I collect definitions of gardening, and there are many I like. But I have yet to find one that can serve as the foundation for a theoretical structure for horticulture. To think about horticulture, we need to be able to agree to a statement that leads to principles that lead to good arguments. We don’t have that.
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.