I grew up with my hands in the dirt, gardening with my mum.
School holidays, weekends, after school — gardening was just something I did. I never once considered it a valuable or valid career choice. There was no money involved, it wasn’t intellectually challenging, and it was darn hard work. Anyone could do it.
So I went to university and studied writing. But the plants called me back. I studied landscape design. Not garden design of course. I was more than just a gardener. Oh, the delusions.
About five or six years ago I started thinking more about the relationship between humans and the natural world. I felt deep down there was something really important in the act of gardening but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I struggled to find writing about gardens that went much further than trends, design ideas, and horticultural advice.
I soon realised the garden had been downgraded to a purely horticultural, practical place. It had become the realm of often-outsourced manual labour, an object of sorts, as opposed to a richly woven place of culture, contemplation, connection and learning.
It was reading American author Michael Pollan’s book Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education that really helped galvanise my ideas about the importance of gardens. In it he writes of the garden as a place where the dialogue between humans and the natural world takes place.
A place of conversation between nature and culture.When viewed in this context, things look rather different. Suddenly a garden is not just a page filler at the back of a glossy magazine, or a war-ground between lawnmower and lawn, but an important site of exploration, contemplation, and change. The more I ponder this topic the more I’m convinced of the simple and transformative power of gardens and gardening.
Humans and plants have been co-existing for many thousands of years, yet our relationship is rather strange. On the one hand, we all know deep down that plants and nature are incredibly important to our ongoing existence on a deep level. Nature sustains us, inspires us, and gives us hope. On the other, our relationship is a very practical one. We need plants to survive. They feed, shelter, and heal us. It’s simple.
Given the above illustrations of the interconnectedness between people and plants, you’d think we’d revere and value them ... right? Wrong!
For some reason, many western cultures are very good at devaluing human relationships with plants. Ignoring them, even. Remember the story of Noah and his Ark? He took two of every living thing, so the bible tells us. Every. Living. Thing. But no plants. Why? Because they’re not quite living. Not in the way we are, anyway.
When things are perceived as not being particularly important, they’re treated as such. Combine the not-quite-living-ness of plants, our cultural focus on quantifiability and our increasing disconnection from nature generally and you get what we’ve got now.
A problem. We don’t value the natural world, and we need to.
This is where gardens come into the picture, as an important part of rebuilding our connection to the natural world. The garden, though, is not some quarter acre suburban dream. It’s not grand, it’s not expensive, its not a designed space. It’s a balcony, a collection of pots on a windowsill, a small courtyard, a street garden or a public space.
The garden is a space defined not by its physicality but by the emotions it evokes and the connections it provokes. It’s simply nature touched by culture.
The act of gardening can change the way we relate to the world around us for the better — it teaches perspective, shares lessons of observation and value and, perhaps most importantly, inspires hope.