I propose four of these stages of gardening:

• Newly disturbed. Gardening around a new development house is a harsh experience, and a gardener who is good at it has to love physical work – mattock against rock-hard compacted soil, wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of mulch and compost. There is an incredible satisfaction, though, in making a house in a wasteland come to life with your own muscles, and picking out the toughest plant you can find, planting it as well as you can, and then willing it to live is a way of being with a plant that is unmatchable.

As a gardener in newly disturbed land, you also gets to make discoveries – wonderful, as when a Sassafras albidum on site seems to have survived the heavy machinery, or heartbreaking, as when a perfect planting spot turns out to be on top of a huge stump. And then there are the sweeping decisions of land use: you get to decide where the primary garden ends and maintained land begins, where there will be a grove of trees or a bed or a lawn or a pond. This is intense horticulture, and it can be wonderful.

• Roughly shaped. Gradually, though, a garden begins to come into focus. Beds you’ve imagined become edged, mulched spaces populated with the toughest plants in your plans. Espaliered shrubs break up blank walls. The edge of the garden becomes clear, and the comforting buffer zone of maintained land begins to look like it will survive.

There are big decisions here, too. It’s time to make decisions about big trees, something a newly-disturbed gardener should put off to make sure it gets done right. Everything that happened before has to be evaluated; plants that aren’t doing well, or that are doing too well, have to be eradicated, a huge horticultural decision. It’s also time for nuanced choices; the brutal soil has softened, and plants that aren’t as tough can be placed among the survivors of the first round of planting.

There’s a huge responsibility in the second stage of gardening, because many sites stall out here, reverting to a smattering of plantings in an ever-larger lawn. Good choices create a home; bad choices create a monstrosity.

• Tuned. The shift into a shaped garden comes in a series of realizations. The inevitable over-planting of a roughly-shaped garden turns into beds that are too full, and the gardener who has been nurturing tiny plants has to start dividing and removing. Trees that you still think of as saplings need to be limbed up, and you order too much mulch because there’s less bare ground than you remember.

This is a critical phase for making sense of a garden. A freshly planted garden determines its own statement, to some extent, because your ideas for what it should mean might be crushed when your Prunus subhirtella (Weeping Cherry) all die because of nursery damage that wasn’t evident when they were planted. Now, though, hard choices have to be made: that Berberis thunbergii that you planted to make a thorny reference to a traditional hedge is seeding in like crazy, and you have to rip it out, while the thriving Aronia arbutifolia (Chokeberry) in the maintained land around your garden shows the potential for birds on your site, and you begin to plant with an eye towards attracting particular birds. I’ll talk about meaning in several future posts; the third-stage garden is tuned around horticultural statements, though, so this is where meaning becomes clear.

• Virtuoso. A tuned garden is a huge achievement, and many of us can’t hope to move beyond it. There are particularly talented gardeners among us who can make gardens at a different level, gardens that push the edges of what’s possible, gardens that shape the idea of what it is to be a garden.

The language barrier is a huge issue here. An exemplary garden comes from a gardener who has internalized a sophisticated set of ideas, something it’s hard to do without the words that we use to shape our thoughts. How can a virtuoso gardener deliberately contradict a horticultural premise to make a statement about what it means to garden, if she can’t name the idea?

Nevertheless, people do it. The garden I mention in my first post worked at every scale, through the season, coherently; beyond this, though, the garden was both overflowing and perfectly spaced, massed thoughtfully without evident weeding or moving, balanced between plants that pushed the edges of weediness and rarities that required special treatment to make it through the winter. The garden, which I’ll write more about, seemed to fully express the gardener’s will, but the plants seemed to be fully expressed in their own autonomy.

The virtuoso garden moves beyond our definitions. Is it safe? Certainly so; yet the edginess of the statements it makes also push that edge, and we have to think through our idea of plant safety and live with the kind of psychological discomfort that comes from an intense experience. Is it aesthetically sound, and does it add to the gardener’s life? Only if a gardener lives in her horticulture at a high level, and can make extraordinarily difficult tasks turn into an extraordinary cultural work.

A good garden progresses from stage to stage, though it’s too much to ask that most gardens become virtuoso gardens. Every stage of gardening is worthwhile and hugely enriching.

Gardening well means knowing where you are and where you’re going, but being entirely in the moment.

As long as there’s some sense of safety in the middle of it, the part of a garden that is intensively cultivated can be very small. The normal practice of trying to garden to a property line forces many people to garden too much, an aesthetic disaster. An appropriate amount of work adds to a good life; a burden is just that, and there’s no argument in favor of it.

The default is to put most of a lot into lawn, and to garden it by mowing, constantly. I’ll talk about this in a later post, but it is important that mowing and the many gas engines it involves are impractically labor-intensive, psychologically brutal on gardener and audience alike, aesthetically bankrupt, closely associated with malignant meanings, poisonous, loud, and incoherent.

If we shouldn’t mow – much – and we can only garden what we can handle, what happens to the rest of the land we’re in charge of?

I think of our habitations in concentric circles. A habitation – house, office – is in the middle; around it is a circle of land that is heavily gardened. For lack of a better term, I’m going to call this “primary garden,” though I’d be appreciative of a better word, if someone wanted to offer one in the comments to this post.  Around the heavily gardened land is what I’ll call “maintained land;” around that is “wilderness,” though my definition is not necessarily the Sierra Club’s.  Each circle demands a different level of control, and a particular kind of investment of time and energy. The two inner circles call for horticulture, but very different kinds of horticulture. The outermost circle must be cared for, but it really is a place to experience, not control.

So, in a primary garden, every inch of surface is covered, with plants and mulch. This circle interacts with the built environment – paving and pathways and porches and the building itself. Plants here are showy, and they can require a lot of culture; this is where we need to take action daily. This is the part of the garden we live with, all the time. You should be able to see our hand in the horticulture, and you should feel that this is a place where plants and humans co-exist.

Maintained land, on the other hand, should be safe, and it should feel safe. But it should not require frequent maintenance. The goal is control with minimum investment, not showy gardening. A thick covering of mulch, renewed during work days a couple of times a year and planted with tough shrubs and hardy ground covers, is appropriate; a meadow burned yearly is more exciting. The space, though, is not about hard use; it is a backdrop and a buffer, not a place to visit.

This is not to say that maintained land shouldn’t be pleasant; it is a likely place for birds, and for children’s hide-outs. But it is not meant to be lived in.

Without the option of this maintained land, gardening becomes a chore, an expense, and a struggle to keep up. An energetic gardener with ample time or a city gardener with a small space might not need maintained land, and a non-gardener might opt only to have primary gardens around a front door, leaving the rest to bi-annual mulching and heavy weeding. But it is a huge problem to tell everyone who controls land that they must garden or mow every bit of it. Gardening is only a good when it’s a choice.

Wilderness land, in this version, is land that doesn’t need maintenance to speak of, land that is taking care of itself. This is more complicated than it seems, as natural lands management is a discipline unto itself. Fire suppression or grazing rights should interest gardeners particularly, since we care about plants more than many. Horticulturally, though, wilderness is land that is, or has become, ungardened.

It’s important that wilderness does not mean pristine land, or even land that is populated by native plants. I worked on a project to manage a valley that had been turned into a garbage dump, but was then cleaned up and re-planted in the 1930s. Its planners deliberately included plants from different regions, including Asian rhododendrons, which do well with North American hardwoods. The land had gone through the transition from unmanaged, dangerous ground to maintained land, and some of it no longer needed attention, which made it wilderness. We spent the winter finding the plump purple buds that identified Acer platanoides seedlings, and pulling them with a weed wrench – a common theme in horticulture career! –  to achieve a mix of plants would eventually no longer require any work at all.

There’s an argument here – a strong argument, I think – that the norm is not good gardening. We need to get away from a mowing paradigm, and build a system of managing land that includes spaces where we do nothing and spaces where we garden very little. There are terrific benefits to this, which I’ll talk about in a future post; imagine, though, crews of skilled land managers gradually turning turf into meadow, and meadow into prairie. It’s a beautiful picture.

• Practicality. To garden is to control the soil surface. If you you’re not in charge, you’re not gardening well.

• Psychological safety. It’s not enough for the land around your house to be effectively controlled, though, if it feels like it isn’t. Plenty of gardens are too barren or too close to the edge of weediness to give the sense that a habitation is protected from the nastiness that is always ready to swallow it. We need a place in the midst of healthy, managed plants. It’s a fundamental human need.

• Aesthetics. Safe land requires constant care. We continue to work with it, and that interaction is a place where our lives are better or worse through plants. If we manage our disturbed soil in such a way that it adds good things to our experience – pleasure, knowledge, a sense of efficacy – then gardening is part of a good life. If we make bad decisions that require unpleasant work, managing land becomes a nuisance, or even a cause for anxious obsession. Intentionally shaping our own way of being with a garden is central to what horticulture is about; a good garden is about a good life.

• Meaning. Gardens are not about plants. They are about using plants say something. What’s both exciting and terrifying is that a plant purchased and planted says something about you, whether you want it to or not. Are you environmentally aware? Are you an ideologue? A materialist? An exploiter of other cultures? A knowledgeable botanist? A consumer? A radical? Your garden tells a story about you. Good gardeners are deliberate about their statements. Bad gardeners plant and culture blindly.

• Ethics. It is easy to wrong people as a gardener. It seems likely that poisoning your lawn could sicken your neighbors’ children, and your insistence on spotless sidewalks wrecks your lawn man’s hearing, as well as raising the global temperature just a little bit. Planting Acer platanoides (Norway Maple) makes you a contributor to an eventual monoculture in the neighboring woodland, drowning out the diversity of plants that many of us value as crucial to our experience of the natural world. Introducing Aegopodium podagraria cv. Variegatum on your side of the fence might cause your neighbor and the person who buys your house (and the person after that, and the person after that) to give up gardening altogether, since it will choke out everything they try to do. Being a good gardener, in the sense of being a good person, requires thought, commitment, and good choices.

• Synthesis. Horticulture is hard. The amount of information crammed into a good gardener’s head is unbelievable, and he still has to weed for hours on end and swing a mattock at the roots of an ancient yew that needs to come out. This is worse than useless if it’s horrible work, because horticulture is entirely about a deliberately good quality of life; people aren’t used to this, but it’s crucial to all involved that a gardener plan for effective, good, pleasurable work, even while it’s hard.

On top of this, a gardener has to be aware of layer upon layer of meaning, and layer upon layer of right and wrong decisions. All of this has to fit together into a whole. Every piece of gardening depends on every other, and every garden functions only if its values are integrated as a coherent whole. A garden has to be a unified entity, and a gardener has to be accomplished in lots of ways to make it so.

I suggest that these six values are the bones for any horticulture study, and the important things we need to say about ornamental gardening can be articulated using these categories.

It’s a start.

The statement needs to be strictly definitional, in the sense that it is broad enough to cover all of ornamental horticulture but nothing else – it can’t apply equally well to vegetable gardening or landscape painting.

I came up with mine during a time when I was cleaning urban vacant lots. It was unpleasant work: pulling dozens of Ailanthus altissima (Tree of Heaven) sprouts with a weed wrench is hard on the back; beating back poison ivy can lead to genuinely horrifying skin conditions; picking up mounds of broken glass is dangerous; cleaning up dead animals is disgustingly smelly; sweeping up crack bags is heartbreaking. Yuck.

To move a neighborhood forward, though, vacant lots must be cleaned. Simply put, we can’t live with disturbed, unused land. Social ills and vicious weeds leave us no choice but to manage the ground around us.

There is no easy way out of this situation. We produce disturbed land wherever we go, and we always have. It would be nice to imagine our homes plopped into beautiful meadows; in practice, though, we wreck the surrounding soil as soon as we start building a hut, and we set off a series of events that will ultimately destroy the place we are trying to live.

Partly, this is the nature of weeds. Destroying soil structure is an invitation to the most aggressive plants, because they are tough enough to take the conditions. They’re ready to race into open space, and they will always out-compete the plants we can live with, at least in the short term. And they’re terrific at ripping off roofs, smashing foundations, and snarling entranceways.

Add to this the human tendency to treat trashed land as a place for more trash, and you have a recipe for disaster.

The primary uses of land all keep these problems at bay: agriculture and vegetable gardening are all about killing weeds, grazing is effective at keeping down plant growth, building and paving cover soil so weeds won’t grow. But there is always land around our activities that doesn’t get used, but that is a breeding ground for weeds and trash. This is as true of our new development in the woods as it is in our vacant lot in the city.

If you strip horticulture down to its basics, this is what it is: the fight against bad things that happen in the wrecked soil all around us.

I have a formal, scholarly formulation: “Ornamental horticulture is the necessary and ongoing management of disturbed soil that surrounds human activities.”

This doesn’t describe forestry or biology greenhouses; this includes everything we do as ornamental gardeners, including planting and pruning trees, mulching, mowing, and making gardens.

It also creates a series of questions and answers that are the basis for a real structure of horticulture, a true scholarship.

I think it works. We’ll see where it leads us.

I lived with a garden for a while that was an example of the most sophisticated level of horticulture, and it had a huge impact on my life. Not being able to explain it to anyone was odd and difficult, but the ideas that drove the garden were far beyond the way people normally talk about gardens.

I can list its plants in Latin and English — Dipsacus fullonum (Teasel), Aster tataricus (Tatarian Aster), Perilla frutescens (Beefsteak Plant). I can talk about its site on the banks of a pond, with frogs jumping and snakes making unexpected appearances. I could tell you who gardened it and what her training was, I can tell you its history, and the way it fit into the public garden organization it was a part of.

But I can’t tell you about what made this garden unbelievably successful, what gave it the kind of impact that only a major cultural work can have.

The reason is this: There’s no structure for a conversation about what ornamental horticulture means.

This garden sang. It engaged. It overwhelmed. It was a once-in-a-lifetime garden. And, in fact, this garden made incredibly satisfying sense. But there are no words to convey that.

This blog is an effort to explain that garden. If it were a piece of music, I could draw from an enormous body of published theory to begin such a conversation; if it were a sculpture, I could begin immediately with a set of technical terms. But, bizarrely, ornamental horticulture provides almost nothing in the way of a context for discussion. We have to start at the beginning.

Gardening is important. It’s worth the work.