Getting Radical in the Garden
It’s About Your Confidence
When we have a great day at work, our clients love us, and our boss gives us praise, there is nothing finer than going home to enjoy the beautiful garden that all our hard work has permitted us to have.
When everything is going wrong, and we don’t know where to turn, there is nothing better than coming home to take solace in our beautiful garden.
That’s because nothing makes us feel as legitimate as contact with nature. Even our designed version of it. Being immersed in and surrounded by it connects us to the ecology of which we are a part. We belong here.
We love nature. We hate mosquitos. We love a clean, smooth lawn. We hate the sound of a mower when we’re in our garden reading a book.
We’re full of contradictions.
We’re not very good at designing gardens. I believe that’s because we rely too much on other people’s expectations of how our personal paradise should look. We plant our beds like our neighbors, just like we paint our interiors white to preserve resale value.
So, when are you going to take ownership of what’s yours?
I design gardens, and I can tell you that creating restorative, stimulating environments for people gives me great joy. However, I find that many people are afraid of building the places they would really love to inhabit.
What if your front yard gets the best sun in the morning? What’s stopping you from making a small garden with a stone patio where you can have your coffee? Are you worried about that pathway to your front door that nobody (except the unwelcome) uses?
Are you thinking of buying a bunch of bark mulch to spread on your beds? Groundcover plants will do a much better job of stabilizing the soil, providing air and moisture and nutrients.
And don’t you hate the way your neighbors can look into your yard (the one you spend your Saturday mornings mowing) while you are huddled on your deck wishing you had put up some sort of screen?
Every landscape has three ingredients that inform design: 1)the larger landscape that provides context; 2) the way you want to live in it; and, 3) opportunity (time and/or money).
The larger landscape has forms and patterns that result from geology, natural history, and climate. If we understand those, we can make our garden connect to it, enhance, and enlarge it.
Our lifestyle drives garden design because it puts our focus on the experiences we want to have there rather than its physical aspect. Now, if you never go outdoors, then the physical aspect becomes important. But even in this case, it is the view out from the inside that has our attention, not the view from the street.
I can’t design everyone’s garden, and a lot of people don’t have the money to hire a landscape architect, but learning some principles might help, regardless of your level of opportunity.
So I wrote a short book called, Your Rad Garden: Freedom, Purpose, and Meaning in Your Backyard. I have a theory that if people learn a few basic concepts that are the basis for garden design decisions, they (you) will feel more confident about the validity of their (your) own ideas.
