The most important idea I can share about gardening is that it should never be a chore.
The Earth existed for billions of years before we were born. It will continue for billions of years after us. Upon it is a multitude of living things, and those of us who garden are fortunate enough to become stewards of a very small portion of its surface, for a very short time.
Any of us who have spent any amount of time observing nature—which anyone who hopes to be a gardener really ought to do before taking charge of a piece of it—knows that it can be pretty on its own. The most spectacular arrangements of plants and trees, the kind that sneak up on you as you crest a hill take your breath away, all exist in wide wild spaces with no human intervention: fields of wildflowers. Bronze grassy meadows lined with the golden plumes of autumn trees. Snow-capped mountains above a sea of conifers, deep blue-green with lime-colored branch tips reaching outward with fresh spring growth. A magenta shock of rhododendrons in bright sun surrounded by a gloomy-deep forest of redwoods.
Without human intervention, even a small plot of grassland becomes poetry and art. Drifts of stoloniferous plants mix and mingle in a patchwork of silver, green and brown. Different species of bunchgrasses jut up against each other in contrasting textures. Wildflowers peek through the blades, or announce themselves in lazy swaths. Truly, nature doesn’t need our help.
So why do we garden? I would argue, it’s to get to know the landscape a little better. It’s to have a relationship with the plants, the things that consume them, and the people who enjoy them. It’s to experiment and learn their behavior, and to become more intimately acquainted with the successionality of seasonal change. It’s to have an impact on what others will experience when they wander through your little world. Gardening is an intellectually, emotionally and spiritually rewarding practice. And it should be creative and invigorating, not work.
A yard versus a garden
In a world of commodification, it’s a sad reality that so many of us think of landscaping as giving an outdoor room some decorations. Not only that, but it’s is a room we scarcely use—barely a guest bedroom. We’ll furnish it with a Berberis hedge for an end table, an Arborvitae ottoman, a hydrangea bookcase, some ivy as a cheap print to adorn a wall.
This is the kind of landscape that nature rebels against, and so it becomes an effort to keep it in place. The wilderness is full of patterns you’ll see if you’re observant, but rarely will they ever be square. And almost never will you find such a small number of species; the lack of diversity, leaving open many a biological niche, is just asking for weeds to come and try to fight you.
Nature abhors a vacuum, turning this conventional suburban yard into a liability: in addition to the weeds, the roses will need to be sprayed for bugs, the lawn given nitrogen fertilizer, the edging strips must be dug out and lifted every few years, the bushes need to be hedged into straight lines. Instead of enlivening us, the garden is a tedious chore.
Gardening an ecosystem
I like to think of gardening as being a curator of life. Until you become intimately acquainted with a space—traced the paths of sunlight and shadow over the days and months, felt its soil, become familiar with the climate and the warm and cool spaces that manifest themselves in any complex setting—its hard to predict where plants will want to grow.
One area might lend itself to a dense, lush billowing garden of large leaves and bright juicy flowers. Another might be naturally inhabited by rugged, hardy plants with gray furry foliage that buffers the intensity of sun. A garden plot might be transformed from leafy and mild to scorching hot with a seasonal change, bringing a new angle from the sun. A certain spot might seem like a setup for a lush shade garden of ferns and hostas, but over time and repeated planting failures you come to appreciate how aggressively the nearby tree depletes the soil of moisture. You’ll need hardier plants: hucheras, bearberries, or drought-avoiding early spring flowers to fill the spot.
Over time you learn. And by getting the plants right, in an ideal pattern that fits the resources well, they harmonize, each performing its best and successfully crowding out weeds. It’s when you reach this point that a garden may behave like a natural landscape, moving and evolving and never ceasing to inspire you. It becomes exactly as prolific as the land will allow, a refuge for everyone who spends time there, a food source for animals and bugs, a playground and classroom for children and a laboratory and prized art piece for the gardener.
That’s the spirit with which I approach the landscape. Aesthetically, I like things varied and full, and emotionally, I like knowing that I’m feeding wildlife. Spiritually, I like knowing that this is something that can be balanced enough that it would be able to manage itself in my absence, although I don’t always have the self-control to step back. In any case, I’m letting the garden breathe: the plants can expand in wet years, hunker down in dry ones, push and pull on each other, drift and spread and offer new surprises.
I could spend hours in a garden every day, digging, clipping and poking around, experimenting with propagation and with putting plants in situations that—just barely—challenge their needs. But I never really feel like I’m “working.” Truth be told, when a garden is well-fit, it doesn’t require much of that. And since it’s no longer an obligation, an hour in the garden feels like a break at the end of a long day.
My hope is that I can use this blog to promote that feeling. I’ll write about practical advice, science, design, ecology, biodiversity, change, and of course, all of my favorite plants.