Creating a garden is, initially, an introverted process. It takes a while to imagine a garden and to develop it into its final form. For much of that period your thoughts are just part of an evolving dream of a future reality. It takes longer to build a garden and a whole lifetime, or more, for that garden to mature. To embark on making a garden is an act of faith. The creative journey is made unique by the relationships we have with those we enlist to help us. Without other people there would be no garden. Together, we generate a great alchemical soup of ideas, we consider constraints and we discuss details that ultimately coalesce into the new garden. Landscape gardens can express themselves in myriad ways. I have always enjoyed the freedom landscaping offers to explore what the land, the people and the circumstances ultimately reveal.
Recently, and seemingly in response to increasing warnings about our effect on the planet, gardens appear to be having an identity crisis. Evocations of an imagined lost wilderness peppered with wildlife are at the fore in contemporary garden culture, while gardens with perspective and order seem, for now at least, consigned to history. Any form of art or innovation seems shamefully wasteful of natural resources, as though we have forgotten, briefly, about our impending fate. What on earth are we doing? This ‘ hair shirt’ hubris about how we gardeners alone can offer a mea maxima culpa to the earth seems odd. With our eyes raised imploringly towards heaven are we wriggling ourselves off the guilt hook?
English gardener and author Christopher Lloyd once said the countryside in May cannot be beaten, so why try? Appreciating and supporting the wider ecological structure of the countryside, and finding harmony with it, has been around for centuries as a design concept. I do think, however, that the natural world and the gardened world are very different things. From a practical stance, the constant encroachment of the natural world onto our hard-won cleared ground is inexorable; ceaseless work is needed to keep it and its denizens at bay. For any landowner, however much or little they have, maintaining it is a challenging experience. I have a friend whose land, one summer, became too tinder-dry to cut hay. The merest spark from a tractor blade could trigger a wildfire, so all machine work in the region was stopped by legal decree. The moment cultivation slowed however, the parched land filled with tiny trees. To our modern, non-agricultural eyes, this is a marvellous act of ‘rewilding’, yet to a subsistence farmer it represents a life’s work slipping through their fingers.
For as long as we have cultivated land, we have sought a point of division between us and the wild. The invention of boundaries was our first step towards establishing some sort of control over nature, ultimately creating gardens. But what is a garden? A garden is paradise on earth, made by humankind for the deeper exploration of who we are, what life means and how to prepare for the inevitability of death. A garden invites a tender exploration of beauty, of geometry, of divine inspiration and a searching for inner peace through meditatively caring for something beyond us. It allows us to express our reverence for trees, flora and fauna for their own sake in a place of good order – emphatically not the wilderness. Every garden encapsulates, in microcosm, the cycle of life through the seasons. It is inescapable. Gardens have always existed behind their high walls and fences, in imperfect worlds of war, destruction, plague and famine. Every generation before us, without exception, has faced existential threats. We are, perhaps, only different because we finally understand, albeit too late, that we have brought many of the problems we face on ourselves: global warming, nuclear war, habitat destruction, over population, asset stripping, mass extinction. We do not much like the prospect of having to undo things and go without. We have too much, expect too much, want too much, give too little. Are we, with this latest trend, actually craving limitation so that we can find peace?
There was a case, in 2008, of a property developer in Suffolk furiously cutting down a mass of saplings he deemed inappropriate. They belonged to an elderly neighbour who in turn claimed the developer had vandalised their garden. The case made it to the High Court. Lord Justice Moses offered in his summing up: ‘The Oxford English Dictionary states that a garden is an enclosed piece of ground devoted to the cultivation of flowers, fruit or vegetables. That definition is clearly now too narrow, as the current fashion for wild gardens and meadow areas amply demonstrates. The reality is that no description will categorically establish whether a piece of land is a garden or not. It is incumbent on the fact finder to determine its use. It is important to look at the relationship between the owner and the land, and the history and character of the land and space.’
So, there we have it. We have evolved. If you think it is a garden, it is a garden.
Extracted from What Makes a Garden: A considered approach to garden design by Jinny Blom, published by Frances Lincoln
