Gardens and Nature Are Not the Same
Gardens are not nature, and nature are not gardens. They both live by very different definitions.
When I design a garden, I attempt to do it with no ego. I attempt to not believe that my plant choices will be stronger than the Tennessee sun. I don’t believe that my plants are any less delicious to rabbit or deer. And I don’t think, and I know, that low maintenance will result in an ugly garden.
The person who creates nature isn’t a person at all. That’s a spiritual faith conversation for who built this beautiful place, the earth, that we all call home. So I don’t make nature. I make gardens. And when I design them, I rely upon the last 20 years of traveling around the world, seeing millions of plants in gardens, in nurseries, in their native habitats, visiting experts.
Stewardship, Not Control
I don’t believe that nature will keep my garden weed-free. But what I do believe will is the experience and intentional design. The word stewardship is a word I revisit daily because gardening is stewardship. A garden is an intentional decision to create a space that without its gardener or steward wouldn’t exist on its own.
Nature is a complicated system made by God that we learn from. We see ideas, inspiration, we watch, we observe. The garden is where we get to take those observations, those learnings, and put it to stewardship to see if that sedge is meant to be in that spot or not. And if it is, it will keep the weeds down.
How “Landscaping” Took Over
Landscaping became the word that currently dominates the American vocabulary when it comes to building a new home and putting plants around it. The term and the approach dates far back with some of the most formal of its time, occurring in the 1700s in England. But the initial thoughts of landscaping were very literal. It was stewarding the land at large scale. It was creating creeks, creating valleys, creating views and perspectives that didn’t exist in nature, but man could now shape the land to create these experiences and views.
It was a time where the effort was for man to exert his will, both in design and in intention over nature. That’s a craft that on my most stressful days, I’ve tried to have. My worst days as a garden designer, head gardener, head nursery owner, and horticulturalist have been when I am silly enough to believe that I can exert my will over nature. But yet, much of modern landscaping comes from exactly that thought.
Designing in Pencil, Not Pen
As my own garden making has expanded with opportunities from clients and support from people like yourselves, reading this, I don’t try to control nature anymore. I don’t exert my will. I design in pencil, not pen. I allow the land and the place to tell me what plants are best there. I use my decades of experience to creatively provide what the client wants visually, while at the same time paying respect to the very soil and the uniqueness of each place on earth.
Never believing that my will of throwing down some shrubs and mulch will keep weeds out or rabbits away. In fact, what’s better than a recreation of Watership Down on your own property? Nothing.
The Kind of Garden Work I Want to Do
My design work currently is the beautiful kind of garden design and stewardship planning that I’ve always dreamt of. The projects I get to work on today continue to move those directions. Because more people like yourself are seeing that weeds will never go away. Deer and rabbits are more fun to have than not have. And bugs are actually pretty interesting.
And trying to control with a hard clenched hand, what nature does in any given year is just a mistake. And the real stewardship is working with a place, not against it.