perspective, improves its attitude towards us. So far it does not seem to be so, for we know many young gay gardeners.”
A Year at North Hill includes the observation, “Probably the first step after the most abject needs for survival are met is to grow something pretty, just because it is pretty and for no practical reason.” But there is even more to gardening for gay men than just the chance to re-imagine their environment, albeit in a prettier configuration. The physical demands of the process can itself bring pleasure long before the full flowering of this achievement is realized.
“Gardening as an activity represents a rare synchrony between mind and body – like dance – and has an even more special pleasure as a result. For many gay men,” noted Winterrowd, “the very physicality of gardening is wonderful. They may not be good at tennis or golf or weight lifting, but they can dig, trench, move stones, lay paths, lift pots.”
This physical contribution to the Vermont landscape will one day serve as testimony to the pursuits of those who have labored. Orchestrated plantings of stately trees, stones moved into specific configurations, a bed of peonies, perhaps, may survive the gardener for a time as an echo of his vision of beauty, cohesion, and structure that he brought to fruition. Wrote Eck and Winterrowd, “For how many centuries might there be the subtle tracery of a stone wall or path, the abundant progeny of Impatiens fladulifera, even naturalized stands of Meconopsis betonicifolia?” All gardeners leave ephemeral shadows of their dreams among these mountains behind them, fading with each passing year. But as Winterrowd noted, “We do not expect [our garden] to outlive us by very much. Nor, necessarily, should it.” The joy of the garden is immediate, and intended especially for the gardener himself.
But this is not to suggest that the garden, and gardening, is not the better for being shared. “Our deepest luck,” noted Eck and Winterrowd in A Year at North Hill, “has been in the fact that there have been two of us at this work – twice the muscle, twice the courage, twice the attention, and twice the dream. Once can, of course, go it alone, and sometimes – sooner or later – one must. It has been our great good fortune, however, that we have not had to do that often. Or yet.”
Winterrowd noted further, “We certainly think of ourselves as independent beings, and we always know that each of us possesses an identity that lies outside our relationship, and that those separate identities must always be acknowledged and respected. But part of the cement of our relationship, part of where our individual circles overlap, is gardening. We have loved sharing that.”
While gay men may be particularly keen on gardening, Winterrowd sees the love affair as essentially one-sided: “There is nothing particularly gay about gardening. We simply tap into it in greater numbers than are proportionate to our numbers in the human community.
“Nurturing is so basic a human impulse that all gardeners express it in their passion for plants and gardens. We know many gardeners, straight men, straight women, gay men, lesbians, and none differ here in any material way. They love to nurture plants and gardens.” And they are, in turn, nurtured by them. “To have something to nurture us is very important to the human soul, and the garden fulfills that function.”