From compost to composure: this week I want to blog about – or at least spin off from – a book I’ve been reading that I really like a lot. It’s by Robert Pogue Harrison, and it’s called Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition.
Harrison starts with the idea that gardens are the human refuge from history: history is full of wars and suffering and busyness, while gardens are retreats where we find calm and beauty and rest. However, he goes on to claim that what we love about our gardens is not just the peacefulness – because we are restless, and easily bored. What we love about gardens is the care we provide there, the opportunity to work with the soil, rocks, water, and sun to create places that express our souls.
This really makes sense to me. As much as I enjoy visiting the great public gardens where someone else does the work, I don’t want to live in Eden or any other non-earthly paradise where the fruit just hangs there perpetually waiting to be taken. I like the process of gardening – I like getting my hands in the soil, in the roots; I like the bending and stooping and schlepping. I like the relationship it sets up between me and the plants.
I do two kinds of gardening: for myself and for clients. Designing someone else’s sanctuary is a tricky and challenging business: I try to be as sensitive as I can to who the people are, what they imagine about their garden, how they’ll use it, who’ll use it (kids? Grandparents? Pets?), and how much work they want to put into the garden. A lot of people tell me they want low-maintenance gardens, and I respect that, as much as I can. People’s lives are busy and they have a lot of commitments. They may not know much about how to take care of a garden, and they may not care to. But there’s no such thing as a no-maintenance garden. (Roy Diblik, a renowned Wisconsin plantsman, does a presentation he calls the “Know-Maintenance Garden.” I just spent fifteen minutes rooting around in my files to see if I had a handout from his talk. I don’t . My files are as overgrown as my garden gets in July.) Gardens are living things, and like relationships, they have to be tended.
What I like to do is teach people how to garden and encourage them to get out and try things, once I’ve given them the structure and the start. People can be very nervous about their gardens, afraid they’ll kill something or pull up a good plant instead of a weed. I try to communicate a spirit of playful caring in the garden. A new garden is a lot like a new baby. It needs more care – and different care – at first than it will in ten or fifteen years. When I was a new parent, I was nervous too, and I had to learn to diaper and bathe and feed my daughter. But it quickly became familiar, and what I learned I made into my own way of doing things. Gardeners can do the same: at first you follow the “rules,” such as they are, but soon enough you’re improvising or experimenting, being a plant mom or dad in your own way. I count myself most successful when my clients start transplanting, dividing, adding new plants, pruning, weeding, and deadheading: putting their own labor into their gardens. I figure that’s when the garden starts to become meaningful to the gardener.
My own garden is an adventure: it’s nature, it wants to live. If I’m tired of the catmint flopping over the back walkway, I pull it up and move it behind the compost. Mickey Cat will find it wherever it goes. If the Endless Summer hydrangea proves an Endless Bummer, out it goes (or, more precisely into the parkway garden of the rental unit next door, where at least it will provide foliage). Both are thriving despite their not-fit-for-prime-place rejection. Of course, some plants don’t thrive: they just up and decide that they’re not getting enough water or it’s too damned sunny here or they don’t like clay. And since I’m still learning about plants – I figure a few lifetimes and I’ll maybe know enough – I make mistakes. But the mistakes are what teach me about the plants. And yes, I do talk to them.
When I walk into the garden, I’m conscious of many needs. Some weeds need to be eradicated. Some old blooms need to be deadheaded. Some plants have overgrown their space and need pruning. Some need water. Some have powdery mildew or aphids. Some need staking. Some days they all seem to call at me at once, while other times I can do one chore, feel really satisfied, and relax. For me, though, the garden is mostly not about relaxing in the traditional lounge-in-a-hammock sense. In the garden, I’m conscious of what I should be doing, what I want to be doing, to keep growth and decay in balance. The pictures of gardens that we all drool over capture a moment, but a garden is a process, and change is its real beauty. Sprout to bud to flower, to seed or fruit; ripeness to decay; decay to soil; soil to sprout to bud to flower to seed. Like an orchestra, a garden features first one species then another, each claiming a moment at the focal point. Like an orchestra, too, a garden needs to be played, or worked: each stage in the cycles poses its own tasks. In this way, we invest ourselves in the garden. It’s my work in the garden that makes it an expression of my being, my soul. And that work, while it can be physically demanding, is ultimately the relaxation I crave, because it absorbs me, it focuses me, it takes me out of my quibbling ego, and it roots me in the place I know best in the world.
When Robert Pogue Harrison talks about gardens in terms of “the human condition,” it’s this idea that we are human because we care for others, we care for the land, we care. And the action of caring, the work of cultivating our gardens, is also a form of self-cultivation. I’ll write more about this soon: he has some very interesting thoughts about what it means to cultivate oneself, that I’d like to explore with you.
In the meantime, I hope you and your gardens are well. If you’re in the north, your garden has gone to bed for its long winter’s nap; if you’re in the south, you may be swaddling it against a possible frost or simply cutting it back and watching it grow again. Have a wonderful holiday season!
