“I am Federal Twist,” declares James Golden in the preface of his book The View From Federal Twist: A New Way of Thinking About Gardens, Nature and Ourselves (2021). Of course all gardens are personal creations, and good ones have an expressiveness and emotional quality that transcends mere plants and makes them feel like an extension of the gardener. But Federal Twist, James’s garden in New Jersey, is as much an idea as a physical place or arrangement of plants. The “view from Federal Twist” — also the title of James’s highly regarded blog, named for the rural road he resides along — isn’t just what can be perceived with the eyes. His chief view is inward-facing. A talented writer as well as garden maker, James gives free expression in his book to the emotional, poetic nature of garden creation, and of living within a garden. Reading The View, you fall under his spell and come to a deeper understanding of what it means to connect with a piece of land through gardening.

It’s one of the best garden books I’ve read in quite a while, one in which the words matter even more than the photographs, although these are quite good as well, and numerous. Only the cover image is by a professional garden photographer, Claire Takacs. All other photos were taken by James, with a lingering focus on the exuberance of high summer and the melancholy of late autumn.

I visited James’s garden last October and wrote about that experience here at Digging. (The garden photos in this post are my own, from that visit.) James’s garden — a strolling garden of wet-loving prairie plants on a sloped clearing in a forest — has garnered much acclaim for two reasons: he broke a lot of gardening conventions in creating it, and he’s shared about his acceptance of the site’s ecology and his design decisions so thoughtfully and eloquently on his blog.

What conventions did he break?

• He didn’t clear the site. He planted directly in existing growth with big, muscly plants that could outcompete weeds.
• He didn’t amend the mucky clay soil. Instead of changing his conditions to suit plants he might have wanted or that are traditionally considered garden worthy, he selected plants (through experimentation and failure) that thrive in the naturally occurring wet soil.
• He made plants — masses of big, prairie-like plants — the main event rather than as decorative accents around a patio or other “people spaces.”
• And although his garden is decidedly naturalistic, it isn’t dogmatic in the way naturalistic gardens sometimes are. He doesn’t truck with natives-only ideology. And he doesn’t garden specifically for wildlife, although he delights in the wild creatures that live in his garden (except for deer, which he fences out). James gardens first and foremost for himself.

His garden, he writes, is “a prairie of the imagination like none that ever existed in nature, but one that looks as if it belongs to its place…It is an ecological garden in which every plant is adapted to the conditions of the site — but it is more than that. I wanted the garden to make physical an interior emotional world.”

Emotion is what drives his garden making. Also memory and a sense of connection with the land’s human history and that of his agrarian ancestors in Mississippi. His ultimate goal, he says, was “to transform a derelict, waterlogged woodland into a garden of emotional power.”

James shares many moments of emotion and poetry in talking about his garden, like this one: “The clearing is like a cove at the edge of the sea…In twilight the plant forms may take on imaginary sea shapes, the round, feathery miscanthus becoming a giant sea anemone, rising spires of silphium and inula looming as mysterious sea towers; the whole garden, a sea floor swaying slowly in darkness.” I lingered over such descriptions. They resonated with memories of transcendent moments in my own garden.

In reading The View From Federal Twist, you come to understand how looking inward may be the most important part of garden making, not only for one man but for anyone who aspires to garden.

Disclosure: Filbert Press sent me a copy of The View from Federal Twist for review. I reviewed the book at my own discretion and without any compensation. This post, as with everything at Digging, is my own personal opinion.

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Digging Deeper

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All material © 2024 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.