The first thing I noticed was her hat. It was a straw gardener’s hat with a large, misbehaving brim. The thing had seen more than a single season, with the very top attached by a fortunate sliver of stitching. We hadn’t met before, but there was an unruliness in Laura Perkins that I recognized immediately. Standing at the edge of a wooded area, she herself seemed a container for all that was wild. “Welcome!” she said, with her entire body, the top of her hat bouncing as she spoke. “Welcome to Stone Barns.” It was a sweltering late-summer afternoon in the Hudson Valley, but her fresh excitement would have one think otherwise. Throughout the next hour or so, I followed her through the brush, fields, and forested areas to smell, scrape, and eat whatever she conducted us towards. We wandered through groves of sassafras, knelt to beds of purslane, and met with a trip of goats she was studying. The approach here was different than the rest of the farm: there were no rows, no marked plots. Nothing sectioned off, waiting patiently for the next growing season. With Laura’s free manner too, it didn’t seem that there was much of a method at all. “Everything is changing. Everything is adapting. There are all of these moving parts hurling through space and time. What do we know? We don’t know anything.” “When I first came to Westchester County, I thought I’d get rid of all these non-native ‘invasive’ plants and have this gorgeous, self-sustaining, native landscape,” she says, recalling a vision of returning the land to itself. But she found she was running up against the impossible. “After 5 years of working my ass off, I realized that just wasn’t going to happen. You’ve got higher soil nutrients, 400 parts per million of carbon, higher temperatures, and massive disturbance from all the human activity.” Nature, she realized, is not meant to be tidied – even with good intentions. “I sometimes feel very inefficient,” she says about her work now as a hybrid-ecosystem gardener. “I’ll look at a spot and think What needs to happen here? I want it to look pretty. I want it to be inviting. I want it to make people want to go into the landscape.” I had just booked a trip to Paris, and thought about the gardens of Versailles. So pretty, and inviting. Meticulous and spaced just so. As a child, I wondered if my heaven experience would include something like that: strolling amongst the poplars and long pools, reflecting blue skies forever. Laura looked out on a path lined with jewelweed. “People like savannas,” she said. “Something more park-like. We want to be able to look out and see what’s going on. A tangled mess makes people feel very insecure, because they can’t see. It’s very primal.” In complex landscapes, we crave order and rhythm. A sense of safety. In this way, that blue-skied Versailles heaven was my boyhood answer to life’s biggest mystery – a way of drawing a neat line around a wild idea. I wondered how much time I’ve spent searching for a Versailles in the weeds of things. At one point, Laura handed me a bob of marsala-colored sumac she snapped off a tree. This was the first I learned that not every species of sumac is poisonous, and that it can also be used as flavoring for food and water. The drupe went straight into my water bottle. Would I have known sumac better all these years if it had been groomed into rows? About the brush, Laura goes on: “The birds and the bees like that mess, really! They love the spots where the multiflora rose grow with the prickery and the vines.” From bramble, the song of birds. “If you go and listen to where all the birds are singing, that’s where they’re singing,” she adds, as if it were obvious. I asked Laura about the chefs at Stone Barns, who whom she consults. “They’re very curious about what I bring in, what my story is about it, what I’ve observed, and what I think is important about it,” Laura told me. “They’re very appreciative and they love to learn.” Even in a space where “jackets and ties are preferred for gentlemen,” they welcome the “tangled mess” to support the evolution of their food systems and dining experience. Evolution. Laura spoke of the landscape, deer, and multiflora rose in this way a lot. She’s gone from battling with some populations to, years later, cherishing their unexpected, ecological purpose. On the changing patterns of deer, she notes, “Everything is changing. Everything is adapting. There are all of these moving parts hurling through space and time. What do we know? We don’t know anything.” Thoreau sums it up. “We require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.” There’s no punishing the weeds of Versailles, or any other garden. No escaping the unruliness of life. And even if we could, why would we?
