This was a very peaceful weekend of gardens and gardening for me. My friend Chuck always says the third year's a charm for a garden, and it looks like my garden in the Fens is all set to prove him right. It's actually my fourth season, but the first was basically digging up and hardscaping the plot. It was not so much a garden as a weed bed when I got it, and then it was a mud pit before its current incarnation (before/after shots here, during shot here).

Now I've got perennials maturing, and the beds are filling up and filling out nicely. In fact, I spent some time this weekend widening beds and narrowing the paths...


I think it looks a little over-scaped right now, but eventually the borders will be defined not with brick and stone, but with phlox and periwinkle, and other types of flowering ground-cover. Got a ways to go, but it's getting there.

I like to look at other gardens for inspiration, of course. And with that in mind, I took a drive with my friend Robert out to Lenox, Mass., Saturday to see The Mount, Edith Wharton's soon-to-be foreclosed on estate. They actually got an extension when news of the pending foreclosure was publicized and almost a million bucks in donations poured in.

The house itself, while lovely, is, by Gilded Age standards, quaint. I think it was even referred to at the time, without irony, as a "cottage," which is a bit of a stretch...


...but having seen my share of Gilded Age estates, I have to say it struck me as simple, as estates go, too. It might seem a little ironic given that Wharton, nee Jones, belonged to the clan everybody was supposed to be keeping up with.

The house has been partially renovated. When we asked a volunteer when they'd run out of money, she said, "keep walking that way, you'll see." And she was right. You could tell it down to the last cent. It was like: oops, they ran out of paint right here. The rooms that have been renovated are lovely. But they have their work cut out for them, that's for sure.

The place has been through a number of incarnations in the nearly hundred years since the Whartons vacated the premises (they lived there from 1902 to 1911): it was a girls' dorm, and home to a theater troupe. Although the entire first floor and half of the second, if memory serves me, are renovated, only one room is fully furnished in the style of the day. Wharton's books were recently acquired and grace the shelves of the newly renovated library, where the sole other piece of furniture is a desk (she usually wrote in bed, but I think the bed she wrote in may be lost to history). Other than that, the rooms are empty.

The grounds are extremely well-maintained, and demonstrate Wharton's focus on order, scale and harmony, which she outlined in her popular book The Decoration of Houses, a shot across the bow of Victorian bric-a-brac. What she demonstrates in the book is simple good taste, which had been lost in the horribly overwrought era of Victorian decor. It was a style of decor that fit the emphasis on conspicuous consumption with which Victorians were themselves consumed, but was begging for a backlash.

The gardens have been completely and beautifully restored...


...but while they are an exquisite example of Wharton's design principles, it took all of ten minutes to explore them. Gardens that employ grand promenades and fountains generally need a slightly grander scale to fully appreciate them, but if you look at the assembled elements as a garden sampler, it's instructional. I enjoyed it, but it's no Villa Medicea La Petraia. 

Still perfectly quaint, and lovely. Though, admittedly, it would have been extra nice to have been able to sit on the terrace, as Wharton's own guests back in the day must've done, and have a coffee, but the cafe on the terrace wasn't open. So having fairly breezed through the house, and explored the gardens in short order, we had some unanticipated extra time on our hands.

We took our time on the way back to Boston, which enabled us to hit what may just be Massachusetts' angriest rest stop. A woman glared at Robert with pure evil in her eyes for no other crime than being on his way out the door when she was on her way in. Then, as we got back into the car, the man in the minivan next to us mumbled something. He was not looking at me and had not raised his voice above the level of a private conversation with his passenger.

It took me until after I had already gotten into the car to realize he had been wondering aloud if I had enough room to get in. He did not address the question to me directly, and therefore got no answer from me. The fact that I did not answer him prompted a tirade much louder than the original question and unmistakably directed at me, about my rudeness in "ignoring" what was, after all, only a polite question. He was now glaring at me and berating me as a prime example of Massholery.

Of course we all have moments when we want to believe the worst of everyone else, but the degree to which people go to prove this point to themselves is impressive. That guy's gotta be a blogger.

Because Springfield is on the way back from Lenox, we dropped in to the Quadrangle to check out the Doctor Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden...


...which was what it was. Unfortunately we were too late to get into the museums at the Quadrangle. I would like to have gone to the George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, in particular. It houses its namesake's private collection, and it's always interesting to see something like that.

The historic area around the Quadrangle is fascinating. Not only for its Victorian splendor, but for the effort to encourage tourism it represents. Strolling around the historic Mattoon neighborhood you soon realize something is slightly amiss. Here's this oasis of beautifully gentrified Victorian row houses, surrounded on all sides by high-rise public housing. All along Mattoon St. the historic units were for rent, and by the looks of the residents we encountered, they could be rented for cheap, too.

I wondered as we explored the area whether the city itself was responsible for restoring the neighborhood, and had made a special effort not to displace the residents who'd occupied the units before gentrification. It certainly didn't seem to be a classic gentrification scenario.

In exploring more of the city, I got more intrigued by what seemed to be decades of redevelopment projects gone awry, one after another. Springfield seems to have tried everything to draw tourism. Their next revitalization project could be The Museum of Failed Revitalization Projects.

I don't want to appear flippant here or diminish what Springfield has achieved. There is ample evidence of its "Industrial glory," just as Hartford's — Springfield's sort of "sister city" — is achingly evident in the splendor of the Athenaeum, and attractions like the Mark Twain House. But decades of neglect followed by desperate, short-sighted modernization projects in the seventies tarnished their luster, and what was destroyed during that time has made it all but impossible for these cities to rise to glory as tourist centers, or re-urbanization destinations.

It's painful to walk out of the splendor of the Athenaeum into the ordinary ugliness of modern Hartford. It's not even a nice place to visit aside from those remnants of its glory days, never mind living there.

It does make you appreciate the delicate balance Boston's Back Bay seems to have achieved. There is as fine a harmony between the old and new here as you'll find in any historic city that has retained relevance as an economic center — as a living city as well as a tourist attraction. Sure, we've got our failed urban spaces. The difference is Boston's size, and its abundance of historic sites.

But imagine if all that was left of historic Boston was the Skollay Square area, and they tore it down and put up City Hall Plaza. But there was no Faneuil Hall, no Beacon Hill, Back Bay, or North or South End to escape to. Maybe the BPL and Trinity Church, and scattered heritage sites. That's Hartford. That's Springfield. It's poignant. But on the level of urban planning disasters, it's pretty interesting. I must warn you, though: you'll probably come back from a tour of downtown Springfield with a bruised forehead. From smacking it every time you ask yourself, "what were they thinking?"