Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans

Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd

102 Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd I have been invited to spend the day at North Hill, the Vermont hillside on which Wayne Winterrowd and Joe Eck have, for over thirty years, tended a seven-acre garden, deemed one of the best in North America. A “vinous lunch” has been promised, then a tour, followed by our interview and dinner. The preliminary correspondence to arrange all this has been friendly, gracious, courteous. “Let us know approximately what time you will arrive, and we will have the upper gate open for you.” But for the fact that the instructions come via e-mail, this could well be a sentence out of Jane Austen. When I pull up, the two men, both in their sixties, are in a bit of a flutter. The bull has disappeared, so off we trek through forestland (in toto, North Hill comprises twenty-five acres) to the fenced-in pasture. Scots Highland cows look up, eyeing us suspiciously before returning to graze on the rocky terrain. The bull? Eck guesses that it can’t have wandered too far. He suggests we tour the garden. It’s mid-July. A jaw-dropping profusion of varieties, colors, shapes, aromas, and textures greets me as we wander through each “room,” horticultural lingo for an area of a garden designed to achieve a particular effect. When I exclaim that everything seems to be at its height of perfection, I’m politely corrected. There are about eight thousand species of plants at North Hill. I’ve already missed the 103 Joe Eck and Wayne Winter rowd spring and early summer delights—snowdrops and hellebores, the daffodil meadow, magnolias, lilacs, primroses, and the rare, “fabled” Himalayan blue poppy. And I must return in the fall for still more delights. All my research for this visit has not prepared me for the dizzying splendor of the real thing. Eck and Winterrowd’s books, written together or individually, have been described as “inspiring,” “a gold mine of practical advice,” full of “seductive beauties.” “Funny, affectionate, wise and snobbish exactly when you want them to be,” wrote Dominique Browning in her New York Times review of their most recent one, Our Life in Gardens. “The point we would make about gardens,” Winterrowd says as we head back to the house for lunch (homemade pizza laden with leeks, scallions, and black olives), “is that they’re just like life. We can’t talk about a garden without talking about life.” We eat in the kitchen, which is dominated by an open-hearth fireplace and a Jacobean cupboard. Afterward, they invite me into the living room. Like the rest of the place, it speaks of a life richly, deliberately, and unabashedly led. “Gay sensibility is not so very different from that of all the sensitive people I know,” says Winterrowd, whose rakish head of blond hair, now tending toward gray, suggests he was once a young man of considerable visual appeal. “The real divide is not between gay and straight but between people who see their lives as a work of art and those who see it as merely a means to a great fortune.” Eck (shorter, shaved head, piercing blue eyes) politely suggests to his partner that there might indeed be something to the idea of gay sensibility. “One thing about being gay is the degree to which, because of the more exploratory and frequent nature of gay men’s sexual experiences, we enter a great many lives that wouldn’t normally be accessible to us. We all have the experience of loving people who differ from us in terms of class, race, language. And that is . . .” Winterrowd comes on board: “The point is, you’re open to the experience of so many people out of the desire to belong, to work your way in. As gay people we learn to value, love, eroticize, embrace an enormous range of humanity, and out of that grows a kind of cosmopolitanism that allows us to be comfortable with so many different kinds of men.” The afternoon will go on in this way, with stories corrected, embellished , continued by one or the other. As young boys, Winterrowd and Eck, both lonely children, found safety and security in the world of plants. “The impulse to create a safe, harmonious, tranquil world is born of some kind of pain,” says Winterrowd, who grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, and still retains...