Catskill Road Trip; Falling Water Diversion

This is Part 4 of 5 essays about our garden trip to the Catskills.

Read Parts 1,2,3 here.

The final Part 5 will come out here on Sunday.

Tom puts up with a lot of garden talk, botanical names, and garden personality gossip. I love him for that. And as a good husband, for a garden road trip, I try to throw in a bone of other interest sometimes.

For a while this past winter, I fooled around with writing a book about \influential gay garden men who were born in South Carolina. I’d linked a bunch of mentors starting with the oldest, born in the 30’s, internationally recognized and whose garden is now called the John Fairey Garden, through Ryan Gainey and up to Jim Martin.

Dean Riddle would be a given.

“Let’s go see Dean and his new garden next summer,” I told Tom. He didn’t really look up, but said, “In New York? Ok.” He didn’t look at which part of New York until too late.

Frank Lloyd Wright became the bone. I’ve never been in a Frank Lloyd Wright building that I enjoyed, but I knew Tom wanted to see Fallingwater, so I routed the trip that way, and we ended up needing a night on the road to get in line for our 8 am, $90 tour. We spent the night before at a mall in West Virginia, which was sort of a lark but turned out to be a wonderful surprise. The mall cinema offered Spider-Man and Hadestown, neither on my list of must-sees. Spidey lost out. But the live filming of the Broadway musical, Hadestown, captivated me. It was one of those performances in which you want every scene to hurry up so you can find out what’s going to happen, but the singers and dancers so talented that you don’t want the scene to end. (It’s still in some theaters.)

Tom loved the early morning Falling Water tour. I liked the place more than any Wright building I’ve ever been in. But there was a weird moment when I asked about the final owner, the one who set the house up with a foundation, lots of money, and lots of land. The guide’s answer was sort of evasive, sort of prim, in that old way folks used to talk about gay men. I don’t remember the words, but they conveyed that we might best leave the subject alone. Some later reading told me more and left me with no respect for old Frank Loyd Not-So-Wright. He was a homophobe. He didn’t acknowledge that his senior drafstwoman, did about half the work, and on top of that, ungrateful to the gay man who got him the Fallingwater job, the same man who ensured the house’s conservation. (Here’s an interesting Substack about that man and Wright’s ego.)

I appreciate a work of art so much more when the person behind it seems likable — after watching the Hadestown movie, I found an interview with André De Shields, whose warmth on stage turns out to be the real thing off it too, and it only made me love that movie more.

The morning architecture experience and weird tour did give Tom and me a lot to talk about on the drive from there up and over to see Dean in the Catskills. I can recognize visionary work — I even loved the patio chairs at Fallingwater

But what I’m really excited to write about will come Sunday morning, right here via this Substack. We’ll see the garden grown by the man who’s become a respected friend of mine — Dean Riddle. For years, we’ve felt like friends via our profession. Dean was for a long time, the only US-based writer for the British magazine Gardens Illustrated; his gardens featured in dozens more and were captured by famed photographers. He and I, between us, wrote what are without a doubt the two gayest books in American garden literature.

I’ll share plenty of photos, but what sticks in my mind is the first moments in the garden with this man. He plowed in, observing every detail, which he had planned, talking through them in that way that Southerners do, wondering aloud, threading in a story, and occasionally, sort of asking for advice about something. The garden was mostly pastels, but Dean’s head-scratching revolved around one perfectly open poppy “They were all supposed to be pink. but one, that red one- just came up on its own! But I do kind of like the pop of color, so I’ve let it stay.”