Research Essay: Why Do We Garden? (200 Points) Length: 8-10 pages Check Canvas for Due Dates
The Task: Craft a thesis that explores and addresses the connections between the following questions: What is a garden (in other words—what makes a garden a garden, what defines it)? Why do we garden (what are we looking for in the art– the pastime, the pleasure, the challenge, the satisfaction, the escape, the sanctuary– of gardening)? Please note that it is absolutely essential that you specifically and thoroughly address and respond to these questions in your essay. In other words, your essay must provide possible answers to BOTH of these questions and show the inherent link between them. If you do not do this or you only do so vaguely, you will not have fulfilled the task.
Quick List of Assignments Required for the Project (Due Dates for Each Can Be Found on Canvas)
(1) Online Library Skills Workshops (See Canvas for schedule, links and due dates – Upload Badges to Canvas)
(2) Garden Visits (5 points) Upload to Canvas
(3) Garden Supply Stores Visits (5 points) Upload to Canvas
(4) Interviews (5 points) Upload to Canvas
(5) Prospectus (5 points) Upload to Canvas
(7) Annotated Bibliography (10 points) Upload to Canvas
(8) Final Draft (200 points) Upload to Canvas
Many of you more than likely have little or no experience with gardening. This is precisely why you will need to research what gardens are and why many choose to garden (and why many choose to stop gardening). Please keep in mind that you may not end up using all of your research. The advantage of completing all of these tasks is that they will help you to better understand what a garden is and why people garden. To best familiarize you with gardening and prepare you for writing this research essay, you must complete the following steps.
Step 1. Completing the Online Library Tutorials : Failure to complete them will result in a loss of your entire participation grade (25 points). The required workshops are listed on Canvas, where you will also find a link to the library website where the tutorials are offered (as well as links to upload your badges that prove you completed the workshop). Step 2. Garden Visits : Visit a minimum of two “kinds” of gardens (a public garden, a friend or acquaintance’s garden, a community garden, your own garden, a radically different kind of garden). As you visit these places, take notes about your observations and ask yourself, based on what you observe, “what a garden is” and “why we garden.” Then write a 3-page informal narrative (basically a free write) that explains how what you saw helps you address these questions (and provide some possible answers). The more detailed and informative your discussion, the more points you will receive. Your task is to begin writing your thoughts about how to answer these questions. Double spaced. Check Canvas for due date . (10 pts) Step 3. Garden Supply Store Visit : Visit at least one store that sell plants and gardening supplies ( e.g. Sloat Garden Center, Home Depot, Orchard Supply Hardware, a local nursery). As you visit this store (or these stores), take notes about your observations and ask yourself, based on what you observe, “what a garden is” and “why we garden.” Then write a 3-page informal narrative (basically a free write) that explains how what you saw helps you address these questions (and provide some possible answers). For this assignment, also include what you learned from visiting the two different gardens and how visiting a garden supply store has contributed to your further understanding of these questions. Double spaced. Check Canvas for the due date . (10 pts) Step 4. Interviews : Interview at least three people and ask them “what a garden is” and “why we garden”—as well as any other questions that you think will be relevant to your research. Note: try and talk to people who have gardens or gardening experience. (Hint: interview people at the gardens and garden supply stores that you visit; you can even interview me if you wish!). Then write a 3-page informal narrative (basically a free write) that explains how the answers to your interview questions help you address those questions. For this assignment, also include what you learned from visiting the two different gardens and a garden supply store and how these interviews have contributed to your further understanding of these questions. Double-spaced. Check Canvas for due date . (10 pts)
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Step 5. The Prospectus : Sit down and prepare a prospectus that outlines what you intend to research/ write about. Your prospectus should introduce your basic working thesis, the research you intend to pursue, and the basic outline of how you plan to present it. You should already be coming to some conclusions about “what a garden is” & “why we garden” so that you will have something specific to explore. Check Canvas for due date. (5 pts) You are not bound to your prospectus. You are allowed to change your mind. However, if you do change your mind / direction significantly, please submit a new prospectus for my approval. Your prospectus must be more specific than, “I plan to do research and find out why people garden and what a garden is.” I am looking for the specific direction and an outline of at least several things you wish to research.
Step 6. Do Your Research Keeping in mind your specific focus, research everything you can about Gardens ( e.g. their history, practices, garden styles) Reasons why people garden ( e.g. spiritual, practical, relaxation, challenges, etc.) The specific direction you have chosen to research Note : You are required to use and quote William Fitzgerald’s “The Impermanence of Order,” Jim Nollman’s “The How-To Garden,” and Michael Pollan’s “Gardening Means War.” Note : You must find and use a minimum of six additional sources. Two of those sources may come from Internet sites, but the other four must come from printed sources. However, if your source was originally a printed source but has since been stored electronically online, then you may use that source (for example, articles, essays or books found through an online database). Note : The best approach for a research project is to gather more information than you need for the essay. Your goal is to find a substantial amount of research to draw from while writing your essay. Also keep in mind, that you will not necessarily find sources that specifically address these questions. You will need to process and think critically about the information you find and ask yourself how your research can help you address the questions of what a garden is and why we do it. Note : As you work on your research, you don’t need to know exactly what you are going to write about, but you should have a general goal. Think of the research portion of this essay as an opportunity to let your experiences and observations help you figure out what you later want to write about. However, everything you gather and think about should be focused on answering the questions put forth in this prompt: “what a garden is” and “why we garden.” Step 8. Annotated Bibliography : List the sources you will be using for your essay. Do not number the sources. You must follow all the MLA formatting rules for biographical citations (see the course reader for correct formatting and a sample annotated bibliography). Check Canvas for the due date. 10pts. Below each citation, you must provide a short summary of what, overall, the source is about and how you intend to use that source. Your summary must be very, very, very specific. I am not looking for generalizations. Make sure that the summary of the source is on a different line than the citation itself (refer to the sample annotated bibliography in the course reader). Remember: you need a total of 9 sources: (1) Michael Pollan’s “Gardening Means War,” (2) William Fitzgerald’s “The Impermanence of Order,” and (3) Jim Nollman’s “The How-To Garden” PLUS six additional source s that you find via research. Of those six additional sources, two may come from Internet sites, but the other four must come from printed sources. However, if your source was originally a printed source but has since been stored electronically online, then you may use that source (for example, articles, essays or books found through an online database). For the articles in this course reader, use this reader as your source (use the page numbers from this reader). For example (note the exact formatting): Fitzgerald, William. “The Impermanence of Order: The True Nature of Gardens.” English 1A Course Reader. Edited by Nathan Wirth, Nathan’s Mind Inc., 2019.
Things That You Must Do/Remember (Check this List Before You Are Ready to Upload Your Final Draft)
1) Your essay must follow the requirements listed in this prompt and respond to the questions asked in the task (What is a Garden? / Why do we Garden?). If you go way off topic or do not address the questions, your essay will not be successful.
2) Important: this is not an essay about your experiences visiting gardens and stores to gather information; rather, it is an essay that explains what a garden is and why we garden— nor is it a personal essay about why you like or don’t like gardening (or even what you, personally, think about gardening). To that end, you are not allowed to use “I” in the essay (or “you”).
3) As we will have discussed in class, your essay is not a dumping ground for quotations. Keep in mind our discussions about using research to meaningfully contribute to the discussion in your essay (use your sources to support points, to address ideas and possibilities, to provide valuable insights for answering these questions, etc.). Remember our class discussions about providing context for the sources that you use. Many students, over the years, have told me in their process letters that they struggled to find sources that agree with and/or support their ideas and points. This is not the correct approach to a research essay. You are supposed to learn from your research; in other words, your research should lead you to new insights and help you shape your responses to these questions.
4) You must write a minimum of eight full, complete pages and no more than twelve. Essays that do not reach the required minimum might receive less points and / or not receive a passing grade.
5) You must include a formal, properly formatted works cited page ( do not use your annotated bibliography ). Make sure that you also follow all of the proper MLA formatting for in-text citations. If you have many MLA errors and / or no works cited page, I will have to reduce your grade, so make sure that you take the time to properly format your in-text citations / works cited page.
SAMPLE PROSPECTUS
Miley Cyrus English 1A Prospectus for Gardening Research Paper Prospectus I am going to explore the idea that a garden only maintains its shape as long as one does the upkeep. This reality, in my opinion, defines a garden. No matter what kind of design one chooses, that design will only last if you do the work necessary to preserve it. Furthermore, I want to explore the idea that many of us garden because we love the challenge of that upkeep. Many of us also garden because even though it is very hard work, we find it peaceful and rewarding—even spiritual. In order to explore these ideas, I plan to research several different kinds of gardens. The formal English garden. The Zen Garden Natural Gardens Guerilla Gardening By looking at the differences between these garden styles, I plan to discuss how the different designs and approaches reveal the various ways we shape the garden. These gardens range from rigid designs to random seed dispersion, but all of them reflect the intention and desire of the “gardener.” Why does the gardener wish to pursue any of these? What satisfaction does she get from all the hard work? Finding answers to these questions should help me better understand how these different styles appeal to different people. Furthermore, I plan to explore how these designs help us to understand what a garden is— and how these designs reflect our desire to “control” and “shape” nature (knowing full well that it will last only as long as we put the work in).
SAMPLE ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY (Follow the Formatting EXACTLY)
Miley Cyrus English 1A
Annotated Bibliography for Gardening Research Paper
Kunitz, Stanley. The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden. Norton, 2005.
Kunitz’s book explores his love for gardening and how it has shaped his attention to poetry. His book reflects the gardener who has become very old and knows that he will soon die and that his garden will not likely last once he is gone. I plan to use this to help support the spiritual benefits of gardening.
Pollan, Michael. Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education. Grove, 1991. Pollan explores the gardener’s almost intimate relationship with nature. The various essays in the book reflect his successes and his many failures with gardening. He considers the ways that the garden permits us to study wilderness while at the same time admitting the folly of our desire to control it. I think Pollan’s book will be very useful for supporting my discussions about the gardener’s desire to control nature—and the likely inevitably that we will ultimately fail.
Yamaguchi, Akira. “The Essence of Nature and Spirit in the Placing of Stones.” Sacred Space: The Art of the Zen Garden. Vintage, 1978. Yamaguchi discusses the spiritual aesthetics of the Zen garden by exploring how it reflects nature. I plan to use this source to show that even though the rock garden typically has few or no plants, it requires a significant amount of maintenance.
Furthermore, the typical Zen gardener continually changes and moves around the elements of the garden while also accepting that nature will inevitably undo his patterns and designs.
Spiritual at their core, these gardens reflect a gardener’s perception of nature.
Zucher, Brown. “The Free Form Garden: Beyond Tradition.” Gardening, 24 Jan 72, pp 29-38.
Throughout much of the article, Zucher argues that the free form garden offers the perfect opportunity for someone to watch nature freely form in the confines of the garden, but he also recognizes that even though this kind of garden is random, it still reflects some kind of intention by the gardener. I think this will be very helpful for my thesis that gardening is very significantly bound to the intent of the gardener.
Sample Outline for Research Essay
I. Introduction (could be more than one paragraph)
A. Establish the questions
1. What is a garden? and Why do we garden?
B. Ponder possible answers
1. The idea is to possible ways that we might consider what a garden is and why we do it
C. Thesis: Your specific response to the questions (DO NOT USE … People garden for many different reasons and gardens mean different things to different people or In this essay I will explore the different ways / reasons, etc. INSTEAD, BE SPECIFIC … MAKE A CLAIM)
II. Rose Gardens (could easily be more than one paragraph)
A. Provide a transition from the introduction / thesis that shows / explains to your reader why considering different garden styles will help answer these questions.
B. Describe, specifically, what a rose garden is
1. What are its various elements?
a) Order? / Structure? / Formal?
2. Rules / Requirements
C. Why do people choose to cultivate a rose garden?
1. This should be various things – each of which helps to explain why / what
D. Your conclusions about how your discussion of a rose garden answers the questions why people garden / what a garden is.
III. Natural Gardens (could easily be more than one paragraph)
A. Provide a transition from the previous paragraph(s) about Rose Gardens. Something that picks up off of the conclusion about what makes a rose garden a rose garden and how this relates to why people garden / what a garden is.
B. Describe, specifically, what a natural garden is
1. What are its various elements?
a) Order? / Structure? / Formal?
2. Rules / Requirements
C. Why do people choose to cultivate a natural garden as opposed to a more traditional garden?
1. This should be various things – each of which helps to explain why / what
D. Your conclusions about how your discussion of a natural garden design answers the questions why people garden / what a garden is.
IV. You should draw some conclusions about how your discussion of the two garden forms so far helps us to understand what a garden is and why we garden. Think of this as an opportunity to give relevance to your discussions of the two garden forms.
A. Take some time to consider how they are different but only do this so that you can consider what is similar about them.
B. From these conclusions, transition into the next garden form.
V. Zen Gardens (could easily be more than one paragraph)
A. Provide a transition from the previous paragraph to this third garden style. How is it different from the other two – but is still similar and how does it help us to understand why people garden / what a garden is.
B. Describe, specifically, what a Zen garden is
1. What are its various elements?
i. Order? / Structure? / Formal? / symbolism?
2. Rules / Requirements
C. Why do people choose to cultivate a Zen garden?
1. This should be various things – each of which helps to explain why / what
D. Your conclusions about how your discussion of a Zen garden answers the questions why people garden / what a garden is.
VI. Conclusion (could easily be more than one paragraph)
A. What the various styles / forms considered together tell us about what a garden is
1. How those differences still help us to understand how / why / what
2. How, despite their differences they all help us to understand how/ why / what
B. What, ultimately, are your responses to the questions?
1. What is a garden?
2. Why do people garden?
Please keep in mind that this is only an example, one that serves the purpose of providing a means for discussion about structure
/ transitions / etc. There are many different ways that you could organize / discuss / research / consider your responses to the task set forth in the essay prompt. In other words, you can use this outline, but you are not required to follow this direction.
The Impermanence of Order: The True Nature of Gardens by William Fitzgerald
Gardening is not a rational act.
– Margaret Atwood –
The earliest evidence of gardening takes civilization back to the symmetrical rows of acacia and palms found in 15th century B.C. Egyptian tomb paintings; in fact, even the most perfunctory survey of gardening throughout its long history reveals an attention to symmetry— a conclusion that suggests a significant element of gardening is grounded in the aesthetic and practical desire to bring order to things. The poet Stanley Kunitz wrote that “the garden is a domestication of the wild, taking what can be random and, to a degree, ordering it so that it is not merely a transference from the wild” (13). Kunitz’s observation emphasizes that gardening is not just a happenstance practice of transferring a perennial, a shrub, or a tree from one part of nature to another, but, rather, a planned act— one that reminds us that this ordering can only be accomplished “to a degree,” that the design, the shape, of a garden can be as formal as the gardens of Versailles or as haphazard as randomly disseminating seeds into a backyard and waiting to see what happens. In other words, even the most disorganized, seemingly random garden reflects some form of human instrumentality, some act of creation. As a result, gardens— like almost any creative endeavor— represent and reflect the human struggle to bring harmony to disorder, that order, in this case, being the manipulation of nature. This is, perhaps, what most significantly differentiates the garden from the wild. Indeed, in the end, the gardener, wishing, perhaps, to play God, to be a creator, imposes his own sense of order onto a world of randomness, but that same world will reclaim any effort he has made to shape it as soon as he loses interest in the back-breaking labor it takes to sustain that often creative imposition.
Anyone who wants to create a garden has a plan, some kind of design— even those who want to develop something decidedly un-garden-like. Indeed, even the goal of making a garden as “un-gardenly” as possible requires at least some thought, some purposeful act. Most gardeners, however, have a specific design in mind, and typically both the seasoned and would-be gardener shapes their patch of land in organized clusters of rows, circles, rectangles, triangles and squares. Humans tend to be naturally drawn to the beauty of symmetry, and while one might argue that the symmetry of a garden stands in direct contrast to the randomness of the wild, making it almost the opposite of what nature intends, such an observation fails to recognize how we see nature. At the very least, if one looks more closely, one sees such beauty and balance in the shape of a leaf, in the curve of a trunk, in a splash of color, and even in the fragmented oval shape of a pond of water after heavy rainfall. The symmetry we so relish comes from nature itself, from those places and moments where the shapes and curves of mountains, rivers, and trees seem almost planned by human intervention or a benevolent being that shares our love for the potential harmony of order. But it is equally important to recognize that even though we first recognized this sense of symmetry in nature, we, through the language of experience, impose our sense of symmetry onto nature. A shrub does not know it grows in a conical shape, or that it spreads across the ground like a carpet, nor does a flower know that it has a bulbous shape or that its oval splotches of purple balance perfectly with its white petals. These observations, as well as our language of understanding them as such, belong only to us— and the garden, in a sense, reflects our desire to recreate that same symmetry however we see fit.
So, on the one hand, the design of a garden reflects the way we see nature, but, on the other, it is entirely an illusion. A garden only retains the shape that we impose on it for as long as we are willing to sustain that imposition. One might take this thought a step further, as Michael Pollan does in his book Second Nature, and recognize that nature will eventually reclaim anything that we create. As he takes a walk in the woods near his house, Pollan, who is in a battle with the inevitable forces of animals and pests that want to eat the vegetation of his garden, realizes that “every weed I pulled, every blade of grass I mowed, each beetle I crushed— all was done to slow the advance of the forest” (46). Pollan comes to this conclusion after he discovers that these woods have reclaimed what used to be an agricultural village— and through this experience he realizes that the forest is what is normal, and that “the lawns and pavements and, most spectacularly, the gardens” are an “ecological vacuum that nature will not abide for long” (46). Indeed, if nature itself is a constant reminder of the impermanence of things, then the garden serves as a profound reminder that any human attempt to force purpose or design upon it only ends in its eventual reclamation.
If nature is an inevitable force of reclamation, then how does one stall this affront long enough to sustain the aesthetic shape of the garden—no matter how illusionary and impermanent it may be? The obvious answer should be: through hard, back breaking work. Indeed, the design and purpose of nature,
if we choose to anthropomorphize it as such, is to grow, evolve and survive, a process that consumes and recycles everything in its path. Nature is not concerned about death or destruction or preservation.
Death, destruction, famine, floods, fire, and extinction are nature— just as aphids, snails, gophers and blights are nature. Such forces are, after all, merely doing what they do. We, in the end, are the ones that are working against the natural flow of things. Pollan suggests that a garden is “a place that is at once of nature and unapologetically set against it,” an observation that cautions the gardener to be aware he is cultivating something impermanent (53). The poet Robert Frost once famously wrote, in his poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” that “Nature’s first green is gold / Her hardest hue to hold” (1-2). Frost’s poem reveals the melancholy beauty of the transience of nature, and life itself, through these fleeting flashes of brilliance found in the first budding leaves of early spring, which begin to fade as soon as they have opened. The gardener lives for those mere hours before “leaf subsides to leaf,” and knows that the measure of the seasons brings blistering cold, searing heat, flooding rains and generous measures of light and life-giving drops of rain. Eleanor Perényi, in her book Green Thoughts, cautions that “the seasons can’t be rushed, or halted” (68). The would-be gardener who does not understand these subtleties soon learns that he must learn them because— if one wants to play god and shape their own slice of nature— there are rules, rules that even the seasoned gardener looking for a risk or two cannot always overcome.
One might argue that nature, in all of its randomness, has no rules or that, even if it does have them, those rules often change on a whim, but when one imposes design, shape, and symmetry onto nature, one, as Pollan suggests, is doing something that is “unapologetically set against” nature (46). In other words, if one seeks the beauty found in the folds of a rose, one must realize that (a) one will not be rewarded with those fragrant swirls of petals until the summer and (b) one should not plant a rose in a rainy climate because the moisture will lead to mildewed leaves. If a gardener loves the brilliant explosion of leafless flowers on a cherry tree, he will only witness them in the early weeks of spring. If a gardener wants a beautiful showy garden of petunias, violets, zinnias, snapdragons and daisies he cannot plant them in the sand outside a beach house. And, perhaps most importantly, whatever a gardener wants in a garden, it will not survive without water— which often means he must bring the water to the garden (as well as sometimes having to figure out a way to channel the excess water out of the garden). In the “real world” of nature, plants develop to particular kinds of soil, frequencies of rainfall, and exposure to light— so one might well think that all one needs to do is to choose the plants that best match the soil and climate of one’s little patch of earth. Many gardeners, however, often want what they want when they want it and where they want it, so, if one wishes to experiment, one must know at least something about each plant’s limitations.
And where does one find this knowledge: books, magazines, websites, garden nurseries, friends who garden, professional gardeners? All these equally helpful sources are part of a culture’s folklore, a rich history of tips and methods culled from centuries of gardening. As Noel Kingsbury, author of The New Perennial Garden, points out, whatever “the exact nature of a particular natural garden” might be, “it is almost inevitably managed in some way; in other words, it is still a cultural artifact” (102). Kingsbury is writing specifically about the natural garden, a style of gardening that involves much less human intervention than more formal gardens, but his observation applies to all gardens. In other words, anyone who gardens takes part in a cultural act that has a long and varied tradition— regardless of whether they are planting a small vegetable patch, creating the splashes of color found in a cottage garden, or planting flowers and trees in plastic tubs in a back alley in a poor neighborhood— a tradition that stretches even further back than those 15th Century B.C. Egyptian tomb painting and as far forward as gardens created by the homeless in New York slums.
In his book Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, Robert Pogue Harrison, an Italian literature professor at Stanford University, writes about his fascination with these New York slum gardens, which are made up of objects and items found in the streets, things that might be thought of as garbage by most. What fascinates him, however, is not the fact that this kind of garden stretches our idea of what a garden is or can be, but that it asks questions about what motivates these people, who have virtually nothing, to spend so much of their time and effort finding and arranging items when none of it helps them with the basics of surviving (42). At the very least, they are motivated, as most gardeners are, to create, to “express, fashion and beautify,” a kind of self-expression that Harrison reminds us is “a basic human urge” (42). This spark of creativity, this desire to create, to design, to shape, is part of what sets gardening apart from farming. Indeed, no one actually knows which came first, but conventional theories suggest that gardening is either a creative response to farming or a kind of prototype for agriculture.
Harrison, however, argues that one could just as easily recognize that the earliest primitive gardens were created for ritual purposes, citing the “fundamental” craving “in human beings to transfigure reality, to adorn it with costume and illusion, and thereby to respiritualize our experience of it” (40). Harrison’s
observation reminds us that the garden can be a cultural expression of art, one that not only reflects the creativity, skills, and vision of its creator, but also the visitor’s appreciation of and desire for beauty, symmetry, and harmony. And it is this creative spark that often draws both creator and appreciator to the garden.
Even a superficial consideration of writings about gardening reveals that many gardeners and garden visitors are looking for such seemingly disparate experiences as escape, solitude, purpose, peace, spiritual grounding, pride, privacy, control, blessings, freedom, self-expression, silence, and a communal relationship with nature. All of these suggest something entirely self-absorbed about the experience of either creating or visiting a garden. We often want to be alone with our thoughts as we soak in the beauty or to escape from our worries as we bury ourselves in the labor of cultivation. Indeed, many gardeners simply want the escape from their daily lives and obligations and, instead, embrace the opportunity to be alone with soiled hands and knees. However, many people have a garden simply because they want to impress others, some even hoping to earn bragging rights. In this light, many gardeners strive not only for their own sense of perfection but what they think others see as perfection. Often this need to “show off” applies to those who hire gardeners and designers to create something for them. Indeed, gardening is not for the lazy, for it requires constant maintenance and many are unwilling or unable to commit to such an enterprise. Anyone who has tried to plant a garden and then given up can attest to both the frustration and inevitability of how easily and quickly plants and shrubs resist your will to shape them to your vision. Perhaps even more curious is the fact that many home owners feel culturally obligated to have a garden because that is what is expected of a homeowner (many neighborhood associations even require homeowners to have a well-kept, well-manicured garden lawn in front of their homes). In the end, the reasons for planting and creating one, or simply having it all done by someone else, are as varied as the many different styles of gardens and flora to choose from.
So, why then do people garden? Whatever the exact answer to that question might be, its possible answers are inextricably bound to what makes a garden a garden, a question that also has a myriad of possible answers. At the very least, gardening continues to be as popular as ever, evidenced by the multi-billion-dollar industry that has grown around it, a thriving industry that offers the tools, materials, and cultural expectations that every seasoned and newbie gardener could ever possibly need. Furthermore, every style, every garden form, has its own jargon, its own books, its own tools, its own styles. For example, a traditional English garden features very formal elements such as a graveled walkway, a birdbath or gazebo, and organized beds of flowers. The traditional rose garden showcases one’s favorite, prize roses in order to highlight their various colorful and fragrant qualities. In fact, many gardens simply highlight various colors and fragrances and various shapes and symmetries organized to be visually appealing— sometimes very symmetrically and other times somewhat haphazardly. Some gardeners specifically design their creations to attract desired visitors such as hummingbirds and butterflies. Some disperse seeds with reckless abandon and wait to see what springs from the ground.
Some people grow food. Some only garden in containers placed on apartment decks because they have no other space. Others garden inside, bringing tropical plants into their various rooms. Others turn to decidedly very un-garden-like styles such as Zen gardens, which typically eschew plants in favor of organized rocks and raked patterns in the sand that, symbolically, reflect the forces and shapes of the larger natural world. One can even see something very gardenlike in a single bonsai, a miniature tree that has been carefully shaped and cultivated in a small pot or tray.
Gardens also stretch beyond the cultivators and designers to the garden visitor, thus allowing one to include public parks, which people can wander around in or simply sit and relax, and community gardens, which provide urban gardeners with no space of their own to plant food and flowers. Many prisons have gardening programs so that inmates can learn the value and satisfaction of hard work while also producing something they can eat (also serving as a system to reward good behavior). Guerilla gardeners sneak into private property, often abandoned, and plant a garden as a political statement that seeks to question the neglect and misuse of that property. Each of these— even though they take us away from the garden as a home-based endeavor— are still bound to ideas of cultivation, order, and intent, three very specific elements that clearly help us to understand what a garden is and why so many do it. Indeed, to cultivate is to work and prepare the land, which both gardeners and farmers do. Indeed, to plant is to labor. Both farmers and gardeners order, or organize, the plants; however, farmers tend to limit such organization to even rows so that they can easily harvest their crops. Consequently, even though farms are bound to a kind of symmetry, the intent of such order and structure is purely to yield a product for profit in the most efficient way possible. Gardeners, on the other hand, typically seek symmetry as a creative act, one that can be bound to an artistic-like vision or simply just the desire to plant something of one’s own, to create something from seemingly nothing. In the end, one can argue
incessantly about whether gardens and farms are really all that different, neither side of the argument ever offering anything entirely conclusive or undebatable. Nevertheless, much of gardening is bound to aesthetics and personal satisfaction and goals— and on a dramatically smaller scale than farming, which is far more associated with commercial activity practiced on large tracts of land. If we boil down everything discussed in this essay, we see that the typical gardener seeks something personal— the typical garden occupying a limited space that is manipulated and ordered to some specific end. And while the circumstances and intentions are as varied as the possible styles and approaches, all of them are bound to some form of expression or purpose, one that often fulfills a specific goal or vision.
So, ultimately, what exactly is a garden? Is it merely a matter of: it all depends on what one cultivates, where one cultivates, how one cultivates, and why one cultivates? Simply stated: a garden can be planted for various reasons, cultivated and ordered in a variety of styles, but all of it, in the end, is merely an illusion of order imposed on the chaos of nature, for no matter how or why or what one plants, such an imposition of structure and order can only last if one invests the time and work into cultivating such an illusion. This, however, does little to stop anyone who wishes to garden from gardening, for such is the very essence of all gardens and the act of gardening itself. In fact, if one wished to be so bold, one might very well conclude that the act of cultivating something that cannot, ultimately, last— something that is inevitably fated to one day be reclaimed by the very nature that a garden reflects, something whose success is subject to the whims and stresses of our busy lives— curiously mirrors the very fact of the impermanence of our own lives. Therefore, one might conclude that we garden because we wish to shape our surroundings for as long as we remain alive.
Basic Outline of “The Impermanence of Order” (What is a Garden? | Why do we garden?)
I. Introduction Question(s) Addressed
A. Gardens have been bound to symmetry since their inception What is a Garden?
1. Symmetry comes from appreciation of / the desire to organize things What is a Garden?
B. Symmetry is designed What is a Garden?
1. Such design is related to our desire to create Why do we garden?
2. Symmetry is related to our desire to bring harmony to dis order Why do we garden?
Thesis: By gardening, we impose order on that which cannot retain order. Both questions.
Note: The first paragraph introduces the reader to the main focus of the essay: that gardens, in general, are creative expressions of symmetry and order in the face of the reality that this order is imposed and will not last unless one does the necessary upkeep to sustain that shape, that imposition. Moreover, gardeners wish to bring harmony to disorder–all of which serves as an introduction to not only the overall essay and eventual conclusion but also, quite specificall, in this paragraph, the thesis. (This is the real purpose of an introduction).
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II. Garden Design and Symmetry Question(s) Addressed
A. All gardeners have a design / plan What is a Garden?
B. Symmetry comes from nature What is a Garden?
C. We recreate that symmetry found in nature What is a Garden?
Note: The first body paragraph builds off the thesis and introduction by furthering the discussion about how most gardens are based on designs … and that many of those designs are based in symmetry, which comes from our perceptions, fully realized or not, of the shapes found in nature.
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III. Garden Design / Shape is an Illusion Question(s) Addressed
A. Shape is only retained if we do the upkeep What is a Garden?
B. Pollan story about Dudleytown What is a Garden?
1. Illustrates how nature reclaims anything we design / plant What is a Garden?
Note: This paragraph connects to the previous paragraph by transitioning into the fundamental fact that the imposed shape and design of a garden will only last as long as its upkeep. Pollan’s story of encountering Dudleytown illustrates this point, followed by an explanation for why that illustration is relevant.
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IV. Maintaining the Shape / Design Question(s) Addressed
A. One needs to do the necessary upkeep What is a Garden?
B. Nature is always trying to reclaim through its agents of reclamation What is a Garden? ?
C. Frost poem reveals nothing lasts / everything is impermanent What is a Garden?
D. To keep shape, one must follow the rules What is a Garden?
Note: This paragraph connects to the previous paragraph by exploring how nature continually seeks to reclaim anything we plant or create. The Frost poem serves as an illustration for the impermanence of all things. One must, therefore, know the rules in order to keep the illusion of shape / order.
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V. The Importance of the Rules of Gardening Question(s) Addressed
A. A Garden goes against the rules of nature What is a Garden?
B. Examples of rules that must be followed (growing requirements/water) What is a Garden?
C. Necessity of knowing the rules What is a Garden?
Note: This paragraph connects to the previous paragraph by building off of that necessity for knowing the rules by illustrating some of the rules of gardening and why it is necessary to know them.
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VI. The Culture and Knowledge of Gardening Question(s) Addressed
A. Gardening knowledge can be found in a variety of places What is a Garden?
B. Gardening and the knowledge of it are part of culture What is a Garden?
C. It is a cultural act that stretches over time What is a Garden?
1. Goes back to Egyptian tomb paintings of early gardens What is a Garden?
2. And stretches forward to slum gardens, which are quite un-gardenlike What is a Garden?
Note: This paragraph connects to the previous paragraph by illustrating some of the sources for where one can acquire the knowledge of those rules and then transitioning into a discussion of how all those sources are bound to culture (thus showing that gardening—even the most un-garden-like forms— is, by its very nature, a cultural act).
See Next Page
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VII. The Creative Impulse of Gardening Question(s) Addressed
A. Harrison considers slum gardens (an illustration) What is a Garden?
1. They are very un-gardenlike What is a Garden?
2. They reflect the need to express creativity Why do we garden?
B. Creativity is an essential part of why we garden Why do we garden?
Note: This paragraph connects to the previous paragraph by picking up from the previous paragraph’s discussion of slum gardens. Harrison’s discussion of slum gardens illustrates the fact that most gardens are born from a desire to create, to express.
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VIII. Many Reasons for Why People Garden Question(s) Addressed
A. List of experiences / needs that gardeners and garden visitors seek to fulfill Why do we garden?
B. People, in the end, garden for many reasons Why do we garden?
Note: This paragraph connects to the previous paragraph by building off the need to express and offering a series of illustrations that offer a myriad of possible reasons / emotions / experiences and desires for why people garden. The paragraph more or less ends the body paragraphs by concluding that the reasons for why people garden are many (which paves the way for the concluding paragraphs to consider possible answers to the question more deeply). Please note this serves as a way to dig deeper into the question and not to just say that there are many reasons and be done with it.
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IX. Conclusion Begins – Why People Garden Bound to What a Garden Is Question(s) Addressed
A. The answer to why people garden is bound to what a garden is Both questions.
B. Multibillion dollar industry serves the needs of those who wish to do it Both questions.
C. Different garden forms / styles have their own jargon rules Both questions.
1. list of different styles and their goals Both questions.
Note: The first conclusion paragraph begins to provide possible answers to the questions by linking them together. After a quick discussion of gardening industry the paragraph then segues into some of the different kinds of gardening styles.
[Yes, the conclusion is three paragraphs long. The overall goal of a conclusion is to build off the body paragraphs and come to an actual conclusion about why we garden and what a garden is. A conclusion is not simply a restatement of what you have said; instead, it is what you have been arguing towards for the whole essay. These paragraphs set up the opportunity to consider the commonalities found in the differences, allowing one to show the relationship between gardens and gardening. These paragraph notes clearly show how the body paragraphs are connected—along with their overall line of reasoning]
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X. More Conclusion: Cultivation / Order / Intent Question(s) Addressed
A. Cultivate: How different and similar to farming Both questions.
B. Order: How different and similar to farming Both questions.
C. Intent: How different and similar to farming Both questions.
1. How intent really differentiates gardening from farming Both questions.
D. Cultivation, order, intention all bound to expression, goals, and purpose. Both questions.
Note: The second conclusion paragraph transitions from the common garden styles traditional home gardeners follow to the public types so that the commonalities that are shared between all of the garden styles and approaches can be discussed” cultivate, order, and intent. The discussion of these three common elements is presented through a discussion of how farming and gardening are different in order to better demonstrate what makes a garden a garden and why people do it (the overall goal of the entire essay).
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XI. Final Conclusion Question(s) Addressed
A. Reconsiders and expands on thesis Both questions.
A. We impose order on that which cannot retain order Both questions.
B. But this does not stop us from doing it anyways Both questions.
Note: The final conclusion paragraph reconsiders the initial thesis that a garden is a specific design that we impose and that imposition only lasts as long as we do the work that is necessary to keep that design. This does not stop us from gardening— and this also approach to the impermanence of the garden reflects how we shape our lives in the face f our impermanence.
Gardening Means War by Michael Pollan
I CAME TO THE COUNTRY from the city and brought along many of the city man’s easy ideas about the landscape and its inhabitants. One had to do with the problem of pests in the garden, about which I carried the usual set of liberal views. To nuke a garden with insecticide, to level a rifle sight at the back of a woodchuck in flat- footed retreat, to erect an electric barricade around a vegetable patch: such measures struck me as excessive, even irresponsible.
Respect for nature’s fragility was an article of faith with me. Deploying superior firepower to crush local opposition to my plans for the land seemed a reckless act of environmental imperialism. Besides, these animals had arrived long before the gardener, so who was the interloper? And what was gardening about if not working out a more harmonious relationship with nature?
One of gardening’s virtues is to clear the mind of easy sentiments about nature in general, and its fauna in particular. The first challenge to your romance of animals comes in April, after you’ve turned the soil, humped heavy bags of peat moss and manure from the car trunk to the garden, dug these in by pitchfork, and then laid out in scrupulous rows the seedlings of early crops—lettuce, broccoli, cabbage. Do all that, then see how you feel next morning when that orderly parade ground of seedlings has been mowed down by a woodchuck out snacking.
It’s not just the wasted time, effort and cash. Consider the forlorn appearance of the mowed-down seedlings, neatly snipped off a half-inch above the ground, as if by someone with a pair of scissors and all the time in the world. This is what tells you a woodchuck is responsible: they devour a crop systematically, whereas a deer— nervous, and possessing perhaps a more developed sense of shame—will snip a shoot here and there, and then, startled by a falling leaf or something equally perilous to a 200-pound mammal, will dash off before the meal is done. The woodchuck approaches your plants less as a thief than a relative. He does not worry that you will interrupt his repast, and he fully intends to return tomorrow for seconds.
And the gardener will oblige. He is not about to fold his garden in the face of this impertinence. A rodent whose cerebrum could be packed into a thimble might win a battle or two, but finally the war must go to the larger, more developed brain. What is our species doing on this planet if not winning precisely this kind of contest?
At least, that’s how I saw matters the first time, a year or two ago, when I awoke to the evidence of a predawn April raid on my freshly planted vegetable garden. I thought the problem through, and determined to take the battle to the woodchuck’s own territory, I went looking for his burrow.
My vegetable garden is laid out on a small, flat lawn that ends at the base of a small slope, which is covered by a tangle of blackberry bushes and a couple of Russian olive trees—perfect cover for a woodchuck burrow, and not five chuck-size paces from the nearest garden row. Woodchucks, nearsighted and slow-footed, prefer to set up house as close to their favorite dining spot as prudence will allow. I whacked at the brush with a machete, and there it was: a large, ugly mouth set into the hillside, with a pile of freshly dug soil arranged beneath it like a fat bottom lip. This woodchuck was not only visiting my garden, he had moved in for the summer.
This called for a program of behavior modification. I gathered a half dozen fist-size rocks and squeezed them into the hole. Then I mounded a few shovelfuls of earth on top and stomped on it a few times to jam the rock and earth down into the tunnel. This ought to persuade him to move elsewhere, I thought, with the confidence of someone who understood not the first thing about woodchucks.
The next day the hole had yawned open and spit out the rocks and the soil. Hungry from his excavation work, the woodchuck had polished off a fresh row of lettuce seedlings.
THE READER MIGHT REASONABLY wonder why I had no fence. I can offer a few practical explanations—expense, building competence—but the real reasons, I suspect, were more visceral. Fences just didn’t accord with my view of gardening. A garden should be continuous with the natural landscape, in harmony with its surroundings. The idea that a garden might actually require protection from nature seemed absurd.
I had also absorbed the traditional American view that fences were Old World, out of place in the American landscape, a notion that crops up repeatedly in 19th-century American writing about the landscape. Early landscape architects, such as Frank Scott, campaigned tirelessly against the fence, which was considered a feudal holdover from Britain. In 1870, Scott wrote that ”to narrow our own or our neighbor’s views of the free graces of Nature” was selfish and undemocratic.
The American prejudice against fences probably has its origins in the first settlers’ views of nature. The Puritans saw the American landscape as sacred. The transcendentalists, too, considered nature ”God’s second book,” and taught us to read it for moral instruction. Residues of this view persist. It may be that in nature writing today guilt has taken the rhetorical place of transcendentalist ecstasy, but the essential religiosity remains.
Once we accept the landscape as a moral and spiritual space, how can we presume to remake God’s landscape? It is one thing to cultivate the earth for our sustenance—the Bible speaks of that—but to do so for
esthetic reasons has until very recently struck Americans as frivolous, or worse. Even when we plan gardens today, we avoid anything that looks designed or artificial. We favor gardens that resemble natural landscapes, and that leaves little room for fences.
MY OWN EFFORTS to design a perennial border that flowed seamlessly into the surrounding landscape met with derision from the local inhabitants, who quickly took advantage of my naive romanticism. The deer feasted on the young day lily and delphinium shoots. The grasses from the meadow have found that so-called hardy perennials are, in fact, pushovers. Instead of the flower border pushing back toward the meadow, the meadow is pushing forward to the house. Without my intervention, the border would not have stood the season.
Under the pressure of this many-fronted assault, I have come to understand the distance between naturalists, who gaze benignly on all of nature’s operations, and the experienced gardener, who perforce has developed a somewhat less sentimental view. Particularly toward woodchucks. I am not ready to see them banished from the planet altogether—they must have some ecological purpose—but I seriously doubt that news of some form of woodchuck megadeath in this part of the country would put me in an elegiac frame of mind.
But in giving up my romantic views of the local fauna, I may have gone overboard in the opposite direction. I tried everything I could think of to eliminate my woodchuck problem, in an escalating series of measures William Westmoreland would have understood. I started with elaborate campaigns of behavior modification—my send-in-a- few-advisers phase, in which I confidently deployed the accumulated wisdom of Western civilization. I had done my reading and learned that woodchucks can’t stand getting their fur dirty. Thinking I had located my adversary’s Achilles’ heel, I introduced a few choice items into his tunnel: a dozen eggs, smashed and dribbled down its side; a jar of molasses; half a can of motor oil; a dead field mouse. And, lastly, a quart of creosote, vile stuff so sticky he’d need his fur steam-cleaned.
When this didn’t work—evidently, my woodchuck lacked his species’ Felix Unger gene—I found myself attracted to less cerebral approaches. It’s astonishing, actually, how much anger an animal’s infiltration of your garden can incite. I would not, after all, go hungry as a result of his depredations. No, this was no longer about any cool calculations of self-interest. This was about winning.
A rifle was out of the question; I’ve always been afraid of guns, and have never owned one. But I came up with something equally unsentimental: I found a somewhat flattened woodchuck along the highway, scooped it into a crate and brought it home. I hacked the corpse into several pieces and jammed them into the burrow. This amounted to terrorism, I admit. But either he did not get it, or he did not care, because in two days’ time he had dug a detour around the corpse and the pillaging resumed.
Next, I decided to incinerate the woodchuck in his burrow. I poured maybe a gallon of gasoline down his tunnel, waited a few minutes for it to fan out along the various passageways, and struck a match.
Evidently, there was not enough oxygen down there, because the flames shot in the wrong direction—up, toward my face. I leapt back before I was singed too badly, and watched a black-orange fountain of flame flare up toward an olive tree. I managed to smother the fire with earth before the entire garden went up. I guess this was my destroy-the-village-in-order-to-save-it phase.
MY BRUSH WITH CONFLAGRATION among the vegetables shocked me out of my Vietnam approach to garden pests before I had a chance to defoliate the neighborhood. I also began to think that there might be more going on here than a cartoonish war between me and a woodchuck.
I realized that during a long walk one late afternoon last April in the woods near my house. Most of the land around here is post-agricultural hardwood forest; the farms were abandoned starting around the turn of the century, and the forest has made quick work of reclaiming large parts of the countryside. You might think this oak forest was primordial if not for the stone walls and other lingering signs of one-time cultivation: wolf trees (specimens with broad crowns, signifying they matured in open, uncompetitive spaces); the anomalous bloom of a garden flower, faint plow furrows visible in the snow cover.
But on this particular walk I found an even ghostlier set of signs. Following an old logging trail, I came to an area that somehow seemed more ordered than the surrounding woods. On both sides of the trail were stone walls—linear piles, really—marking small rectangular enclosures among the trees. Within each square was a rectangular pit lined with stones: the foundation of a small house.
I HAD STUMBLED UPON Dudleytown, an abandoned 19th-century settlement that I had often been told was nearby but had never been able to locate. Traces of former habitation were everywhere, like shadows on the landscape, even though the forest had completely recolonized the area. Oaks, hickories, ash and sycamores had spread out evenly over the village like a blanket, rising up in the former yards and fields and even in the middle of cellar pits, jutting heedlessly through spaces that once had been organized into kitchens and bedrooms, warm spaces that had vibrated with human sounds.
If you blotted the trees from sight and followed the contours of the land, you could make out the organization of the village. Houses lined a main street. The stone walls marked each family’s yard; in some stood gnarled apple trees on their last legs, starved for sunlight by the new forest canopy. A few clumps of day lily survived, along with deep green patches of myrtle and vinca: remnants of dooryard gardens that the forest had failed to defeat. Some yards opened onto what must have been fields or pastures. Stone walls, which had once marked boundaries and kept cows from straying, threaded arbitrary paths through the trees, accomplishing nothing.
To the gardener in me, Dudleytown quickly assumed a spectral presence. Every weed I pulled, every blade of grass I mowed, each beetle I crushed—all was done to slow the advance of the forest that had reclaimed Dudleytown. It made me see that the woodchuck was no free-agent pest, snacking strictly on his own account. He labored on behalf of the oncoming forest. Not only the animals, but the insects, the weeds, even the fungi and bacteria, were working together to erase my garden—and after that, my lawn, my driveway, my patio, even my house.
My experience as a gardener has taught me that nature resents our presence. She deploys her various agents to undo our work in the garden. But to what end? Now I grasped her local teleology: Dudleytown.
The forest, I now understand, is ”normal”; everything else—the fields and meadows, the lawns and pavements and, most spectacularly, the gardens—is an ecological ”vacuum” that nature will not abide for long. Here the soil is richest and most frequently turned over. What softer, sweeter, more hospitable bed could an airborne weed seed ever find to lie down on? Other weeds don’t even have to find your garden: thousands of their seeds lie dormant in every cubic foot of garden soil, patiently waiting for a pleasing combination of light and moisture so they can move on your plants.
And your plants are sitting ducks. Just as cultivated soil constitutes a kind of vacuum in the environment, so do most of the plants grown in it. Most cultivated fruits and vegetables contain nutrients in greater concentration than ordinary plants. They stick out in the natural landscape like rich kids in a tough neighborhood. Enter the animals. The woodchucks and deer are the flora’s great levelers, making sure there are no undue concentrations of nutritional wealth in the landscape. They want to redistribute my protein.
Should the vertebrates fail to drive me out of my garden, a dozen insect species, each with its own distinctive tactics, will march on my plants in a series of waves beginning in April and unrelenting till frost: cutworms, which saw off seedlings at ground level; aphids, specks of pale green that cluster on the undersides of leaves, sucking the vital fluids; loathsome slugs, naked bullets of flesh that emerge at sunset to travel the garden on their own avenues of slime; and last to arrive, the vast, farflung beetle family, which mounts a massive airborne invasion beginning in midsummer.
Like the vertebrates, this exoskeletal mob is drawn by the nutritional extravagance of the vegetable garden, as well as by the fact that most garden plants are nature’s weaklings. We breed garden plants for qualities that appeal to us, not ones that might help insure survival. Rather than school them in the martial arts, we enter into a tacit pact with our plants: in exchange for their beauty and utility, we shield them from the horrors of Darwinian struggle.
So please don’t talk to me about the harmony of gardens and the natural landscape. The forest is so vigorous around here, so well served by its advance guard of animals, bugs and weeds, that a single season of neglect would blast my garden back to meadow; a decade would find the forest licking at my front stoop. And in 50 years: Dudleytown. A cellar pit with a sycamore rising through it.
WHAT WAS THE right approach to pests in the garden? How could I halt the advance of Dudleytown without turning my garden into a toxic waste site? These questions quickly led to bigger ones about how we choose to confront the natural landscape. Domination or acquiescence? As developers or naturalists? I no longer think the answers are so obvious.
Domination, in suburban or rural terms, means lawn, a demilitarized zone patrolled weekly with a rotary blade. The lawn holds great appeal; it looks sort of natural—it’s green, it grows. But, in fact, it represents a subjugation of the forest as utter as a parking lot. Every species is forcibly excluded from the landscape but one, and this is forbidden to grow longer than the owner’s little finger. A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.
On the other side is acquiescence: the benign gaze of the naturalist. Certainly, his ethic sounds nice and responsible, but have you ever noticed that the naturalist never tells you where he lives? Unless you live in the city or a tent, the benign gaze is totally impractical—sooner or later it leads to Dudleytown.
The trick is somehow to find a middle ground. That is what gardening is, or should be: a midspace between Dudleytown and the parking lot, a place that admits of both nature and human habitation.
The choice is not, as Americans often seem to assume, simply between raping the land or sealing it away in a preserve. That the first approach is bankrupt goes without saying. Yet, right as it sounds, the second one is a dead end, too. We need not, like the naturalist, shrink before our own power to alter nature. To renounce that power is
in some sense to renounce our humanity—our nature, which is no less real than the nature we seem to think exists only out there. Shakespeare’s Polixenes has it right in ”The Winter’s Tale.” In response to Perdita, who rejects the hybridized flower as unnatural, he says: ”This is an art/ Which does mend nature—change it rather; but/ The art itself is nature.”
For the gardener, breaking free of the notion that art negates nature is liberating. A promising strategy against pests can begin to take shape. For starters, one can re-examine the American taboo against fences. Fences may offend American ideas about democracy, limitlessness and the landscape’s sanctity, but perhaps we need to consider the possibility that their absence offends the idea of a garden.
FOR MOST OF HISTORY, people have been making gardens, and most of their gardens have been walled or fenced. ”Garden” derives from the Old German word for enclosure, and the Oxford English Dictionary definition begins ”an enclosed piece of ground. ” (Compare that to American dictionary definitions, which omit the idea of
enclosure.) The long history of gardens, which traverses many very different cultures, suggests that perhaps there is something natural about erecting a wall against the landscape on one side and society’s gaze on the other. We number the beaver dam among nature’s creations; why not also the garden wall?
IT WAS TIME FOR ME to put up a fence. I went with five feet of galvanized steel mesh stretched across posts that had been treated with arsenic to resist rot and then sunk three feet into the earth. The bottom edge of the fence runs a foot underground, to deter tunnelers. It doesn’t look at all bad, and even though you can see through the wire mesh, when I close the garden gate behind me I feel as though I’ve entered a privileged space.
But more important, the woodchuck so far respects the fence; the cabbages have reached softball size unmolested. He has not abandoned his burrow, however, and I picture him jealously pacing the garden perimeter at dawn, scheming, looking for an angle. I remain on alert.
Now four feet of fence won’t impede a doe with snap beans on her mind, but I can take care of that. Six inches above the top of the fence, I’ll string a wire that pulses every second with several hundred volts of electric current. I’ve been told to smear the wire with peanut butter in order to introduce the deer to the unprecedented and memorable sensation of electric shock, after which they should be gone for good. The power will run off a solar panel that sits atop one of the posts, reaching toward the sun like some gigantic high-tech blossom. This last touch strikes me as a nice bit of jujitsu, turning nature’s power against a few of her own.
Intervening against the insects is not so straightforward; but here, too, there may be an art that ”itself is
nature.”
The key to eliminating an insect from the garden is knowledge: about its habits, preferences and
vulnerabilities. Most chemical pesticides represent a crude form of knowledge about insects: that, for example, a powerful chemical, such as malathion, cripples the nervous system of most organisms, so a little of the stuff should kill bugs but (probably) not bigger creatures.
Even though this knowledge has been produced by humans wearing lab coats, it is not nearly as sophisticated or precise as the knowledge a ladybug, say, possesses on the subject of aphids. The ladybug is not smart, but she knows one thing exceedingly well: how to catch 40 or 50 aphids every day without hurting anybody else. If you think of evolution as a billion-year-long laboratory experiment, and the gene pool as the store of information accumulated during that experiment, then you realize that nature has far more extensive knowledge about her operations than we do. The trick is to put her knowledge to our purpose in the garden.
So far, the only way to harness the ladybug gene for aphid capture is by obtaining whole ladybugs, and this can be done through the mail. For about $10, you can order 3,500 ladybugs from a company that specializes in ”biological controls.” The ladybugs come in a drawstring pouch that can be kept in the refrigerator; you spoon out the bugs onto the leaves of infested plants. They also sell praying mantis egg cases, which should be sewn onto a tree branch near the garden; when the weather warms in spring, the nymphs emerge, to take up stations on the upper leaves of your plants. Their patience and stillness are extraordinary, as are their reflexes: a praying mantis can snatch flying insects right out of the air.
Not all of the biological controls on the market are insects; some are bacteria. You can buy a powder inoculated with Bacillus thuringiensis, for example, and start a plague among the cabbage loopers and other leaf- eating caterpillars without harming anything else.
Biological controls won’t solve every pest problem—there are still too few controls, for one thing. But the approach holds promise, and suggests what can be accomplished when we learn to exploit nature’s self-knowledge and stop thinking of art and technology as being necessarily opposed to nature. For how are we to categorize Bacillus thuringiensis as a form of human intervention in the landscape? Is it technological, or natural? The categories are no longer much help, at least in the garden.
I won’t know until the end of the season whether I’ve completely solved my pest problem. But, puttering in my newly fenced garden, watching the mantises standing sentry on the tops of my tomatoes and the ladybugs
running search-and-destroy missions among the eggplants, I feel a lot more relaxed about it. Though Dudleytown remains over the next hill, I know I can stall its advance for as long as I continue to put my thought and sweat into this patch of land. There are going to be setbacks; gardening is not a once-and-for-all thing. But I think I’ve drawn a workable border between me and the forest. Could it prove to be a Maginot line? I don’t think so—it doesn’t depend on the invincibility of technology. Nor does it depend on the benignity of nature. It depends on my acting like a sane human, which is to say as a creature whose nature it is to remake his surroundings and whose culture can guide him on questions of esthetics and ethics. What I’m making here is a middle ground between nature and culture, a place that is at once of nature and unapologetically set against it; what I’m making is a garden.
The How-To Garden by Jim Nollman (from his book Why We Garden)
Although there are many books and courses on the subject of how to garden, ultimately we learn about gardening by doing it. The how-to garden is thus defined as the place we go to encounter our own gardening education. Like the sentient garden, this one is an experiential garden. That is the reason the story of a how- to garden’s planning, digging, and planting is also told most accurately in the first person. Also like the sentient garden, this garden clearly speaks to us, offering counsel in its own good time. Unlike the sentient garden, the how-to garden is rarely a self-conscious garden that persistently focuses our sensibilities upon itself. The how-to garden is more passive, more like a playing field that focuses our sensibilities upon the activity manifested within its borders.
So far, this book has referred to my personal garden only obliquely—as if it were a diving board from which I continually spring off into large notions about a sense of place, paradise, sentience, history, the future, and so on. It now seems an appropriate moment to step off that conceptual diving board to sketch in an experiential biography of one particular how-to garden as told through the eyes of its own pet gardener, namely me.
Because any account of the how-to garden is inevitably strung together from a framework of the first- person voice, its telling occasionally stumbles on the same problems of distancing that confront proud parents discussing their children. Before segueing into this discussion of my own how-to garden, we might all benefit from first considering the strange case of the fictitious botanist Kamikochi Kiyomasa, who ran into his own problem of distancing while studying the equally fictitious flower Anadea taludensis:
Kamikochi decided to take a closer look at the flowers and so started walking towards the hilltop. On the way he realized that something very bizarre was taking place. Unlike what usually happens when we approach an object we have seen from a distance—it gradually appears larger until, when we are near enough to touch it, it assumes its proper dimensions—these plants did not seem to get any bigger as the biologist approached them. When Kamikochi reached the hilltop they turned out to be just as small as they had appeared from a hundred meters away.
I started my garden ten years ago by focusing entirely on masses of colorful annuals. The bigger and brasher the hybrid the better it would look in my brand-new garden. I was the guy standing in front of you in line at the local gardening store juggling ten six-packs of those red-and-white-striped petunias with the blue-and- white mottled rim that spelled out the message “Support our troops.”
But seriously, although they provide an instant blaze of bright color, hybrid bedding annuals like petunias and begonias often trumpet a grand statement of impermanence born of gardening inexperience. By the end of that first season gardening on six very wild acres, I watched the petunias and the potted geraniums wither into oblivion and realized that I had planted nothing whatsoever to nurture a deeper connection between myself and this unique place that surrounds me—even though the connection to this place would probably endure through the rest of my life.
I sought an enduring garden.
There are annuals, and then there are annuals. The term annual simply defines any herbaceous plant that germinates, flowers sets seed, and dies all in one season. This succinct life cycle also signifies that an annual follows a survival strategy that devotes all its energy toward effusive flower production capable of attracting whatever pollinator it needs in order to achieve the goal of generous seed production. As all this oversimplified botany refers to gardening, the primary virtue of any annual is providing an instant splash of color to patch up the tattered spaces in a garden bed.
Likewise, there are splashes, and there are splashes. Six-packs of so-called improved mixed colors actually means that some marketing person sitting within the bowels of some seed company office has decided to employ the great American advertising gambit of playing on the customer’s vanity by naming something the slightest bit new and unusual as, well improved. It is a word germinated in the very same bed as seed catalogs that describe each of twenty different broccoli varieties as being the best of the best; this fact is ostensibly demonstrated by the glossy inclusion of twenty one-inch-square photographs that look suspiciously like the very same broccoli plant shot from twenty different angles using twenty different lens filters.
Improved rarely means “better,” only occasionally means “different,” sometimes means “more” or “larger,” and always means “buy.” It almost always means “hybrid,” going a long way to explain why the seed catalogs lavish so many extra columnar inches promoting them. A hybrid, for the uninitiated gardening penny- pincher, might be defined this way; If we happen to like that pack of “improved mixed colors,” we are going to have to buy another pack of twenty sees at $1.98 next year from that same company, because probably none of the thousand seeds we might have saved from this year’s model will reseed true to form. The parents are different, the underlying genetics don’t equate. Those thousand seeds will germinate, instead, into smaller plants bearing smaller flowers. If we are very lucky, we won’t start cursing the progeny of the hybrids, referring to them as weeds when they start popping up uninvited everywhere we never planted them. We gardeners refer to these uninvited as volunteers. I suppose it is an attempt to put a positive spin on what often amounts to many hours of extra weeding. Mixed is another dubious adjective. Unfortunately, mixed colors of just about anything planted in a garden rarely achieve more than a grand confusion to the eye while trumpeting a lack of clarity by the gardener. Mixed colors sit in the bed as a sampler of the hybridist’s art, a summation of all the possibilities on the same order as those six-packs of cold cereal we buy to decide which flavor we actually like. Planted together, mixed colors treat the garden as a container of tints, and variations on some company’s marketing scheme. At best, they may elicit the collector’s curious emotion of having one of each. If there are annuals and annuals, splashes and splashes, then “improved mixed colors” might best be regarded as the horticultural equivalent to splashing into a kid’s plastic wading pool. The one that was never meant to last beyond one season.
Despite the very striking petunias planted at key locations around the perimeter of the house, the flowers that actually held my attention the longest that first summer were the so-called old-fashioned annuals. If improved mixed annuals are the Billboard Top Ten of flowers, the old-fashioneds are the old standards—the ones that have stood the test of time—like purple bachelor’s buttons (Centaurea), yellow calendulas, and the extraordinary, spidery, gray-blue love-in-a-mist (Nigellla).
Each of these pieces grew, flowered and set seed without much watering on my part. And today, nearly ten years later, the progeny of those same three standards still grace the edges of several borders. All it takes to ensure their return each year is to grab a handful of seed heads and cast them a bit beyond what the plants are able to muster on their own. Sometimes I forget to do this. And yet, like reruns of “Star Trek,” the “old-fashioned” always return. Like rereading Moby Dick for the tenth time, they still pique my senses all over again. Significantly, the so-called improved species never last, which seems another way of saying that the ability to bond to place is bred right out of them.
At the end of my first gardening season, I had also learned the names, favored habitat, and flowering period of several of the tiny wildflower species that flourish at the edge of the woods. I paid close attention to the fact that early dandelions are soon followed in quick succession by pink filarees, followed by calypso orchids, buttercups, chocolate lilies, oral root, camas, and centaury. Roughly in that order. By the following spring I added my first long-term investments in what was still a highly unformed gardening vision: in this instance, the relatively foolproof choices of a red-leafed Japanese maple and a star magnolia. In my ignorance I had thought I was buying trees that would eventually shade a substantial area. What I got was trees the size of shrubs. After nearly ten years, the maple had grown to seven feet tall, and the magnolia barely to six. In another twenty years, I and told, neither should attain more than twice its current height. I have long grown to love both trees, although for reasons a nongardener can hardly hope or appreciate second-hand.
The star magnolia’s primary trait is its awesome ability to unfold a lavish spread of the softest white, fragrant, and exceedingly thick-pedaled flowers. Quite honestly, if I did not personally experience my own front walk glowing with the show of those four-inch-wide flowers in early spring and someone chose to slop me a photo of this same tree in full bloom, I might believe the photo to be a practical joke: the canny result of a trickster pinning huge tissue-paper blooms on the branches just to test the limits of my credulity.
This floor show of a bloom lasts less than three weeks. It leaves behind a fond memory of the flower’s sweet vanilla fragrance, and occasional out-of-sync bloom in mid-August, and a thickly leaved, two- trunked shrub with otherwise unremarkable characteristics. If the star magnolia had nothing to offer besides a three-week bloom—no matter how spectacular—I would have planted it at the end of some garden cul-de-
sac, thus precipitation an annual spring pilgrimage just to pay homage to a very special tree in full bloom. But I planted it, instead, right beside the front porch. That’s because I also observe it to be the most hopeful plant in the entire garden (although someone else might continue calling it a trickster). It wins that appellation by virtue of the forty of fifty flower buds that bloom to such excess in April. Those buds start showing themselves way back in September. Its display of swelling buds continues throughout the winter.
The general effect on my own state of mind is joyous anticipation. By late January—when almost nothing else in the garden is happening, and the ground is soggy and sometimes frozen, and normal human being can’t seem to put his finger on what the world spring actually refers to – chancing upon those magnolia buds growing slightly larger every day offers a generous ray of hope as well as a grand illusion of all that is to come. By late January, the buds have developed a furry silver casing that makes them look not unlike a hyperthyroid pussy willow. Every bud shouts out that spring is not far away. But it is still only January. Spring seems very far away indeed. And the hopeful magnolia has tricked me again.
The Japanese maple achieves an entirely different effect. Whereas the magnolia looks remarkable for a very short time and then transforms into a hopeful trickster for most of the rest of the year, the maple puts on a worthy display just about all the time. The leaves are a brilliant red, especially during the spring when they first unfurl. The high sun of early June reflects through those bloodred leaves, causing them to light up from right inside themselves. The tree glows as it were a cultivar introduced from a collection Moses himself brought down from Mount Sinai. The maple puts me in a paradise garden anytime I choose to visit it.
If the effect of the magnolia is hopeful, the effect of the maple is unexpectedly nostalgic, I’m lying on the ground just to the north of that tree on a breezy June afternoon, head propped up on my elbows. The tree appears to pulse in time with each gust of the soft breeze. The sun tosses shards of bloodred light through the shimmery fingerlike leaves; the audacious flicker soon causes me to reminisce about a time, many years ago now, when we were all younger and mind-altering drugs enjoyed a brief meteoric renaissance before being relegated, once again, to the death row of societal icons. Sixties songs like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” sixties images like Jimi Hendrix in full psychedelic regalia, start flashing in front of my eyes. I see the rockets’ red glare of Southeast Asia, and it rekindles in me the experience of that crazy, inspiring, youthful, dangerous counterculture.
But then the breeze stops gusting; the tree lies inert. Just as suddenly, I intuit what it was that caused the psychedelic generation to vanish until who knows when. No pun intended. Still, the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind…
Nostalgic is the only word for that tree. Yet I also imagine the Japanese maple being favored by architects. The leaves possess a wonderful structure of their own. The Japanese Bloodgood maple is one cultivar whose twiny branches and bowl-like shape invoke a splendid garden architecture even when devoid of leaves. The tree is a sight to behold even during the dead of winter when the leaves and all their reminiscences are fast asleep waiting for spring.
Knowledge and experience. Some garden writers assert that a mastery of their art occurs primarily through an accumulation of knowledge wed to the direct experience of plant identification, soil chemistry, landscape design, and perhaps the finer points of the color spectrum. Once we learn enough of these basics, we should be ready to set off on our own to exert that blessed sense of control over nature that is the contemporary definition of gardening.
However, any thorough examination of the science of horticulture—when to plant, what to plant, why to plant, et cetera—will also be seen to offer nothing at all in the way of explaining the process by which a casual gardener suddenly explodes full-blown upon the scene as a compulsive gardener.
The analytical approach to gardening mainly offers up choice tips and pointers to aid in the education of a gardener. But mere knowledge rarely leads to mastery because it overlooks both the sweaty passion and the poetry. As the nowhere garden has already foretold, gardening is creativity on a grand Utopian scale. We consult a nonexistent compass and so set off on a journey to Eden, which actually ends when we encounter a sense of place. The how-to garden teaches us grounding: how to keep our eyes firmly locked on the path and not lose our way.
Our lives are constantly bombarded with information. One result is that most of us “know” more than we experience. Some of us go so far as to believe, erroneously, that knowing is in fact the same thing as experiencing. But what that conviction primarily lacks is grounding. To quote an old saw, experience is the best teacher—not our thoughts and stories about our experiences; and certainly no the data we may collect while experiencing. The practice of gardening offers on of the premier pathways leading ot a direct experience of the Earth. It does so far ore directly than any discussion about gardening. It does so even better than the production of that practice: the garden itself.
A first-rate education grows in our own backyards. The education displays all the characteristics of matriculation, final exams, degree credits, failing and passing grades. A gardening education combines the unexpected and the revelations with the methodical. I plant a Japanese maple in my own how-to-garden not only because the color and shape are right for any particular spot but because the tree possesses an unexplainable charisma capable of lifting my spirits to crazy daydreaming on a sunny June afternoon. The unpredictable process of choosing that tree thus borrows as much from spiritual development as it does from craft or science. I would submit that it is to the bones-throwing, entrails-divining, and especially sweat- producing aspects of the gardening experience that we must surrender if we are to transform our controlling hand into a nurturing one.
A key aspect of my own epiphany occurred shortly after I discovered the gift of the glacier. A glacier retreated across the land I garden about fifteen thousand years ago. I am told that the ice was three thousand feet thick, which explains why the surface of my front yard is mostly a slab of polished granite bedrock. The scarring and gouging of the rock runs decidedly southeast to northwest. The knoll drops off precipitously to the northwest. When my wife and I first moved here and built our house, the flat plain beyond the edge of this northwest-facing cliff was composed entirely of scrubby Oregon grape alder, and willow. The very noticeable lack of forest trees indicated that the ground there probably had no topsoil. The presence of the moisture-loving alders and willows strongly hinted at a local water-retentive blue clay. When we dug a pond on that spot five years later, we were very happy, although not surprised, that the clay plunged below ground to a depth greater than our fifteen-foot hole. When the winter rains do their job and fill the pond to overflow, Tarzan himself could dive off that cliff and hit deep water.
The opposite edge of the knoll, the southeast quadrant, possesses a very different sort of geology.
This is a gradual slope that descends into a second-growth fir, madrones and pine forest possessed of an understory of serviceberry trees that fill the forest with white flowers each April. Between the bedrock knoll and the beginning of the forest there is a uniquely bumpy ground of widely spaced, stunted trees. While digging there seven years ago in preparation for an eventual artichoke bed, I discovered a jumble of pumpkin- sized boulders covered over by just a few inches of topsoil. Since no human being had ever lived here before, I deduced that the stone must have been deposited in the same glacial withdrawal that left so much clay on the opposite side of the knoll. These heavy boulders were the detritus given up by the ice in its northwest retreat across the boulder catcher that was my knoll.
The discovery of a seemingly bottomless pile of boulders has since proven to be the most influential factor in determining both the shape and the form of the resultant garden. I started excavating the fifty-to-a- hundred-pound boulders, on at a time, by pick and shovel and wheelbarrow and soon started mortaring them together to construct terraced garden beds all along the varying slopes of the bedrock. Over the years these terraces have grown ever more sophisticated and ambitious as my skills increased. While most of the boulders are of the same mineral composition as the bedrock itself. I have also discovered bubbly pieces of lava, large quartz crystals, and even a heavy piece of lumpy iron that looks suspiciously like a meteorite. They are all gifts of the glacier-rocks, each one with a story of its own to tell; each one adding to the composition of the growing garden.
I do most of the rock work in the late fall, during the two-month period when the garden is going to sleep but the cold weather has not yet arrived to mar he setup time of mortar. When the rocks are in place, I immediately start filling the boulder-framed beds with whatever organic material I have on hand. My main source of the gardener’s gold and diamonds known as compost is kitchen scraps mixed with barrels of seaweed and bales of hay, augmented with the abundant horse manure I gather by the truckload from a neighboring stable. When the bed is full, I let the mass simmer for a winter or even longer, until nothing remains but sweet-smelling compost. Since the finished product is much denser than the original, I start adding in more wheelbarrowsful of decomposed horse manure until the top of the terrace is overflowing with it. I let it sit for another few weeks and then plant.
I follow no recipe for building compost and therefore provide no fount of knowledge about how anyone else should proceed. With a plethora of how-to books on the market, I have preferred to consult my how-to garden directly. Actually, there are many excellent books teaching a gardener how to build a proper composter. Every book recommends that we turn the mess regularly with a fork, adding as much air as possible for the benefit of the aerobic bacteria. Turning also kills the stench. I have not yet discovered, however, any how-to book that will tell me how to deal with garbage when it’s thirty degrees outside and the composter itself is already overflowing and the breakdown of all that organic matter is progressing so much more painfully slow than the how-to book says it’s supposed to do. And every time I put a fish carcass in the composter, some dog or raccoon manages to get into it and makes a mess all over the year. But I can’t figure
out how the animal gets in. Then again, maybe that dog is doing me a favor. She is turning the compost and I’m not, which accounts for both the overflow and the stench.
Actually, my own bottom-line advice about composters is less than clinical. It demands that instead, we follow the advice of an old pop song. Get whatever composter suits your fancy. Build it, buy it, dig it, do it. Place if as far from your house as is geographically possible without also getting yourself into a lawsuit whenever the wind shifts toward your neighbors. Turn it every so often. Buy a few bales of hay. Whenever you empty the garbage can into the bins, heap a few wads of hay on top. Besides that simple advice, que sera-
—whatever will be, will be. Flies, smells messes; one or another of them is going to creep up once in a while, no matter how sanitary a person tries to be—and no matter how many times that how-to book says it shouldn’t happen.
My own rock terrace cum composters have been developing for several years now. Constructing the boulders into terraces, filling them with garbage, planting them several seasons later, and building stone stairways to connect them all have since turned into the most labor-intensive tasks of my life. Reiterating the goals of Joe Hollis’ paradise garden, terrace building offers me the reintegration of my leisure activities. It is the ongoing source of my physical well-being—my jogging, elliptical trainer, and aerobics. It is the largest art project I will ever confront, a labor of love and spirit that now writhes across the knoll like a series of waves. I could never have imagined the extent of these terraces in advance. They were completed on at a time. And only when the current terrace is finished do I start imagining the placement and depth of the next one. They are all constructed to the shape of the land, out of the land, and filled to the brim with yet more of the same land.
Notice that this description has made no mention of the plants that ended up in the various terraces. This points out an important distinction between gardening and landscaping. If gardening is the experience of growing plants, then landscaping is the experience of growing gardens. Gardeners keep their eyes to the ground and the greenery. Landscapers develop a peripheral vision, always scanning the larger environment called home. In many ways, the two terms, gardening and landscaping, are not much more than two different viewpoints of the same relationship to place. In this book I sometimes use the two terms synonymously.
In my confusion of suddenly facing so many new unplanted gardening beds, the how-to garden spoke to me of the virtues of setting seed in one season, then herbaceous perennials grow year after year if sited in an auspicious location. They put down roots both literally and figuratively. It was during the fall of my third gardening season that I started accumulating perennials. As perennials tend to do, the newly planted peonies, oriental poppies, lychnis, and polemonium soon taught me the important lesson of appreciating leaf texture and plant shape as easy equals to the lavishness of their flowers. Over time, I find myself personally favoring flowers on the blue end of the spectrum and round, mounding plants over tall or short ones. Captivated by those two criteria, I convinced myself that the round ball of a crater-lake veronica, with its bluest of blue flowers, must be the epitome of flowering perennials. But when that pregnant mound of greenery grew so large that it finally collapsed outward under its own weight, I concluded that its new bird’s-nest shape looked inelegant and sloppy or even wrong. I fought the sprawl by artfully employing green twine to lasso the collapsed bundle into a mound again. Success was a twine skeleton that could hardly be seen at all.
Two years later, while immersed in the now-established task of stringing up the veronica to fit my agenda, I suddenly recognized that the plant’s yearly collapse closely reflected the process that individual flowers undergo when they open their petals from the center outward. Here was a plant busily engaged in its own normal growth cycle, and I wanted to incarcerate it inside a green string prison for committing the crime of aesthetic disobedience. I stopped tying ad soon started observing the veronica’s outward sprawl as an opportunistic strategy evolved for dropping seeds over a far greater plot of ground than a tight mound would ever permit.
As one might guess, this was also the year I developed an appreciation for the sprawling, falling, ground-hugging torus shape. This kindergartener finally listened to the solicitations of a humble veronica and was soon taught to observe the self-seeding of perennials as nature’s way of cultivating groups of plants rather than individual specimens. This newfound sensitivity to the growth dynamics of a crater-lake blue veronica had surely affected my gardening aesthetic. It also gave me my first tantalizing peek at the Mayan compass, which set me on a long faltering journey leading to an ever-increasing relinquishment of control over my garden.
The how-to garden soon pointed me towards unusual perennials, downright Dr. Seuss-looking perennials, so that soon I was choosing such relative rarities as rosey incarvilleas, twirling euphorbias, and spiny everlasting eryngiums over the much more common salvias and rudbeckias. I became transfixed by formerly unheeded gardening events, perhaps exemplified by the remarkable way the Alchemilla mollis focuses a dewdrop right at the center of its thick, perfectly round, blue-green leaves.
Perennials teach gardeners to look beyond the climax of flower blooming and to appreciate, with equanimity, every aspect of a flowering plant’s growing cycle. In my case, I started to pay closer attention to the moment a perennial first breaks soil, noticing, for instance, that a large grouping of columbines are up and spurting toward the sky long before the platycodons show anything at all. When the platycodons make their anticipated appearance at soil level they look a lot like a colony of tiny asparagus. A week after that event, I finally notice that one of the plants I formerly identified as a columbine is actually a thalictrum with
columbine-shaped leaves. As another week comes and goes, the columbine remains close to soil level and has started to plump up its stems. Meanwhile, the individual stems and leaves of the thalictrum have started to look much more delicate than any columbine. Within another week the thalictrum has grown a foot taller than either the columbines or the platycodons.
So it goes throughout the seasons. This recognition of attributes beyond just flower was a sure sign that I had ascended onto another gardening level.
The classical approach to landscape gardening insists we learn our own personal gardening aesthetic after first immersing ourselves in the best of the traditional styles. It is an approach borrowed from traditional art education. Students first study the theories and techniques utilized by masters like Cezanne and Rembrandt and Picasso before they ever allow themselves to experiment on their own. We draw a better picture and, by inference, plant a better garden after we learn the technique and tolls of the masters.
Certainly, it’s all useful, all helpful. Ad I followed this model, I would have adopted on faith specific plantings utilized by, for instance landscape architect Russell Page and probably would have learned to appreciate conifers a good ten years before I actually did so. Today those conifers would be ten years fuller and more mature than the trees I finally got around to planting last spring. On the other hand, ten years ago I had not yet discovered the local resource of buried boulders and so had not yet begun building terraces. With a front ear of bedrock, I did not yet possess deep enough beds to plant those hypothetical conifers. Ten years ago I would have viewed those conifers as “element” in my own version of a four-tree garden. And alas, it seems quite certain that they would be long gone by now, scarified on the altar of their own exuberant growth.
It is said that the difference between successful people and those who just get by is that successful people tend to fail more often. One important lesson that the classical approach sometimes forgets to mention is that the vast majority of the so-called masters were renegades or outright failures in their own time. They were revolutionaries who believed that relying on too many old-fashioned rules stifles creativity. As that statement pertains to music, I once knew a local subculture of five year olds who loved to play music. They continued loving to play music until they started taking violin lessons at six and had their creativity suffocated in favor of a rote recitation of the classical technique. None of them picked up and instrument again until they turned thirteen and had recovered from their former torture enough to pick out their own favorite tunes to play on a piano and guitar.
As the premise relates to gardening, the Japanese garden style, as one example, developed over several hundred years. Its basic principles were constantly being refined and expanded upon by inspired although rebellious gardeners who continually rejected and refurbished the established rules of the time. In other words, straying from anyone’s idea of the traditional path does not imply either weakness of tradition or lack of talent. It is the tradition and leads to the continued evolution of artistic expression. It is therefore best to regard the old revered traditions no as laws set in stone, but as free tips by long dead masters.
Much of what passes for gardening aesthetics (including my own developing style) is actually a fashion statement masquerading as objectivity. Orthodox call about height, color, texture, and the like have more to do with correctness than truth. They mirror any issue of Vogue magazine where the models are supposed to represent the perfect woman, though in fact only a certain stratum of the female population covets that hollow-cheeked, gaunt look.
Reflecting the Vogue vision of female perfection, some gardening styles have likewise become institutionalized. There is a good reason for this: style offers guidance to people unable, for whatever reason, to work things out for themselves. It is, in many ways, the horticultural equivalent of those picture books where children connect the dots and so draw a clever picture. Watching my own children connect the dots with great concentration, I cannot say that the pastime has either helped or hindered their ability to draw on their own. Likewise, following preconceived notions of style provides an easy roadmap leading to a rudimentary sense of place. It neither helps nor hinders the development of a knockout garden.
If any particular style persists for a long enough period of time, we start referring to it as a classic.
Having stood the test of time, the classics are internally integrative, always historically pertinent, and occasionally beautiful. The redwood deck, for instance, has emerged as a classic gardening element in the United States.
Get enough of these classic gardens started in one locale and a tradition emerges: the French tradition, the English landscape tradition, the Italian tradition, and so on If the various classical traditions often reflect a sense of the place they originated (although not necessarily anywhere else), they likewise reflect a strong sense of the lifestyle and fashion tastes of the landed aristocracy of that particular place. The traditional French garden, for example, follows a set of conventions dictating geometrically sheared hedges enclosing great beds of monochromatic flowers. It is a landscape invented for the precise purpose of being viewed from above, from great terraces and bedroom patios, and granting much the same overall effect of a giant Persian rug covering the floor of one’s grand landscaped estate. The French garden thus necessitates a large manor for viewing, a large staff for maintenance, and inevitably, a bottomless financial capability to pay for that high maintenance and control.
The English landskip tradition is the direct ancestor of the modern American garden. It is perhaps best exemplified by the work of one Lancelot Brown, better known to history as Capability brown. Brown meticulously constructed naturalistic appearing pastoral landscapes (landskips) that presumed to emulate Arcadia, the bucolic Greek paradise garden where centaurs and fauns were said to reside. Brown’s constructed view of paradise can be seen in Walt Disney’s Fantasia, which includes a segment with Arcadia as the visual accompaniment to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.
The man’s work seems a paradox. This “capability” of his caused Brown to sacrifice great parcels of the natural ecosystem of England—as well as many of the formal gardens constructed during the English Renaissance—in the cause of creating a naturalistic artifact meant to resemble an idealized Greek image of paradise. Brown leveled entire villages to the ground just to keep the view around the manor open and naturalistic. But he is also responsible for tree planting on a vast scale. His staff planted one hundred thousand trees on the estate of Lord Donegall alone.
The English landskip tradition has exerted an enormous effect upon twentieth century Western culture, perhaps best reflected in that exemplar of the modern garden: the clipped lawn. In many respects, the idea of a vast stretch of lawn was splendidly matched to the English countryside and the aristocratic lifestyle from which it originated. The upkeep of the baronial lawn was overseen by a large workforce of gardeners whose fastidious maintenance of acres upon acres of grass was attained entirely by driven machines. It has even been argued that the landskip tradition was socially beneficial because it proved to be such a bountiful employer of the otherwise disenfranchised servant class. This high-maintenance task was utterly dependent upon the abundant rainfall, deep soils, and clement temperature variations of the English countryside.
The idea of emulating the garden tradition of one specific culture and place doesn’t always translate well into other cultures and other places. While the lawn was once the highly refined gardening tradition of a few hundred wealthy scions of Empire on the grand scale, it is now the garden cliché of tens of millions of homeowners on a much-reduced scale. Over the past hundred years, the lawn has democratized and humbled itself and finally emerged as the quintessential icon of suburban America. Yet it rarely receives either the traditional high-maintenance hand care or the climactic blessings that did so well to mediate an equilibrium between British culture and the British ecosystem.
If the physical necessities of that original balance have essentially vanished in places like Tucson, Minneapolis, and Orlando, what is retained from the original is its insidious cultural base: the definition of a garden as a place to be controlled. Where place is unfriendly, culture turns more assertive. In places like Spokane, Palm Springs, Houston, and Montreal, achieving the ideal of a beautiful lawn often develops into a matter of poisoning the ecosystem.
Our lawn-tending ways have led to an ecological crisis of some magnitude. The high- nitrogen fertilizer needed to keep any lawn green also pollutes any body of water located downstream. Fifty billion acres of American lawn at an annual maintenance cost of thirty billion dollars(2) demands vast foot- acres or irrigation, which places unendurable stress upon already diminished water supplies across North America. The amount of herbicides utilized to keep the creeping incursion of weeds at bay far outweighs the amounts used even by commercial farming. Because herbicides harm many other organisms in their path— whether they be out-of-sight fish swimming downstream, or pets and children who happen to play on the typical lawn’s well-poisoned surfaces—the choice of planting a lawn today shares something essential with other ecological irresponsibilities such as refusing to recycle, buying gas-hogging cars, driving off-road vehicles to tour the desert, et cetera, ad infinitum. In every case, a once socially acceptable action continues to be fostered in an increasingly overpopulated world and without any consideration of its cumulative detriment.
There are, of course, other ways to cover up dirt in a suburban front yard without recruiting artificial fertilizers, excessive watering, and herbicidal poison. Discover ground covers. Or cordon off a little parcel of the front yard and plant low-maintenance grasses, which don’t demand artificial stimulation. We might also start to regard the lawn the same way many semivegetarians now regard meat: as a condiment rather than as
the main course. Surround a much-reduced lawn with flowerbeds and shrubs. In the process, reinvent yet another English landscaping style known as the garden room.
Although my how-to garden has as yet resisted the temptation of the lawn, it has borrowed several conventions from the Japanese gardening tradition. The Japanese developed their elegant style within a temperate and wet climate bestowed with natural stylistic elements (e.g., moss, river-polished rocks, water, and dense evergreens) interpenetrating with vistas of natural features (e.g., mountains and sky). These attributes closely reflect my own environment. The rules that embody the Japanese style demand a close adherence to shape, shadow, light reflection, and greenery. Those gardens that mirror the rules most strictly are often very subdued. Like the English landskip tradition, they are “naturalistic” devices that skillfully hide the controlling hand of the gardener. They are planted primarily as a source of serenity. And when done well, they often achieve their purpose.
Regard the concept of shakkei, (3) which translates literally as “borrowed landscape.” An already existent view of a mountain, a pond, perhaps a temple, or a waterfall, is incorporated into the general garden design by carefully framing it with trees. In a few exceptional cases, every single tree, herbaceous plant, and manmade addition to the garden is placed not so much to hold one’s attention through its own individualistic beauty but rather to lead the eye naturally to the view beyond. Pruning the trees to frame the vista has transformed into a high art form. No saw cuts are ever seen by a visitor’s casual glance at the trunk.
Shakkei and the English lawn are both landscape devices, although the former is a perceptual device, while the latter is physical. Shakkei exists independent of place. The Japanese physical prerequisites of stone, water, and climate need not necessarily be adopted. What is pivotal, instead, is the view itself and the subtle way we go about framing it. The lawn, by contrast, is a physical entity that demands green grass wherever it grows.
In my own attempt to adapt shakkei, I have never fretted very much if the trees are planted in such a way as to make some prototypical Mr. Toyota break out in deep contented grunts. I also find that when the concept of shakkei is adopted successfully the result is so exceedingly subtle that most observers rarely perceive that the plantings were made specifically to blend and focus any particular view. Shakkei also serves as its own garden compass. The eye is led to a specific viewpoint and the feet soon follow down that path.
The garden and the view interpenetrate to accent a sense of place.
The how-to garden spoke strongly to me during the winter of my fifth season on the land. The garden was in hibernation, and quite honestly, there was little to enjoy besides the boulders, the wild Oregon grape that frequents so much of the Pacific Northwest, the fir trees, and an exceedingly mossy hillside. Of those things I had planted myself, the bare but evocative Japanese maple proved to be the one notable exception. By now it had spread more outward than up, and a few of the mahogany-colored branches were snaking around one another like braided rope dispensing a wonderful shape and tint to the otherwise drab winter garden.
One day in early December my family visited the Seattle Zoo, where I found myself more mesmerized by the bunches of luminous lavender berries crowding the branches of a Callicarpa bush than by any of the sadly aloof caged animals. These berries were as brilliant as any flower, and yet four inches of snow lay on the ground. It caused me to embark on a study of the relative merits of shrubs and small trees, and to conclude that shrubs are obviously an expression of commitment and longevity in the garden. Flowers come and go, but shrubs and trees are permanent. Book after book on the subject reinvoked the basic concept that shrubs and small conifers are best thought of as the bones of a garden. It is an apt metaphor. Evidently my garden was telling me that it lacked bones.
The resultant acquisition of several shrubs and trees presented a practical solution to a perennial garden that was consuming entirely too much time and precious water. Any gardener with an unlimited appetite for increased garden area must eventually realize that all those enormously fanciful gardens photographed in so many coffee table gardening books are predominantly the playthings of the wealthy or the outright obsessive. My actual garden area encompassed nearly an acre. Being neither wealthy nor obsessive, any serious consideration about further expansion hinged upon what I have named the three garden constraints of time, money, and environment.
First, time. My career is not farming, gardening, or landscaping. The labor commitment to my gardening avocation was now displaying signs of strain. If I wished to expand yet again, then every other part of the entire garden had to become commensurately more self-sufficient. My choice of plants altered
drastically toward the self-sufficient, the long-term, and away from the needy. I sought out plants capable of taking care of themselves without extra pampering from me.
I became a fledgling botanist noticing that bearded irises and peonies thrive in conditions far drier than we gardeners usually allot them—a function of their Spanish and Central Asian heritage. I stopped watering them altogether. I noticed those places where sun and trees created shadows during the long hot days of August and planted accordingly. A frost pocket got a different planting. A west-facing rocky outcrop that baked during the summer got something else.
I commenced a garden worthy of winter by acquiring two Callicarpa bushes. Another choice was a Vibernum Burkwoodii, a shrub possessing the dual virtues of shiny evergreen leaves of great merit and clusters of exceedingly fragrant white flowers produced profusely very early in spring. Continuing my love for blue flowers, I bought several evergreen ceanothus, a xeriscaping species capable of thriving on no water at all through the thirsty days of late summer.
The second constraint is money. The purchase of new plants and gardening hardware costs plenty. I discovered that a $1.98 packet of buddleia seeds proved no more difficult to germinate than radishes, and I soon had more six-inch pots filled with one foot-tall buddleias than I could ever use myself. They proved wonderful presents for gardening friends, some of whom had never heard of the plant. Buddleias have the added advantage of attaining up to ten feet in height and flowering late during their first season. They put out long racemes of sweetly fragrant flowers during August when not much else is blooming. They attract butterflies better than anything else this side of a bergamot. Certain cultivars seem to possess an ability to attract ants, which don’t seem to damage the shrub. I soon planted several in places far away from the house where I could appreciate the endemic ant mounds. I like to think that the buddleias keep the ants happy, in effect communicating a contractual agreement, a coexistence ideogram analogous to my chicken-wire fence ideogram. Likewise, the buddleias teach me the difficult lesson of how to coexist with ants. The source of all this robust growth, fragrance, color, butterfly feast, and ant retreat starts life as a seed no larger than a particle of dust.
The third constraint is environment. Whatever I choose to plant, I could not permit myself to further strain the limited natural resources, especially a limited water supply. Gardening thus becomes a matter of what we manifest when we have the time, the money, and the natural resources. From then on, the three constraints dictated my growing style every bit as much as my love for blue flowers.
Another year passed. Ornamental fruit trees were the next season’s great discovery. Because ornamentals feed the eye and not the stomach, the nonutilitarian “idea” of them seemed disdainful or my deeply ingrained obeisance to the great American work ethic. In the process of discovering them, I also recognized that apple pie is the yardstick by which we measure traditional American values because apple trees themselves are such halcyon edproducers. But one day, mostly in response to a ridiculously low price, I responded to a local nursery offering Prunus (Japanese cherries) and Malus (crab apple) species. They now flourish along the rim of my pond like a line of prima ballerinas whose outstanding virtues include striking red bud color followed by profuse pink flower production, interesting bark texture, and an unusual reddish-green leaf color in summer and fall. The waxy yellow crab apples that hang from the bare limbs of the Brandywine crab apple have long since become one of the high-lights of my winter garden. Crab apples also meet the demands of the third constraint. They never need extra watering no matter how hot and dry the summer gets.
Inexpensive ornamentals unveil a hidden bonus of the second constraint, finances. Because shrubs and trees cost so much, what better reason to study up on all those mysterious crafts utilized by the nursery trade? In fact, learning how to propagate all manner of plants through layering and grafting need not be any more difficult to master than learning to tile a bathroom or setting up a computer database.
Two years ago I received the wonderful gift of a beautiful and relatively expensive mock orange cultivar. I immediately scraped a bit of bark off the soil side of six branch nodules and dropped those branches (still attached to the mother plant) under the dirt with a rock on top to keep them down. Twelve weeks later I had rooted six additional mock oranges. I cut the branches just above the roots and a year later had succeeded at naturalizing mock oranges all over this land. No doubt due to the origination of its wild ancestor in central Oregon, all those naturalized plants now seem much happier in their untended, unamended dirt than the original did in its rich bed of topsoil with weekly watering. Like buddleias, mock oranges are now among the most appreciated gifts I give to others.
Or another easy gift: start lilacs by planting the seed heads gathered from an existing plant. Like buddleias, lilac seeds are no more difficult to germinate than radishes. However, quite unlike radishes, the plants may take seven or eight years to grow large enough to reach flowering size. Then again, any such intimation of the tortoise timetable always proves to be an important gift on its own behalf. The slow passage
of time counted from the yearly growth of shrubs and trees pays homage to the fact that the giver knows the recipient is home.
I cannot leave this quirky education from my garden without mentioning the conifers—the cone bearers—a class of tree that has taken me nearly eight years to learn “how to” admire. The reason for that insensitivity relates directly to place. My knoll is surrounded by a thick second-growth forest composed predominantly of conifers. Planting conifers directly into the knoll’s terraced beds seemed too much like carrying coals to Newcastle.
The change in my attitude came in a flash. I was at a nursery, being shown the location of a shrub, when the proprietor stopped to admire the beauty of a Boulevard cypress just then in the process of opening new needles. This is a slow growing columnar-shaped conifer of the Chamaecyparis genus that may eventually grow to fifteen feet high and six feet wide. Its bark is a deep red-brown, which provides a striking contrast to the thick, silvery-blue needles that seem to corkscrew like a Shirley Temple hairdo. “I’ve never appreciated conifers,” I remarked to the salesman. He looked me over as if I had just announced that I’ve never appreciated love or beauty, and commented, “I look at conifers as the fur and feather bearers of the plant world. Very sensual stuff.”
A customer soon pulled the salesman away, leaving me to wander the aisles on my own. I ended up in the conifer section. Rubbing my palm against the soft bristles of an arborvitae, the feathery plumage of an incense cedar, the hedgehog prickliness of a blue spruce, and the downy softness of an Austrian pine, I was suddenly transformed into a true believer.
I purchased two tine Boulevard cypresses, two Elwood cypresses, two blue-green Irish junipers, a yellow-ochre-colored Rheingold arborvitae, a spidery-branched golden conifer known as a thujopsis, and the fateful sequoia that soon got planted into a one-tree garden. The next two are more rounded and squat and seem lit up from inside when spied from a distance. The sequoia is of course, an ambassador to future generations.
As both my garden and I enter middle age, the established beds seem ever more capable of taking care of themselves. I have tried many different gardening fashions, committed several monumental planting blunders, and felt compelled to try more categories of plants than either this limited history or the soil is able to nurture. I now find myself looking away from the actual plants and toward the landscape as a unity, although I am also convinced that this projected sense of unity is as much a matter of self-deception—smoke and mirrors—as it is the result of sophisticated planting technique. For example, every place my bedrock knoll drops off toward forest or pond offers a natural cascade of rock outcroppings, moss, lichen, sedum, and wildflowers. A rock gardener in the Japanese style might spend an entire lifetime trying to emulate what those cliffs gather to themselves naturally. But whereas I once considered the cliffs to be “wild,” meaning outside my gardening domain, a slight shift in perception now lets me regard them as exemplars of the well- integrated garden. Yet I have planted nothing on those cliffs besides a few scattered hen-and-chickens. Any more tampering would simply cause one or another of the three constraints (time, money, or resources) to rear its ugly head.
This sensibility for wild areas is an example of the Findhorn (4) notion of always leaving one area in a garden as a natural sanctuary. Consider it safe ground, sacred ground, and an homage to the biota that preceded the garden. Garden ecologist Forest Shomer asserts that the sanctuary “represents the mystery or unconscious from which non-mental possibilities can emerge and is the resting place of the nature spirits and elementals who don’t often take up residence in the control areas of the garden.”(5)
This perception of a wild area harmonizing with the cultivated garden now seems the next direction to explore. It also implies its opposite—that the cultivated garden is capable of being perceived as an integrated extension of the wild environment. In such a manner, the garden offers a heightened perception of nature in microcosm.