Two blogs ago I was making the point that thousands of years in the past when the first people to develop pleasure gardens were organizing space, they built walls to keep out wilderness. They needed to wall out predators and marauders; their little clearings in the forest or oases in the desert were ways of keeping nature at bay, preventing the gangs from getting in, keeping themselves safe. Wilderness was dangerous and enormous. People had to be protected from wild nature and wild men.

Today we have to build walls around the wilderness to keep people from destroying it. People have so denuded the planet that only legal strictures and lack of access can keep even remnants of wilderness alive.

Gardens are somewhere between wilderness and urbanity. They aren't cities, but they also aren't wildernesses. They exist in varying forms on a spectrum somewhere between these two poles. Some gardens are more 'natural' while others are more 'artificial'. My guess would be that when people think of gardens, they think of them as 'nature,' but they clearly are some sort of negotiation between humans and the green world, a bargain struck between art and nature.
For most of our history, gardens were local, organic, sustainable. But just as it changed everything else, the industrial revolution and the age of imperialism brought a consumerist mentality to gardens and garden design. Explorers brought back plants from faraway, and other plants hitchhiked on ships. People wanted exotics as a demonstration of their sophistication and worldliness. Gardens started needing fertilizers made from petroleum, peat dug from bogs, plants sold in plastic, gas-fired mowers and trimmers and leaf blowers, and on and on.

I think that one things we need now is to bring some wilderness back into gardens. I'd like to offer a couple of ways to think about this, one philosophical and one more. practical

First off, there's the question of what is it we gain from gardening? Why do it in the first place? Realtors say you can improve the value of your home by up to 10% with good landscaping. Gardens add to our living space and give us shade, color, fragrance, and beauty, but beyond these, here are some of the benefits I think people experience as a result of working a garden. Maybe they even come along just from enjoying a garden. Certainly they're among the reasons to spend time in wild nature too:

Gardens provide encounters with unpredictability; opportunities for surprise (like live TV). Something grows, something else doesn't.

Gardens give us exposure to rhythms and cycles that are long. Instead of the 24 hour news cycle or the quarterly business cycle, we have annual cycles, and longer. Trees live much longer than we do. Maybe gardens can help us learn patience.

Gardens get us in contact with the soil: organisms in most soils are believed to have power to boost immune systems. Soil is full of life. We all depend on it; we spring from it and return to it. Soil isn't dirt, and it's a wonderful moment when we realize how entirely different ecosystems exist beneath our feet. Children who are exposed to soil develop fewer allergies.

Gardens allow for wordlessness: tending to plants, watering, weeding, deadheading, moving them, planting them, we get both relief from the constant stimulation of the media and escape from our own monkey minds, the mental gerbils that scurry around their little mental wheels in our heads all day.

(That said, I have to tell you about the truly, truly nasty trick I learned from the man who works with me. He calls it mind worming. You know how you can catch yourself with a song in your head, and it's the same song that's been there for the last 3 hours, and it's as dumb as music gets? Paul said he and a buddy used to plant songs in people's heads; either a mention or just humming a few bars as you walk by, and you've condemned the poor soul to Yellow Submarine or Mary Had a Little Lamb or Stairway to Heaven or whatever you want to inflict. Did I tell you about gardening for a client with a dog called Maggie? Every time I was there – every time I thought about being there – Rod Stewart came along. It got to be torture. And I even like that song. Or used to.)

Gardens also teach us humility and confront us with our limits in relation to natural law. We can want the trumpet vine to grow, we can will the trumpet vine to grow. We can command and beg and wheedle and bribe. But if it isn't going to grow, it isn't going to grow.

But they also provide us connection: connection with the whole green, growing world, connection with the insects and birds that feed in our gardens, connection with something much larger than ourselves.

Philosophically, that is, I think gardening is good for us: good for body, good for soul. Gardens do some of what we go to wilderness for: they ground us, humble us, delight us, inspire us, and test our knees.

But practically, what can we do to bring a little bit of wilderness into our gardens? I should make a note, here, that since I live in Chicago, I’m mostly familiar with city and suburban gardens. For those of you who live in more rural areas, the challenge is different. You have much more space to work with, and likely there are parts of your garden already that are verging on, if not wild, at least way less structured. But in built-up areas, where the space to garden is limited, what can we do?

Whether city or country, residential, and even commercial, landscapes can contribute to the maintenance of habitat, if not for migrating mammals, at least for birds and insects. As you know, the loss of habitat is one of the greatest threats facing many endangered or shrinking species. Cities, farms, parking lots, the whole built environment fragments habitats, making it difficult for species to migrate, and often even to mate. The Wildlands Project, which started on the west coast, is a conservation strategy that hopes to create 'wildlife linkages' to string together corridors between natural areas and thereby to combat loss of species. In the summer issue of the Association of Professional Landscape Designers journal, The Designer, Jules Bruck interviewed Dr. Doug Tallamy, Chair and Professor of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware,. Tallamy argues that home gardens can play a role in restoring and preserving habitat, and thereby, biodiversity. He pointed to the relationship between insects and plants as central in this. The native plants of a region coevolved with the native insects of the region, which in turn are food for native and migrating birds. When we plant a variety of native plants, we contribute to the diversity of insects, which provide food for a diversity of birds. Tallamy stressed that this is most important for choosing woody plants: a native oak may support over 500 species of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) while a native goldenrod only supports about 100. So if you have a choice, choose a native tree. If you're planting shrubs, think about densely branched or evergreen shrubs that provide shelter for birds. If you're planting perennials, include some that are native to your area. They'll feed birds with their seed, they'll attract colorful pollinators, and they'll do well because they're adapted to your climate.
I have several red twigged dogwoods in my yard (Cornus sericea). They have flowers and fruit at the same time, all season long, and the birds love them. So the plant feeds birds for the entire growing season. In the winter, the red stems show up beautifully against my garage and cheer me up when it's gloomy and cold. My Joe-Pye Weed (Eupatorium maculatum), in the picture above, blooms in August. It gets very tall – 6 or 7 feet – and it's a total butterfly magnet. I leave the dry flowerheads up all season because the birds like them.

I think there's a hunger for positive things we can do to improve the planet. We can all get so downhearted and guilty about our own consumer habits, about global warming and water loss and bulging landfills. Planting for habitat is something we can do to counter the damage. What do you think?

I hope you'll visit my website at view link I have some new photos up and I'd love your feedback.
Talk to you soon.