Why do We Garden?

How foreign that so many of us are compelled to do something that can be so tedious , that is such hard , dirty and repetitious work . The interminable engagement with persistent weeds that we know is doomed to failure . The grass will still be there when we are long locomote .

Have you ever discontinue to ask yourself why you do it ? Can you call back when you first started and why ?

Many long time ago , when I was very untried and had my first garden , I was determined to be as good a nurseryman as my parents and grandparent . I took it for granted that if you had a garden then you dug it . I discover a very old horticulture Good Book , publish in the 1940s , in a 2d deal Word shop and determined to learn myself the black prowess of horticulture . But oh , what hard work it all seemed . And how unimaginable to fulfill all the tedious tasks that were pose out for each month . The chapter on labour almost made me give up altogether . It was send for : BASTARD TRENCHING.I forebode you , this is what it was called . With many diagrams , it showed you how to dig up your whole garden and then move it on a metrical foot or two . Whoever invented this method acting of digging up the garden and moving it about ? You never hear anything about ‘ bogus trenching’now . The name says it all . The illustrations in this book read an old gardener in a cap , with a tobacco pipe in his mouth and intelligibly a hinge in his back .

Mole and Badger.Arthur Rackham

And then there wasLAWN CARE.According to our champion in the detonator , you’re able to not call yourself a gardener if you do n’t spend huge amounts of energy , money and noxious chemicals in turn your lawn into a velvety , greensward . The rolling and stabbing and raking and spray that went on in that book made me find quite dog-tired . Anyway , Ilikedaisies .

I found another old gardening rule book , presumptively written from the view of the employer of the man in the cloth cap . I ca n’t think of much about it , just the wonderful sentence:’No topic how modest your kitchen garden , always set by a quarter of an Akko for potatoes’ . I imagined this human beings grandly giving out orders to finish the mongrel trenching , flora hundreds of white potato and then spray the brassicas with DDT . Just suppose take an landed estate with something as sorcerous as a walled kitchen garden and filling it up with potatoes and bastard trenches . Not to mention annoying , know - all gardeners with chapiter and pipes .

I hate to say this , but these dreary Word of God could only have been written by men . And Isle of Man with no verse in their souls . Where is the thaumaturgy in bastard trenching ? To gardeners like this , horticulture was all about control . You do n’t work with nature , you control it and envenom it and dinge it into meekness . Maybe we have move on from this idea of the raw worldly concern being something which must be tamed and envenom and bent to our will . I do trust so . But I mistrust that one understanding that some people garden is still a pauperization to control their surroundings . Perhaps this is intelligible in a hostile , irregular reality .

Why Do We Garden - Blooming Garden

Mole and Badger.Arthur Rackham

But to most of us , and I am sure this go for all my blogging booster ; it is something else that keeps us digging and weeding and sweating . Firstly , I believe , it is a desire to be part of the natural humans and to work with it , rather than against it . We grow food to sustain our families and in return find out spiritual nutrition . I do n’t like the intelligence ‘ phantasmal ’ , it fathom ‘ new ageish ’ or spiritual and I am neither . But still , many of us are pantheist at heart . Long before the religions of the Near East broadcast their ( not always benign , in fact very often passing pernicious ) tentacles across the man , our ancestors felt a presence in stones and trees and worshipped them . For century , gardening was an attempt to create nirvana on worldly concern . And still we do it today . To most of us our piddling speckle is our own short Eden . These days , most of us are keen to create an uncontaminated Eden ; a little bit of ground that we can nurture , on our hapless violate and work planet . It started with many of us have just a diminished box devoted to wildlife and then gradually we realised that the whole ecosystem of the garden is delicately balanced and we could n’t use herbicides and insecticides and keep a healthy environs . The whole garden needs protect and what a privilege it is to apportion it with the local wildlife . It ’s as much theirs as ours . I have to admit I used to use slug pellets now and then , until I pull in that the active fixings , metaldehyde builds up in the soil and is beginning to show up in the water we drink . Besides , what agony the slug must suffer as he dissolve into ooze . And distastefully , there is so much of it . Poisoning them always used to make me feel really hangdog . It made me think of Lady Macbeth saying ‘ Yet whowould have cogitate the old man to have so much blood in him?’after murdering Duncan . Except for blood , interpret slime . And slugs do have a habit ; they eat up all the waste and debris . I have found I can keep them off particular plants by surrounding them with acordon sanitaireof coffee grounds .

mol and badgers make a great deal off the lawn but I feel privileged to have beautiful Badger in the garden . As for mole , the mole hills are unsightly but if you have been brought up onWind in the Willowsyou ca n’t help feeling affectionateness for devout old Moley . Anyway , molehill are a great reference of ready -sieved territory .

Mole and Badger . Arthur Rackham

Mole and Badger. Arthur Rackham

Mole and Badger.Arthur Rackham

squirrel are a nuisance and they have their own ideas about tulip planting and wish to rearrange them . But fair enough , they have to wait at them more than I do and from a unlike perspective . I ’m not allowed to institute new crocus corms , every single one gets confiscated , although existent 1 are allow . Walnuts are for squirrel only , they are not inclined to share them at all , any surplus gets swallow . But however irritated I get by their rules , I love look on them . They bring the garden to life with their stunting .

I must admit I do n’t have a laissez - faire position to all my pestilence ; lily and asparagus mallet are picked off every day in summer and squashed by hand , but I never use chemical substance .

I went to a talk by Rory Stuart a couple of years ago . He wrote the Koran ‘ What are Gardensfor ? ‘ There was a discussion about why we garden and he suggested that many of us are trying to recreate a magical Eden remembered from our childhood . It was interesting how many hands went up and how many people said that they have never forget their grandparent ’ garden and they were always trying to capture the remembered magic from long ago . Maybe many of us are trying to revivify the golden twenty-four hour period of our puerility when the sun always shone and the blossom were brighter and the landscape magical . That would explain the recurrent prayer of the book‘The SecretGarden ’ . In my next post I will severalize you about my privy garden from long ago .

Meanwhile , please tell us why you garden . I suspect that for most of you , it ’s because like me , you ca n’t not . It ’ s gruelling , dirty and frustrating at times . But utterly compulsive .

Many thanks to lovely Beatrice for the picture of me combat with locoweed with little Hector look on .

71 Responses toWhy do We Garden?

Yes , my reasons for gardening are interchangeable to yours . My grandmothers were garden dabblers , but my great - aunty and grandmother were into it a little more . Then , I really got into it when we buy our first sign and belongings – I was gazump ! Your reflections on the evolution of westerly horticulture rang dead on target . And I harmonise : I ca n’t not garden . 😉

Another blogger recently ask a similar question , which institutionalize me round and orotund looking for the descent of my own interest in gardening . Unlike many others , I did n’t have function models among family members . My beginner putter a bit in the garden but he die when I was 6 and I do n’t have any important retention of experience share with him there , unless you count once being prick by a bee , which could just be interpret as convinced . My mother and stepfather had no involvement in horticulture and I had no grandparent that exerted an influence . As I come back , my gardening experience began with small indoor plants around my halfway school years . I do n’t recall receiving my first plant but I have to guess that it was the gateway drug that chair me to lean larger and larger numbers of indoor works and , when circumstance permitted , lead me outside . However , what keeps me there is many of the factors you ’ve mentioned – the sharing with nature , the serenity associated with the process , and the sensation of being a part of something larger than myself .

Fascinating … ’BASTARD TRENCHING ’ . I guess I might call it worse and never do it . I garden to be in nature … to catch it , to find solace in it … to be overwhelmed by its beauty and wonder .

A exceptional billet , Chloris ! Neither of my parent were gardeners but my grandparent on both sides were and three of my four siblings and I are . There are tender childhood memory of quite a few people in my tiny menage town gardening and partake their gardens with me . Seems I ’ve always been interested in grow affair and fascinated by foliage and peak . We garden because we can . It ’s also interesting to remark the change from dominion to stewardship of our slice of Eden .

Why do We Garden?

Why do We Garden?

71 Responses toWhy do We Garden?

Recent Posts

Archives

Why do We Garden?#

Share this:#

Related#

71 Responses toWhy do We Garden?#

Recent Posts#

Archives#

Why do We Garden?

Share this:

Related

71 Responses toWhy do We Garden?

Recent Posts

Archives