“nature” and natives">“nature” and natives

Here’s a bit of dis­cus­sion from David E. Cooper’s A Phi­los­o­phy of Gar­dens that talks a bit about gar­dens and nature and those who would have a gar­den be made of only native plants, a topic I touched on lightly in a pre­vi­ous post:

“Nature” and is cog­nates are, of course, elas­tic and ambigu­ous terms, and not a few debates that have raged among gar­den­ers betray equiv­o­ca­tion over these terms. When, for exam­ple, William Robin­son, the nineteenth-century cham­pion of “the wild gar­den,” argued that it was nat­ural to stock one’s gar­den with plants intro­duced from abroad, his points were that one was thereby “nat­u­ral­iz­ing” these for­eign natives and enter­ing into a less parochial “com­mu­nion with nature.” In object­ing to such intro­duc­tions, how­ever, his many crit­ics have usu­ally meant that it is unnat­ural to grow plants that are not eco­log­i­cal natives of one’s coun­try or parish. Again, some debates reflect the dif­fer­ent uses of “nature” to refer now the the nat­ural envi­ron­ment that is vis­i­ble to us, and now the “the essen­tial real­ity under­ly­ing all things” which, accord­ing to Monet’s friend, Georges Clemenceau, the great painter was try­ing to “expose” in his gar­den at Giverny.

(Cooper 2006: 34–5)

January 17 2008 01:57 pm | Categories: gardening • quotes |

One Response to ““nature” and natives”

  1. [ Lost in the Landscape ] » “away from the soft pornography of the flower” on 09 Apr 2008 at 6:34 am #

    […] as beau­ti­ful as all those merely skin-deep gar­dens, but they’re so much more nour­ish­ing. I wrote ear­lier refer­ring to a com­ment about Monet’s gar­dens being designed to expose nat­ural processes. […]

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