My structure begins with the six values of gardening, derived directly from the definition I’ve come up with.
• 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.