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| From "Minnesota" 1980 by Joan Mitchell |
An ornamental garden is not always what it appears to be
The call to action appeared in my inbox: “are we gardening while the world burns?” Yes, I got the easy reference to Nero, Rome and all that, which is, historically, a fairly complicated story in itself. And yes, ornamental—as distinguished from food—gardening, could be considered an oblivious, even oppressive activity, especially if conducted with plenty of staff in the pursuit of displaying wealth using plants and techniques that harm ecosystems. But rebelliousness rose in me. As a serious modern gardener, I wondered, does this person not understand where gardening is situated in the history of our species and how it can be used to make a fierce statement about possible futures? And I’m not talking about utopian ideas of getting back to the Garden of Eden, either.
Nettled, I did look around the internet and found that the phrase seems to have come from an essay in which the write ultimately decided flower gardening to be akin to other creative acts, worth doing for the sheer beauty of it. He posits the idea of gardening as a call to live peacefully in spite of ruin, and as a way to reach toward the sacred. Opposite to the implication in the email, and deeply true. Yet I wasn’t satisfied, because our world, to state the obvious, really is burning, in ways fast and slow; and gardening, as reparative action, is precisely part of what we need to be doing to put out some of the flames. I mean gardening in its larger sense, of course. I’m talking about a garden as big as Turtle Island, as big as the whole world, as complex as the biosphere, bigger and more complex than you imagine, more complex than you can imagine, as someone once said about the way ecosystems function.
But what does it mean to garden while the world burns? How does it apply? In the smaller sense, that of gardens attached to houses or other buildings? Private or public, large or small? Does the word itself need a definition? It’s odd, but I don’t believe I have ever actually looked up the word “garden.” Never needed to. And I’m sure you don’t either. I’ve always known one when I saw it, beginning just out of toddlerhood, when one of the people who lived in our large, communal house let me help plant some marigolds and explained we were making a garden. Hopefully, you have had some similar experience.
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After that initial, enrapturing exposure—the orange petals contrasting with the green of the scalloped leaves, the spicy scent of the flowers contrasting with the earthy smell and soft feel of the dark, loamy soil, the kindness of the person letting me help—I gardened whenever I got a chance and here I still am. Last week, I browsed through my garden journal from the past two summers of garden making at our new place. As I posted last, the back yard is blessed with what looks like a garden, but is crammed full of invasive “ornamental” plants. To me, not a garden. Day after daily entry, there’s a litany of tasks completed. Hours and hours spent digging up snowdrops, lilies-of-the-valley, daylilies, and vinca. Chopping down non-native grasses and struggling with the massive root balls until my husband came with his superior strength and got the last of them out. Cutting down a twenty-foot-tall burning bush with loppers and a bow saw until an intractable stump remained. One afternoon I went outside and he had had taken an axe to the remainder as a surprise, which felt like a gift.
The summer we moved in, I decided to build the garden from the perimeter in towards the center, woodies first. This is in contrast to my old place, where I started with herbaceous plants, then learned about the benefits of native trees and shrubs, then stuck them in anywhere I could. First things first, I thought now, gaining from hard-won experience. I cleared the edges first, and in went pagoda dogwood, blackhaw viburnums, a swamp white oak, and American black currents. Some I’d brought with me, a couple I’d ordered. All were in one-gallon pots—easier to plant and quicker to adapt to a new place. Once those were in, I spent much of the rest of the summer digging up plants while considering what to plant in future. The garden, luckily, was well laid out, with very little grass. No changes would have to be made to its basic structure, really. Now was the time to watch how the light fell as the season progressed, to check for microclimates, damp or dry spots, understand the soil and so on.
Last spring, at the start of the first full growing season in residence, I put in little bare-root babies: bladdernuts, a round-leafed dogwood, prairie roses, several shrubby St. John’s worts, and a snowberry. I dug up more daylilies, trimmed back the creeping euonymus, and pulled up vinca with some sense of desperation, so at least I’d have the room to put in the sedges and forbs I’d ordered, due in June. All the little trees and shrubs then had to be swathed in tulle to protect them from the cicadas that were also due to emerge in late spring. The whole place looked a little like a garden party full of ghosts, or perhaps one of those old houses where the furniture has been draped in white, awaiting the distant return of the owners. Happily, when the plants arrived, in a heavy sedge to forb ratio, there was just enough room in various spots around the shrubs and trees.
I ordered three cubic yards of free wood chips from the village. When they arrived, I dug out yet another clump of ornamental grass beside the back door, and made a mulched sitting area that immediately improved the quality of human life in the back yard. The rest I used around the plantings; in my experience a light layer of wood chips will help deter weeds while improving the soil, unlike the smothering, heavy bark mulch that, over time, and with yearly reapplication, starves the living soil of air, water and nutrients. The soil is basically not bad, black and sort of a clay loam. The task is to re-enliven it, by punching through the old bark mulch, planting native plants which miraculously help bring soil back into balance, and then leaving fallen leaves all year to shelter insects and feed the decomposers that help cycle nutrients back into the ground. There’s quite a way to go.
Now, my second spring in this place, I’m waiting to see what will come up. I’ve ordered more plants, due in June. Digging up daylilies has resumed. There are yet more snowdrops to remove. The sedges are greening already. Buds are swelling. But: what have the rabbits gotten? What didn’t make it through last summer’s lengthy drought? Will the new plants survive, much less thrive?
***
I’ve been practicing what I think of as honest gardening. Though I grow some vegetables and herbs, it is not primarily a food garden. Rather, it is gardening with other, non-human creatures in mind. It could be called an ornamental habitat garden. I’ve made an agreement with myself and the garden. No power tools, fertilizers, or pesticides. My own labor. Plants native to this particular region. It is honest in that hopefully the garden will become a small embodied expression of a place as it was, is, might be. This geographic location, this history, this soil, climate, air, this piece of what was an oak woodland savanna, now built up, and moving into a future of climate change and extreme weather. This is gardening with something that feels like memory, of this place as it might have been 150 years or so ago. It is gardening with something that feels like nostalgia for an imagined future of restored ecosystems and societal health but is most likely planning for a range of possible futures ranging from dire to less dire, and always hoping for the survival of biodiversity, of ecosystem complexity. Honest gardening requires that we take stock of and work within existing conditions, that we don’t try to make the garden something that it isn’t or couldn’t be. Honest gardening is a kind of truth telling, the way art or literature can be.
There is not a requirement that the gardener do all the design work or physical work of making and maintenance; but there is the requirement that the gardener be involved, aware, understanding, intentional. As my friend and garden mentor Ken Williams said the other day during a talk, “a garden needs a gardener,” someone out there at least once a week, paying attention, keeping tabs, noticing what is happening, what’s blooming, what creatures have moved in, what maintenance needs doing, appreciating the living beauty of it all, even during winter dormancy. Without its human partners, a garden is something else, full of growing plants, but not a garden.
There is dishonest gardening, gardening that advertises a false reality, that of our dominant, capitalist culture, that flattens the true nature of the actual place into an Instagram-ready simulacrum of “what a garden is supposed to be.” Or it is all about displaying the careless use of wealth (though that kind is honest in intent, if not in effect). Or it is gardening that functions as a reflection of what the mainstream horticulture industry deems suitable for consumers to buy in the name of profit, plants that sometimes resemble native plants in the way that junk food mimics food it purportedly replaces. Perhaps gardening, like so much else, has been “flattened” by the algorithms that govern modern culture, as cultural critic Kyle Chayka describes in “Filterworld.” Perhaps it is gardening to be looked at out the window, not to experience, as though viewing it through a screen. And so much in our culture is about this flattening, about “creative destruction,” in that old, worn-out ideology that lurches on like an out-of-control golem, or about erasing memories of things that really happened, and only preserving distorted versions and stories that have some oppressive purpose, the urge towards corrupt power and its cruel, criminalized implementation, for example.
Honest gardening tells the truth of the conditions in a particular place. It affirms life, is a way of telling how things are and can be in a time of wreckage, tells the story of the lived experience of the plants, soil, other creatures and gardener as they work out their partnership. This kind of gardening is what we, those of us who have this calling, this need to help a piece of land thrive, absolutely should be doing while the world burns. It is to garden despite the prevailing ethos of destruction, a way of helping free the flowing current of natural forces upon which all life on this planet depends, forces that we ignore at our peril. It is choosing what to pay attention to, choosing to step away from the monetizing of our attention, the enthrallment to the tiny screens, towards big, four-dimensional complexity, bigger and infinitely more complex than you can imagine. In reality, it is about as radical a piece of transformative activism as you can imagine.
About the image: The great painter Joan Mitchell spent her childhood in Chicago. She once said she painted from nostalgia. The image is from a large, astonishing, lively work worth seeing in its entirety. I photographed it at the Tate Modern, London in 2024.
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