Do you have a landscape like everyone else, or a garden that says something about you?
Gardens are specific places, human constructs that don’t exist in nature. But gardening is a verb, generally meaning the deliberate choosing, arranging, putting into soil, maintaining and adjusting of plants in our guarded areas, indoors or out. An active pursuit that can, and should, please and change with us.
Last week I attended a lecture by Monty Don, a down-to-earth, populist British garden influencer, on what makes a garden. We were both raised toiling in large gardens tended the hard, physical way: wheelbarrowing manure and compost, which were unavailable in plastic sacks; double-digging beds with a shovel and fork before tillers became affordable; pulling weeds by hand because safe herbicides weren’t available; hauling water in cans from rain barrels or a distant faucet rather than hoses; pushing clunky, nonmotorized lawn mowers; the works.
But soon, in the early days of modern gardening, color TV started capturing our attention to possibilities, modern one-stop garden centers began springing up as horticultural fast-food outlets, and a few innovations we now take for granted changed the way we gardened.
Newly developed inexpensive plastic pots and lightweight soilless mixes in bags made mass-producing and shipping otherwise unobtainable plants possible. Lightweight gas engines, mowers, tillers and string trimmers became affordable, and hoses, herbicides and electric hedge trimmers took some of the sting out of chores.
Then even our expectations began to be influenced by mass media. I was 14 when Southern Living magazine started changing how we view our gardens by suggesting, all but mandating, garden lifestyle choices. We went from my garden club grandmothers’ encouragements to be more efficient while helping clean up and beautify our towns, to comparing ourselves to others, for better or worse.
Along the way, many, if not most, modern gardens became democratized into somewhat sanitized, one-style-fits-most lookalikes, routine spaces to be maintained “as is” in perpetuity. The HOA mantra of keeping foundation shrubs and hedges pruned, lawns weeded and edged, and tomatoes out of sight but in rows reigned supreme.
Nothing wrong with any of this, of course, if you are mostly interested in putting on a public face, a means to a social end to be maintained repetitively just so. But the actual act of personalizing even the most standard garden is what makes a garden great. As Monty put it, “To have a lovely garden is seen to be admirable and respected, regardless of the style; but the doing — actually making and gardening your own way, with your own hands — is always better.”
With that in mind, and partly because maverick garden experts like him are encouraging self over style, I am seeing individual garden touches creeping out from once-hidden backyard Edens into the front yard. Perennial flowers planted in neatly edged, curving beds along property lines are subtly dividing streets of once-standard wall-to-wall lawns into individual gardens. Individual trees are now being planted in groups, underplanted with groundcovers, small shrubs or just neatly mulched beds.
Blueberry plants are being sneaked into once-formal rows of shrubs, porches are sporting larger pots with mixed plants, including “edimental” herbs and vegetables, and vine-draped arbors, maybe a low picket fence and gate, are springing up in side yards, helping segue from back to front. Garden art is getting more prominent, perhaps a bit tastier.
Our basic American garden style will never be cottagey like that of England, Japan or any other gardening society. But the standard style is filling out, getting more interesting, with more personal touches.
The way we want to see ourselves.
Felder Rushing is a Mississippi author, columnist and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Visit his blog at felderrushing.blog. Email gardening questions to [email protected].
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