I went to High School in Eden Prairie, a suburb that was once on the extreme western fringes of Minneapolis. Past Eden Prairie, beyond a patchwork of truck farming fields and ancient dairy farms, was Chanhassen. For some reason, Chanhassen, originally a crossroads marked by a single field-stone Catholic church, had been built, mostly at one time it seemed, in an old Old West motif -- an entertainment complex with the Bronco Bar and a dinner theater comprised the center of the town. A few old bars with pickups drawn up in front of them were on Main Street and that road, tilted eccentrically to make an angle with west-bound 5, dead-ended in corn fields. After Chanhassen, the land opened up to big fields of row-crops and hog farms. Victoria, six miles west of Chanhassen, was a compound of old farm houses gathered together around a grim-looking grain elevator on a railroad side-track that was apparently still active. Victoria always smelled of decayed grain, an odor like malt liquor. That town was the gateway, as it were to a blank space on the map, the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. My family went there once a year -- behind fencing, there was a road that led to a building something like the clubhouse on a golf course out in the country. Rolling hills rose gently over the clubhouse and some of them were topped with remote apple orchards. Along the sides of open meadows, shrubs and trees had been labeled. I don't recall anyone ever being there -- the club-house building was always locked. The parking lots were hidden in the woods, places where High School kids took their girlfriends to get them pregnant. It was always very silent in the arboretum and lonely.
Things change. I visited the arboretum on June 1, 2018 and found that the place was now enormous, ranks of school buses parked by the old Club House building that has now expanded into an art gallery and cafeteria and gift shops, a complex of interlinked buildings the size of a small, elite and expensive mall. Most of the parking lots, covering several acres were filled to capacity and little trams hauled people, many of them elderly and wearing hats to protect their skin from the sun, along Three Mile Road, the loop that leads between the various gardens and other features at the arboretum. The sides of the narrow lanes were lined with people strolling between the gardens and crowds of children were toppling and tumbling and doing gymnastic tricks on the grassy hillsides. The place is at the intersection of Highways 5 and 41. Old Victoria is vanished, replaced by strip-malls and huge hospital and clinic complexes. There is no open land anywhere between Eden Prairie and the arboretum. Light industry, Prince's Paisley Park, and various restaurants and other businesses cling to the edges of Highway 5. The truck farms are long since gone.
I write with regret, of course, but it is sorrow measured by my age and my distance from youthful vigor and my grief, really more a kind of strangulated rage, at the huge numbers of people now cluttering landscapes that I once knew as empty, quiet, and remote. The world is brimming over with people: one day, the intersections will simply grid-lock and that will be the end of everything, a massive, repugnant traffic jam stalled between the sinister high-rises of the laser cataract surgery and orthopedics clinics. But this embittered malaise should not blind anyone to the fact that the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum is a fantastic destination with an appeal hitherto completely unknown to me. Obviously, others know about this place -- it was packed with people on the June noon that I drove through the grounds -- but I don't think most people in outstate Minnesota are aware of the arboretum: I have known about the place for fifty years but, after moving to Austin, was never tempted to visit. This has been a loss to me.
The arboretum contains a huge number of different gardens, almost none of which I visited -- it would take you several days to tour all of the different plantings, and groves, and exhibits of flowering plant. There is a garden maze, a Japanese tea garden with a nine-foot waterfall, a trail that leads among ferns, more waterfalls and shade groves and wild areas with small pot-shaped hollows full of marsh and stagnant water, old growth woods, trails winding here and there through glades decorated with brightly colored origami horses and birds and deer (all of them made from folded metal) -- if you look closely, in the thickets, you may see sculptures of brilliantly colored blown glass, three-dimensional stained glass windows as it were, beckoning to you from within the green, breezy shade. The place boasts a sculpture garden that, to my taste, is better than the one at the Walker Art Center. On a sunny hill, you can walk on the grass to inspect big art objects by Louise Nevelson, Barbara Hepworth, Paul Granlund, and others. An African named Nicholas Mukamberanwa (and his son) have carved a olkswagen-sized piece of serpentine into a fantasia of different textures and colors, several forms like profiles turned toward a gale that sweeps hair back in deep incised grooves -- this is called "Looking into the Wind." Hepworth's "Epidauros" is a smooth boulder cut open to reveal a lumpy, complex interior; it is something like a geode and so tactile that you seem to feel the thing with your eyeballs. George Rickey's "Four Open Rectangles" is a spectacular kinetic statue, metal rectangles like precision instruments mounted in such a way that the slightest breeze whirls them on a common axis so that they form ephemeral patterns as the blades cross over blades. Rene Kueng, a Swiss artist, has made a big fluffy-looking harp mounted on top the hill so you look through its stone strings at the distant green and leafy landscape. There is an exuberant construction by Louise Nevelson, all sinister-looking fins and oblong panels grouped behind a mannequin-shaped stela that looks like an angel. An Apache named Gosaquen has made a life-sized spirit dancer, a masked apparition whirling about so that his buckskin dress and his arms seem flung in the direction of his dance -- I didn't much like the piece: it's like the kind of stuff, you see for sale in expensive galleries in Santa Fe and Taos, but, I suppose, some might find the fearsome-looking dancer impressive. The real find at the Harrison Sculpture Garden are two big works by the Italian Mimmo Paladino, "Sud II" and "Canto Notturno" -- these works are house-sized and constructed around slender admonitory figures, emaciated personages that bear some resemblance to the sculpture of Giacometti. Paladino's enigmatic sculptures are variants on classical themes -- figures are draped with the skins of wolves and archaic-looking masks protrude from high walls of brown-black bronze. The figures are surprisingly detailed -- because they are very dark against the brightness of a sunny day, you have to let your eyes adjust to them before you can appreciate all of the bas relief imagery on the figures, vestigial figures extruded from other figures, a tiny ghost-like dwarf carrying on his back a huge primitive-looking mask with two coiled antennae such as you might find on a big, ugly beetle.
A little down the road from the Harrison Sculpture Garden, there is a Chinese garden. The grounds, which are a gift from a Chinese city, are entered through a big Moon Gate, tiled with wet-looking slick blue tiles at its crown. The Moon Gate frames a small, round pond where ducks are swimming, the water rimmed with brown reeds, and a similarly tiled belvedere, a viewing platform under a dragonish roof hovering half-over the water. On the far side of the lake, huge chalk-pale boulders rise -- these are 35 tones of Quinling Mountain Rocks. The garden is a mandala -- a plan of the universe including its oceans and forests and mountains.
There are many trails at the arboretum that I would like to walk. I will have to return to that place. It's probably expensive. I didn't pay to enter: I went with my mother and she is an arboretum member. She tells me that it is particularly beautiful in the Fall when the leaves are changing.
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