why garden?

For­give this long let­ter; I don’t have time to write a short one.
–George Bernard Shaw

Blotan­i­cal is ask­ing gar­den blog­gers to answer a sim­ple ques­tion this month: Why do I garden?

But there’s a catch: The answer has to be SMS-sized, 160 char­ac­ters or less! The brief answers are quick and easy to read. To write one is not.

Here’s my attempt:

I gar­den in order to glimpse nature’s processes and rhythms, because my gar­den takes care of me at least as much as I take care of it, and because all our gar­dens mat­ter more than we’ll ever know.

spacer

spacer


PS: If you don’t know Blotan­i­cal, you should. It’s a great online com­mu­nity of inter­na­tional gar­den blog­gers that has recently sur­passed the thousand-blog mark. If you fig­ure sev­eral years of expe­ri­ence for most of the blog­gers, you could con­sider that the site gives you easy access to sev­eral thou­sand years of com­bined gar­den­ing experience–plus all the blog­gers’ great sto­ries! Gar­den­ers are the best peo­ple, and this site will prove it.

November 29 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes | Tags: • | 9 Comments »

gardens as virtual reality

I’ve been read­ing parts of The After­life of Gar­dens, by John Dixon Hunt, a book on gar­dens that comes at the sub­ject from an inter­est­ingly dif­fer­ent take. Where most books on gar­dens dis­cuss the design aspects of gar­dens, and many books on gar­den­ing talk about plants and their needs, this vol­ume tries to be a “recep­tion study,” using a tech­nique preva­lent in analy­ses of lit­er­ary texts “by explor­ing how sites are expe­ri­enced, often through a longue durée of exis­tence, change and refor­mu­la­tion.” It’s def­i­nitely an aca­d­e­mic work, maybe one bet­ter suited to the late autumn months when the gar­den out­side is tucked into its win­ter bed than this time of year when you want to be out in it, expe­ri­enc­ing all the out­ra­geous plea­sures it has to offer.

One of the early chap­ters bears an intrigu­ing title, “The Gar­den as Vir­tual Real­ity,” and it’s a look at some of the ways how gar­dens achieve their mean­ing. Here’s a snippet:

…I want to pur­sue the idea of the phys­i­cal gar­den itself as a vir­tual real­ity. For one way of think­ing about land­scape archi­tec­ture is to empha­size the way in which it affords vis­i­tors many of the same oppor­tu­niries as do sites on a com­puter screen: dig­i­tally, the vis­i­tor may choose his or her route, click­ing on the mouse and opt­ing for a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent paths, dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences, dif­fer­ent asso­ci­a­tions and ideas. Vis­it­ing a real site entails much of the same process, although now the“mouse” is a person’s delib­er­ate or instinc­tive selec­tion of routes and mean­ings with­ing the one ter­ri­tory… This kind of vis­i­ta­tion of a real gar­den also involves con­stant inter­ac­tion of the sub­ject and object, since the explo­ration of a real land­scape is by no means a pas­sive activ­ity; even a small urban square requires us to “get to know it,” with its ele­ments direct­ing our grow­ing acquain­tance with its poten­tial as a space to inhabit.

In this way all good land­scape archi­tec­ture also man­ages to project a sense both of real­ity and of vir­tu­al­ity. There is the pal­pa­ble, hap­tic place, smelling, sound­ing, catch­ing the eye…; then there is also the sense of an invented or spe­cial place, this inven­tion result­ing from the cre­ation of richer and fuller expe­ri­ences than would be pos­si­ble, at least in such com­plete­ness or inten­sity, if they were not designed. Like cyber­space, a designed land­scape is always at bot­tom a fic­tion, a contrivance–yet its hold on our imag­i­na­tion will derive, para­dox­i­cally, from the actual mate­ri­al­ity of its invented sceneries.

June 20 2008 | Categories: landscape design • quotes | Tags: • • • | No Comments »

a philosphy of gardens

I’ve just fin­ished David E. Cooper’s A Phi­los­o­phy of Gar­dens, a short, dense book–though read­able as far as phi­los­o­phy goes. In it he tries to fig­ure out what it is about gar­dens that make them mat­ter to us. After prop­ping up some points for dis­cus­sion, he pro­ceeds to demol­ish them, one by one, as being mis­guided or sim­plis­tic. Some of these ideas he jet­ti­sons: gar­dens are impor­tant because they are art, gar­dens are impor­tant because they rep­re­sent nature, and gar­dens are impor­tant because they rep­re­sent a fusion of both art and nature. Mr. Neg­a­tive. See if I invite him to a party.

But he takes those and other ideas to come up a syn­the­sis at the end, that gar­dens rep­re­sent some sort of epiphany. He begins his con­clu­sion with a “Mod­est Proposal:”

…The Gar­den exem­pli­fies the co-dependence of human cre­ative activ­ity and nature… (P. 142)

Then he expands it further:

If The Gar­den exem­pli­fies or embod­ies co-dependence, then, this can­not sim­ply be that between human endeavor and nature, but a fur­ther, “more mys­te­ri­ous” rela­tion. (P. 143)

…and finally concludes:

[G]ardening or cultivation…[is] a prac­tice which, engaged in with an appro­pri­ate sensibility–engaged in “think­ingly,” as Hei­deg­ger would say–embodies more saliently than any other prac­tice the truth of the rela­tion between human beings, their world, and the “ground” from which the “gift” of this world comes. (P. 160)

On his way to the final con­clu­sion he brings in Zen notions of the world, so that this “gift” that he speaks of isn’t nec­es­sar­ily some West­ern, “God-given” the­o­log­i­cal con­struc­tion, but a more uni­ver­sal sense of our place in the cosmos.

Take a look at the book if you’re was in the mood to step into some meta­phys­i­cal goo…

February 01 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes | Tags: • • | No Comments »