Garden Thought

This blog proposes a structure for theoretical ornamental horticulture. So far, I’ve defined the garden several ways: conceptually; by its values; and spatially. The next job is to understand horticulture in terms of time. This is a question of stages.

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.