This week, Anne shared a post with me from Scribehound – a spanking new, paid-subscriber, UK gardening and countryside platform hailed with much fanfare, mutual-congratulations, (and not a little backlash) on Instagram this autumn.
This post was by Kendra Wilson, a British garden writer who has recently spent six months travelling the US looking at “private gardens that exist for ecology” for a new book on the subject; and who has some predictably zeitgeistian generalizations to make about American landscapes and American thinking as a result – particularly our “unease with the actual world around us” and our desire as a nation to hold the “The English look” in high esteem whilst battling to keep “the very real wilderness at bay.”
I hope I have not been too unfair in my summing up – you will have to become a paid subscriber of Scribehound to measure my efforts. The title of the piece: “Why Are People Still Enthralled with English Gardens?”
I read the post with interest, and felt my blood rise (which was no doubt Anne’s intent in sharing it with me). But I had to ask myself “why?”
After all, over the years I have written here and for other media platforms against the HOA clipboard police; the East Coast holy trinity of arborvitae, lawn, and azalea; the weed and feed turf tundras; and the homogenization and corporatization of our national plant palate. In short, the desire of people – aided and abetted by a thriving industry with brilliant marketing – to accept easy answers to solve ‘the problem’ that is their landscape.
Thus I have sympathy for Wilson’s position and observations; but I feel that her theory that we are all trying to mindlessly and irresponsibly emulate a clipped British lawn and garden 250 years after the Revolution is incorrect. It is a too-predictable talking point of a design movement which comes with an attached framework of morality, and which doesn’t meet people where they are struggling.
From An Ivory Tower
Her assumption begins with assumption: That wild and native should instinctively be preferred as beautiful by the average eye over cultivated and/or inclusively biodiverse landscapes – and if it isn’t, ignorance, obliviousness, disconnection, and a desire to control is most likely at work.
Failing all that – a desire to be like the Brits.
Well who wouldn’t want to be like this? But I don’t think that’s what she meant. [The long border at Great Dixter]
Perhaps more like this. Ish.
It is an assumption I will oppose just as surely as I oppose the HOA clipboard police. For at its core it is a regulation of taste.
[X] is beautiful. You will find [X] beautiful or there is something wrong with you.
Fundamentally this is no different than expecting a lover of wild and wooly spaces to adore mow and blow landscapes or hedging up the ying yang. And for those who shout “yeah, but we’ve got virtue on our side!” you can bet that in a world where cleanliness and tidiness were considered next to Godliness, the establishment held the moral ground once too. Plusça change…
Would it not be better to begin with a different, less judgmental, premise? Perhaps. But it certainly wouldn’t be as easy to sell in a publishing and design climate that feels that private gardens should “exist for ecology”.
Look at that for a moment. Absorb what that means for average people. Exist. For. Ecology.
Not for you. Not for the kids for whom you’ve worked your rear end off to buy a scrap of land so they can roll in the grass without walking to it. Nor for that moment in the evening when you come home from a long commute and revel in the scent emanating from the non-native orange tree on your patio or sigh at the beauty of the extraordinary Australian Grevillea blooming in your neighbor’s yard and you want to know how to grow one yourself.
Not for you buddy. Current expert opinions will push you towards a native or native cultivar. “They are much more interesting than imported ‘ornamental’ plants” according to Wilson. (Who reaps the visual benefit of our flora and hers on her own soil.)
Nevermind that just down the road thousands of pounds of fertilizer and pesticide are being slathered on a 100 acre orchard of ‘exotic’ almonds pollinated by ‘exotic’ honeybees supplemented by sugar water, and irrigated by massive aqueducts, and a new subdivision just tore up that open space where your kids used to play. This is your problem to solve in your tenth of an acre – and your desire for a Grevillea that seems to grow well here is secondary to that.
Have a nice salvia instead says Wilson. “When there are a dozen native sages to choose from in Southern California, who needs a Piet Oudolf?”
Someone who wants a Grevillea perhaps. Maybe Piet will listen to reason – he doesn’t go all native either.
Oh good. I’m glad homeowners can pick up the slack for Conagra watering their pointless lawn in the California central valley.
Grevillea in an Oakland neighborhood in November.
Meanwhile, across the street, the ravishing tapestry of native clarkia and California fuchsia in a fiercely all-native suburban garden.
Could There Be a Kinder Explanation?
Most Homo sapiens may not be gardeners, but we are all 200-300,000 years into a modern human evolutionary journey that subconsciously influences us in our decisions about our landscapes (both in Wilson’s country and in mine).
Here’s a kinder take on those unthinking, fearful, disconnected fellow humans. Over millennia, we learned:
- …to prefer open spaces around our homes, which allowed us to easily scan for predators and aggressors and leave them more vulnerable, not us. [Lawn and/or mowed open space.]
- …to recognize the importance of protection against the sun’s brutal rays [Large shade trees]
- …to erect boundaries against others which created privacy for intimacy and guarded against intruders and competitors. [Fences and walls]
- …to be wary of insects and rodents, as they offered competition for food when resources were scarce, and disease when communities were crowded. [Pesticides and poisons]
- …to prioritize food and medicine as the primary product of precious time devoted to cultivated spaces. [Vegetables over ornamentals]
- …to seek the visual comfort of lush greenery which signified the presence and importance of life-sustaining water. [Green over grey and/or brown, soil over sand, water features]
Are the vast majority of us responding to those evolutionary inner voices as well as we should in the modern world?
No.
But before you damn us by country or by species, remember that there are external voices with great influence who offer solutions for the land upon which we live (but upon which most of us no longer directly rely), and who benefit from encouraging our aspirations towards beauty – once an indicator of our greatest chance at survival.
Meanwhile, the opposition increasingly talks in terms of dogma and absolutes.
A Little Context
The Post-Revolution United States was never as much a land of gardeners as it was a land of farmers, ranchers and subsistence agriculture. In the last century, it is increasingly a land of city dwellers and suburbanites – further removed from the realities of the land that supports them, but paradoxically in charge of the policies that shape that land.
Here, we average 91 people per square acre. The United Kingdom averages 720 — which is more or less the population density of the state of Connecticut.
If you live on the East Coast you have a good idea of what that feels like. California, Texas, and Arizona, where Wilson spent a good deal of time according to her post, average 252, 113, and 64 respectively.
Compared to many places in the world, this allows more people more access to land – even though much of it might be considered marginal by gardeners in the Hamptons.
And those people are not necessarily desirous to “garden” inasmuch as they wish to look after the property they call home. If they are not gardeners – and most are not – they sink back into evolutionary hangovers: lawn, tree, fence, green, insect-free. A tomato patch perhaps.
Gardening with extremes
If they live in the East or Midwest or South, where heat and moisture make plants and germinating trees grow like they were on steroids, there are fewer expert voices that fully understand the human desire for an open space and are brave enough to admit that, no matter how inconvenient to the current conversation, it is easier to mow a ½ acre lot of mixed-species, untreated turf, than to care for a ½ acre native perennial garden that stops you from playing catch with your kids – and requires a crash course in horticulture.
Meanwhile, the marketing director of the nearest chemical lawn fertilizer and weed treatment company understands precisely what they need, distorts the vision a little, and meets them on that literal and figurative field.
And unsurprisingly, the next time the homeowner is at the garden center, another bag of environmental disaster goes into the cart.
Untreated and unwatered in a Mid-Atlantic climate, but very useable — and used by yours truly.
Gardening with not so friendlies
If they live in the West or Southwest, where rattlesnakes, scorpions, and mountain lions are more than just fairy stories (this ain’t Sussex baby), they can be forgiven for wanting to “keep the very real wilderness at bay” (not to mention the threat of wildfire) when they settle in the desert subdivisions of Palmdale after crossing the scrubby San Gabriel mountains – the ones that John Muir called “ruggedly, thornily savage,” but Wilson describes as a “ravishing tapestry.”
Given their druthers, they’d probably rather live nestled in one of the old, unique homes and gardens in San Marino along with two gardeners and a housekeeper. They might even like to hire a high-end native plant designer who can not only install a garden they have no talent to create themselves, but do it with bragging rights at cocktail parties.
Sadly, the enormous sum of $425,000 will only get them a 1150 square foot house within an hour’s commuting distance of their job in Pasadena.
So perhaps they can also be forgiven for watering and fertilizing their mother’s rosebushes each night after dinner to feel like they aren’t really living in the desert, or for making a mess of landscaping fabric and irrigation lines when both are sold to them as a fantastic solution.
Our job as garden writers is not to shame them. Nor to insist that they see ravishing beauty in the impenetrable chaparral that borders their evening commute, or make them feel ignorant because they don’t. It is to gently and regionally help them to become curious of their landscape, and find purpose and joy in its unique ecology whilst weaving all that into the limitations and ambitions of their everyday lives.
A view of the Sierra Nevada foothills where I grew up. Note the ravishing tapestry of native manzanita and toyon cut back to create a fire break. If you build a deck over those foxtails, I hope you know what snake fencing is.
Get Real or Lose The Room
I very much want people to step up and play with the wonder that lies outside their front door – not escape it or solve it with chemicals. But that involves a certain degree of realism, a good dollop of humility, and a flexible approach when dealing with your fellow Homo sapiens. Sadly, it’s so much easier to condemn.
Americans are not trying emulate ‘the British look’. They’re just trying to look after the place they call home, and they’re currently stuck between the claws of the marketers and the daggers of the moralists – with bad advice coming from both quarters.
Condemnation for Condemnation – However Virtuous originally appeared on GardenRant on November 24, 2024.
The post Condemnation for Condemnation – However Virtuous appeared first on GardenRant.
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