Why We Garden E-Book

Claire Masset

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 163

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Explore the mystery of what makes us love gardening, via history, science, art and philosophy. Whether you seek sanctuary in your potting shed, find paradise amongst your patio plants or enjoy the simple solace of your hands in the soil, there is beauty, peace and happiness to be found for every gardener in this thoughtful and entertaining collection. Both a hymn to gardening and a call to action, this down-to-earth guide is worth a hundred 'how-tos'. Wander the gardens of Giverny with Monet to create your own 'beautiful masterpiece' or, like George Orwell, reap the joy to be found in the work of a vegetable plot. Discover the soothing symmetry in the spiral of sunflower seeds, or, like William Morris, provide a wild abundance for the natural visitors to your garden. Drawing inspiration from gardening greats – from the ancient Greek and French philosophers Epicurus and Voltaire, via the wisdom of Margery Fish and Gertrude Jekyll, to Monty Don and modern-day guerrilla gardeners – this beautifully illustrated compilation is a thoughtful gift for any gardener.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Beauty

Work

Order

Nature

Sanctuary

Therapy

Growth

Spirit

Love

Happiness

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

There are so many reasons not to garden. It’s hard work. It’s time-consuming. It can be tediously repetitive. Sometimes it’s even a little degrading. What other pastime has you on your hands and knees for hours? What is this strange pull that draws us to the soil? Why are we so keen to get our hands dirty? Most of us don’t need to garden. We do it because we enjoy it. In fact, we love it so much that – like Vita Sackville-West – we are willing to suffer and sacrifice for the sake of it.

More and more people are taking up gardening. Even those without gardens. Even those with busy, hectic lives, very little time or money. Even those suffering with physical or mental health problems. This says something about its singular appeal.

I wanted to explore the enigma that is our obsession with growing things: this deep, earthy passion that binds us as human beings; this unbroken thread that connects us to our ancestors. It turns out there is a lot more to gardening than meets the eye. It isn’t just about having beautiful flowers or harvesting fruit and veg. Just like the soil on which it relies, gardening is rich and life-giving, in far more ways than the obvious.

Arranged in themed chapters, this book uncovers the many – sometimes wonderfully contradictory – reasons why people take up gardening and become hooked on it. Within its pages you’ll meet a varied cast of characters: famous philosophers, artists and writers such as Epicurus, Monet and Orwell; not-so-famous guerrilla gardeners, psychologists and scientists; and everyday gardeners like you and me. Each shines their own brilliant light on the topic.

‘I have broken my back, my finger-nails, and sometimes my heart, in the practical pursuit of my favourite occupation.’

VITA SACKVILLE-WEST

_______

George Orwell once said: ‘Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening.’ His diaries show the daily attention he lavished on his plot and reveal, between the lines, something of its grounding effect. I love the fact that this advocate of plain English and documenter of gritty social realities was equally unpretentious in his personal pursuits: a man of the earth, in touch with the fundamentals of life. Gardeners know that there is more joy to be had from a patch of soil than virtually anything else.

Monet became so obsessed with his garden that he spent the last 43 years of his life painting it. He described Giverny as his ‘most beautiful masterpiece’. But as we’ll see, beauty was only part of its appeal. Something deeper was at work: a spiritual undertow that can affect all gardeners. Gardens are potent places, rich in symbolism and transformative atmosphere, and the near-alchemy of plant growth places them on the edge of the miraculous.

In Ancient Greece, the philosopher Epicurus named his thinkers’ community near Athens, The Garden. In this verdant sanctuary, he and his followers found their personal ataraxia, or peace of mind. It’s something we modern-day gardeners can relate to. Whatever the size of your plot, no space is too small, or indeed too challenging, to become an oasis of peace and plants – perhaps the closest thing to heaven you will experience. Consider, for instance, the artist Hester Mallin, who turned her balcony on the 23rd floor of a tower block in East London into a plant-packed paradise, filled with over 100 different specimens. It was her very own country garden, 70 metres in the sky.

I have – at times sheepishly – peppered the book with my own experiences in the hope that my little horticultural epiphanies will chime with yours. Gardening is often solitary work, and yet its simple practice connects us to a worldwide community of plant lovers. In this divisive world, it is a bond worth cherishing. As gardeners, we can be thankful for having something that answers so many of our deep human needs: the need for inspiration, beauty, nature, refreshment, exercise, solace, connection, hope, and so much more. And, just like life, gardening is filled with exciting contradictions. It is both enriching and humbling, freeing and enslaving, quieting and stimulating, consoling and heart-breaking. How could it ever be boring?

Research now proves what we have sensed for hundreds if not thousands of years: gardening helps us lead happier and healthier lives. Increasingly – through volunteer-run projects such as community gardens and mental-health charities – it is becoming a force for social and environmental change. Once a benign Sunday-afternoon pursuit, gardening is now helping to create a better world. We are becoming garden activists. We are saying no to peat, chemical weedkillers and harmful pesticides. We are swapping seeds and saving water. Some of us are planting up previously barren spaces where nature and people can thrive.

Mirabel Osler, one of the most perceptive garden writers whose words I have shamelessly quoted throughout this book, once posed the question: ‘Why garden?’ In jest, she replied: ‘God knows.’ This is my humble attempt at a slightly longer answer.

‘I must have flowers, always, and always.’

CLAUDE MONET

_______

Monet didn’t have just any flowers though; his artist’s eye and horticultural knowledge told him which plants to select and where to put them to create a garden which was, quite simply, beautiful.

Isn’t that what all gardeners want – a mini Giverny? Not a smaller, facsimile version, but what it represents: a satisfying creative endeavour, a visual delight. Monet, the ultimate artist-gardener, loved his garden perhaps even more than his painting. For the last 43 years of his life, it was his inspiration, his joy, his world. But it was also, he confessed, his ‘most beautiful masterpiece’.

Our natural desire to create beauty is nowhere better served than in a garden, and this is despite gardening’s many challenges. It is the most difficult art to get right. To be successful, you need to create a complete experience: one that you can look at, like a painting, but also walk around. A garden is a space you inhabit. It envelops you, not just with its physical boundaries, but with its spirit – a distinct nature incorporating movement, light and sound, which the gardener has helped to fashion. There are other difficulties too, from the vagaries of the weather and the threat of disease, to the fact that gardens are ever-changing and therefore never complete.

Thankfully, gardening is also the most forgiving art. Nature will always be more or less beautiful, whichever way you choose to mix its jewels. Unlike the painter, you are not creating something out of (virtually) nothing. A gardener’s palette is already furnished with ready-made works of natural art.

According to the grande dame of gardening, Gertrude Jekyll, sometimes all it takes is ‘to show some delightful colour-combination without regard to the other considerations that go to the making of a more ambitious picture’ (Colour in the Flower Garden, 1908). Two plants happily juxtaposed can create a splendid little scene. Old-fashioned roses and catmint, tulips and forget-me-nots, climbing roses and clematis – all are classic duos, but the options are endless.

Think how effective containers can be. Your pot is your ‘frame’. Here you can concentrate all your creative energy on a few plants, minimizing the risk of failure and increasing the potential for pleasing effect. It’s a myth that you need a big plot to create something stunning. Your garden/patio/balcony/allotment/studio flat is never too small to be beautiful. Garden beauty is never dependent on size. In fact, it’s the opposite. The larger the garden, the more room for error, the more need for upkeep and expense. ‘In a small garden there is less fear of dissipated effort, more chance of making friends with its inmates, more time to spare to heighten the beauty of its effects.’ Wise words from the Arts and Crafts architect and lover of cottage gardens, J. D. Sedding (Garden-Craft Old and New, 1891).

Gertrude Jekyll, like Monet, was an artist. Although she didn’t reach Monet’s level of renown with her painting (she had to give up all aspirations of becoming a fine artist due to deteriorating eyesight), Jekyll was one of the most prolific garden designers of her time, creating over 400 gardens in Europe and the United States. Many of these are sadly lost, but a few – such as Hestercombe in Somerset, Upton Grey in Hampshire and her own home Munstead Wood in Surrey – have been restored. And Jekyll was a productive writer, penning 15 books and over a thousand articles. She became a vocal exponent of ‘gardening for art’s sake’ and believed that gardening should be seen a fine art. She compared plants to a box of paints. ‘Planting ground is painting a landscape with living things,’ she writes in her first book, Wood and Garden: Notes and Thoughts, Practical and Critical, of a Working Amateur (1899). To Jekyll, a garden should be ‘a treasure of well-set jewels’.

How do you create such a treasure? ‘Try and learn from everybody and from every place. There is no royal road,’ she advises. Your gardening journey is likely to take you from one style to another as your taste develops. And this is no bad thing. Like everything in life, there is beauty in variety and a strange satisfaction in the quest for an elusive perfection. Every year your plot holds the promise of something different, something better, something even more beautiful.

Look at other gardens. You will sharpen your eye and find out what you like and don’t like. Study plants – their leaves, flowers, textures, shapes and personalities – and you will discover a wealth of horticultural options. Delight in the aesthetic and have the audacity to experiment.

Some gardeners look for simplicity, others want complexity. While there are those who praise the untidy romance of a cottage garden, others need clean lines and neat edges. While some strive for a sophisticated blend of contrasts, other gardeners seek purity and coherence. There are as many incarnations of horticultural beauty as there are great gardens. How thrilling to think that right now, someone somewhere is developing a new style of gardening of which we are not yet aware.

Sensitive souls should rejoice, for although they feel pain more intensely, their enjoyment of all that is soul-enhancing in life is more profound. ‘Like the musician, the painter, the poet, and the rest, the true lover of flowers is born, not made. And he is born to … joy that is tranquil, innocent, uplifting and unfailing,’ writes American poet and garden maker Celia Thaxter in her lyrical memoir, An Island Garden (1894).

Jewels there were aplenty in her windswept plot on the isle of Appledore, off the coast of Maine. Here, in the second half of the 19th century, Thaxter planted a small cutting garden, with flowers arranged not by colour or according to any grand design, but by height and in rows and blocks. She grew mostly annuals, always from seed, and loved simple blooms such as marigolds, sunflowers, nasturtiums, pinks and poppies. The attraction of her garden, with its haphazard and vibrant colour combinations, was nothing like that of a subtly graduated Jekyll border, or indeed Monet’s luminous arrangements. And yet it was full of its own charms and pleased its creator immensely (and so too Thaxter’s friend, the artist Childe Hassam, who created Impressionist views of the garden, which have been compared to Monet’s paintings of his own garden).

There is an added delight to cutting gardens. The pleasure they offer outside is redoubled when the gardener makes their selection and goes on to create exquisite indoor scenes, which is exactly what Celia Thaxter did. The rooms of her cottage, also evocatively painted by Childe Hassam, were filled with vases – often single stems, or just a small handful of one type of flower, in each vase.

*****

Monet, Thaxter and Jekyll sought aesthetic delight above all else in their gardens. It is one of the biggest motivators for many gardeners. Why do we seek beauty? Philosophers have pondered this question for centuries and, from the 19th century, psychologists have too. Even more recently neuroscientists have joined the fold. Since the late 1990s a new field of study known as neuroaesthetics has focused on understanding beauty from a neurological perspective. Studies led by Semir Zeki, Professor of Neuroaesthetics at University College London, suggest that our experience of different kinds of beauty – whether it be music, painting or even mathematical equations – produces the same patterns of activity in parts of the brain associated with pleasure and romantic love.

We know from experience that beauty can transfix its beholder. It stops us in our tracks and produces a wonderful feeling of elation and enchantment – almost akin to a revelation. There is something comforting and invigorating about such moments. They are both a shot in the arm and a balm for the soul.

When we encounter beauty, other considerations disappear; we attend to it with all our being. It takes us away from our humdrum thoughts, our chores and our worries. Such an experience contains the reassurance that all is right with the world and also produces a heightened sense of belonging. ‘Somehow the boundary between our self and the world shifts and we feel more alive in the moment of flourishing that it offers. Although the experience may be fleeting, beauty leaves a trace in the mind that survives its passing,’ writes psychiatrist and psychotherapist Sue Stuart-Smith in her outstanding study of the relationship between gardening and mental health, The Well Gardened Mind (2020).

And there’s more. Garden beauty, unlike fine art, literature and architecture, is by its very nature impermanent. When you look at a painting or read a poem, it is there – solid, immutable, ‘set in stone’. You can always come back to it. Gardens refuse to stay still. Because of their transience and aliveness, they seem to demand our immediate attention. The border that reaches its peak of perfection, the meadow filled with wild flowers, the blossoming tree: if you don’t take it in now, the moment will soon be gone. Being aware that a garden’s appeal is ephemeral redoubles its effect. It’s a bit like being parent to a young child. You look at him, asleep in his bed, and stare in wonder, knowing that his current sweetness will inevitably change. In its fleetingness, the moment, tinged with a premonition of nostalgia, is so beautiful it moves you to tears. Beauty – in all its miracle forms – overwhelms you with emotion.

Celia Thaxter, on her windswept island garden, knew this feeling well. Her memoir captures the rapture she experiences over the course of a year, all because of her flowers. ‘The very act of planting a seed in the earth has in it to me something beautiful,’ she writes. Monet devoted his career to painting the ever-shifting effects of light on the natural world. Until the end of his life, he would walk around his garden two or three times a day, delighting in its subtle changes. To enhance its mutability, from the outset Monet designed Giverny so that it would provide a kaleidoscope of colours, textures and shapes through the seasons. Frothy cherry blossom, cheerful mounds of aubretia, bright tulips and poppies, romantic peonies and roses, carpets of nasturtiums and – of course – his famous water lilies: these were some of the many gems that punctuated the garden’s calendar. Monet, the consummate plantsman and nature-lover, once admitted: ‘I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.’ No wonder he ended up painting nothing but his garden.

*****

If you’re a beginner gardener, glossy magazines, gorgeous coffee-table books and dreamy Instagram feeds may weigh heavily on you: those picture-perfect creations where nothing is out of place. All those exquisite borders. All that lush, healthy growth. How can I possibly achieve all that?

Perfection is at best momentary and often deceptive. These photos should be seen for what they are: artistic renditions of – yes, beautiful – gardens, enhanced via the lens (and possibly filters) of a deft photographer. Outside the photograph’s tightly constructed frame all may not be so perfect. The shot was probably taken at ‘peak beauty’ – at a time of year when everything in that garden comes together and at a time of day best suited to making the most of these assets (often at dawn, when the light is just right and most of us are asleep). So, relax, and focus your own gardening lens. You, too, can achieve pockets of beauty in your plot, while the rest of it is not quite as under control as you might want it to be.

Garden beauty takes many forms. Remembering that is freeing. This reminds me of La Louve in the South of France, a terraced garden created by the Hermès textile designer Nicole de Vésian in the late 1980s and 1990s. She had never gardened before, but she still created a masterpiece. La Louve has very few flowers – whatever blooms is incidental. Its beauty lies in the juxtaposition of topiarized shrubs and trees: a sculptured tapestry of green and silver shapes, whose contours are picked out by the Provence sun. It is a thoroughly personal garden and yet perfectly in tune with the landscape, relying on tough, drought-resistant local plants, such as lavender and rosemary, cistus and arbutus.

Inspiration is one thing, creation is another, and a lot more fun. In my experience, it takes time to let go of the idea that there is a right way to create a garden. I’m still not there yet. But every year I break more rules, play it less safe and give myself permission to make mistakes. While I naturally err towards pastel shades, I also know how much I enjoy seeing brighter blooms in other gardens. And so I push myself out of the confines of my narrow, self-imposed repertoire. Next year my dahlias won’t all be pink and cream – some will be purple and orange. But, for now at least, I draw the line at pillar-box red.

The brilliantly candid garden writer Mirabel Osler writes in A Breath from Elsewhere: Musings on Gardens (1998): ‘As for Good Taste, that overbearing tyrant that sends the inexperienced gardener into a spin – forget it. There is absolutely nothing intrinsic about good taste in gardens: it’s as fickle as fashion.’

Other people’s gardens can be inspiring, but don’t let them paralyze or restrict you. Taste is whatever you want your garden to be. ‘Go for what you want, not for what you are told you want. Whatever nourishes your impulses should be your launching pad … Anything, anything please, to get away from bland conformity nourished on caution.’ Thank you, Mirabel, for these liberating words.

*****

Although we may never design a garden ‘worthy’ of a magazine feature, in our pursuit of beauty we can have fun expressing ourselves. Give 100 people the same plot and you’ll end up with 100 different gardens. Not only is there satisfaction in having a garden that is unique, there’s also the possibility that yours could turn out to be truly special.

Whatever their style, the best plots are full of character and reveal something of their creators. Last year, one of the best gardens I visited took me by surprise. It wasn’t grand or well known. It was a private 1-acre (0.4-ha) garden in deepest Dorset, opened for just one weekend through the National Garden Scheme. I went on a whim. My first impression was a sense of jarring. Something in my head told me it wasn’t quite right; the word kitsch crossed my mind. Surely those orange rudbeckias didn’t go with that peachy-pink rose? How could they mix white nicotiana with orangey-brown heleniums? What were