Notes From Madoo

ROBERT DASH

When you design and install a garden for someone else, you have to know a great many things about them in order to a) make the garden look right and b) please them and c) make it seem as if the project was a logical extension of their personalities. The Smiths' garden should not look like the Jones' garden because Mr. Smith is not Mr. Jones and does not share his tastes, equal him in purse, is a gardener, unlike Mr. Jones, who isn't, has three large, largely rambunctious dogs as opposed to Mr. Jones, who has a fat old cat. And so forth.

How to proceed with a client and elicit their predilections, dislikes, or genuine abhorrences, dreams, and aspirations, all of the whatever that comprises the affective personality is, I find, to give them a quiz. Or have conversations with them. I do, anyway. However, a conversation, if it isn't taped, never gets on paper so can be refuted. ("You told me you didn't like yellow." "Oh, but I didn't mean this yellow. . . ." "Didn't you say that you didn't want water in your garden?" "Stream, I meant. Pond is fine.") And more of "and so forth."

If the client is a husband and wife and both are equally concerned with the garden in an intimate, hands-on manner, rather than a distinctly impersonal checkbook fashion, each will receive my questionnaire and be instructed to not in any way discuss their answers.

I begin with what seems undaunting and rather straightforward, such as, What is your favorite color, odor, flower, tree, season, month, time of day, inching forward to rather more intricate questions. One of them is: What do you prefer underfoot as you walk: pebbles, bricks, slate, wood, grass, large stones, a mix of these (if so, which), or is this question too difficult to answer?

Pages fly and the questions go into the hundreds: Do you mind being brushed by foliage as you walk? Would you peer over a tall plant to see a small? Are you allergic to any plant? Do you mind weeping plants, bushes, or trees? What would you never have in your garden? Do you loiter as you stroll through a garden? Do you sit and muse in a garden? Do you like the sound of water in a garden and, if so, is it splashing, dripping, running? Do you mind gates that creak? Will you want a gazebo? Do you want an instant garden? (If so, stop here. I will not supply one.) Do you like moss between stones or would you prefer herbs? Will you want a vegetable garden? Will you light the garden at night? Barbecue or lunch or have drinks there? Do you derive a certain pleasure in weeding? How much of the work will you do yourself? Will you want a potager? A knot garden? An allee? Do you like topiary?

I think that you get the picture. The client is, by these answers, painting a portrait of himself as a garden, which is the way that it should be. It is crucial. Equally crucial is a one-paragraph essay-description of his favorite garden and to answer "Madoo" will not curry favor with me or be specific enough, Madoo being composed of many gardens.

The last question is the most difficult: What do you expect from the garden we are planning?

"I feel like such a fool," "I really don't know how I feel about fences at all," are some of the answers. One was: "This is worse than the Scholastic Assessment Test." And then, the one in capital letters, "JUST MAKE ME A GARDEN, DAMMIT."

Which I will try to do, although I won't make you an English border, for we don't have the climate for it, or give you an all-white garden, for they end up looking like lint, but I will try to give you the garden that has always been in your mind, somewhere where you haven't searched.