Garden Thought

The six values of ornamental horticulture in my “What Gardens Believe In” post set up a crucial principle: gardens must be the right size, and the right size is small.

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.