Gardening

Gardening is an invention of mankind, certainly not one of nature.  This week I have been watching the Chelsea Flower Show on the television.  We visited the show last year but were somewhat overwhelmed by the crowd and so have preferred this time to watch it from the comfort of our own sofa. 

Throughout the week and during the television coverage of the event many of the presenters have referred to the gardens as naturalistic, presumably to mean planted and laid out in a way that looks as natural as possible but actually manmade.  I have been wondering why they used the word naturalistic rather than just natural and today I have found out the difference.

Gardening is an activity that I try to avoid, I’ve never understood the pleasure of grubbing around in the rotting undergrowth, pulling your back and getting filth underneath your fingernails.  But I can’t avoid it for ever as from time to time, usually twice a year, my services are required to undertake some major restructuring in the garden.  This time it was the removal of a couple of old and moribund leylandii that were doing nothing for the front of the house (we’d lost our kerb appeal).  This looked like a simple task but by the end I had gathered around me two saws, some secateurs, a tree lopper, a cold chisel and even a seven pound sledge hammer.  The first tree was a pilot by which I developed my craft and by the second I had a method worked out, firstly cut off a few small branches with the secateurs to get into the body of the tree and then cut of all of the larger branches using the lopper exposing the main trunk which was felled using the sharper of the saws.  In the end there was no need for either the cold chisel or the sledge hammer, both of which had proved fruitless on the first tree (no pun intended).

So what has this got to do with Chelsea?  At the show, the naturalistic gardens are laid out with each plant in its own piece of earth, totally independent of the other plants, at least at ground level.  They are placed close enough together to look as if a higher intellect had had their hand in it but they only overlap above the level of the soil.  In my garden the plants had been arranged differently.  Every single example was locked in its own battle with its neighbours.  Roots were wound around each other scrabbling for water and nutrients, while above ground branches interlocked with competing species reaching for the light.  Ivy was gripping onto the leylandii and bindweed was strangling the ivy.  Dandelions, thistles and grasses covered every spare piece of earth underneath the leaf cover. Mangy specimens were clogging up the soil and creating not separate plants but a single mat of foliage which was almost impossible to separate into  its constituent species, put together no doubt to support me in my love of horticulture.

At Chelsea man is in control and creates gardens that conform to his own expectations, gardens that are formed in his own image but man does not control nature which, when it comes to horticulture has clearly different ideas of how things should be laid out.  I now know that I wish I had had a naturalistic garden rather than a real one.