Gardening can be a meditative sort of thing, an opportunity to focus on one task with the hands and feet (I've been digging holes for plants) while the mind sloughs off all the noise to focus and then connect disparate thoughts and ideas. A couple of things came together for me today about the wild garden. They're damn tough to make.
I started with a remembrance of wild gardens I'd seen on garden tours. They were mostly disappointing messes. My garden has been a disappointing mess from time to time, so I know the situation. These gardens attempt to be a wilderness in the City, but present more as a one of these and one of those sort of thing. Its hard to stay away from that, there are so many great plants. But the plants get big and overgrown and some get straggly. And there are chaparral plants next to coastal plants next to mountain plants. There's no rhyme or reason other than the gardener's love of the plant. That is great, but its not a wild garden.
Which brings me to Joshua Sparkes, head gardener at Forde Abbey in Chard, Somerset, UK. He was featured in a short interview in Gardens Illustrated, that gorgeous magazine with the most spectacular gardens you'll see anywhere. In the interview, Sparkes notes that "sustainable and ecological gardening" seems to include "one aesthetic." I don't know if he's referring to the same thing I am, but I do get a sense that there is an expectation that the aesthetic of a wild garden is unkempt, a mishmash, always on the edge of anarchy...because that's what wild means.
The other thread is from another UK gardener, Monty Don. I think there might be a contractual obligation on everyone to say that he is the UK's favorite (favourite?) gardener, but I'm not sure. Anyway, he is brilliant and he includes his golden retrievers in his program, so he must be a great guy. In a couple of his shows, he's commented that less is more, that you can make a beautiful garden with just five or seven types of plants.
And so bringing it all together...our wild areas, our wilderness, is more like a beautiful garden with five or seven plants, than one with twenty or fifty. Or in my very bad example, 300. The serenity in wilderness is in the flow and repetition of the same and similar plants across the vast area. A sunny slope will repeat from one canyon to another, a shady canyon will too. There may be lots of little things, buy usually only on the moister shady side.
Wild areas have always been a source of inspiration for my garden, but I was really focused on plant combinations, such as the racing stripe on a meadow rill with Aquilegia formosa on the edges and Mimulus gutattus in the center (think about it, red flowers with a hint of yellow and yellow flowers with little red spots). But I'd never put together this bigger concept of flow and simplicity in the bigger picture.
Something more to ponder as I dig more holes. I've got a lot more pots to plant.
California native plants are interesting, from all sorts of perspectives. Science, horticulture, design, art, politics, culture....California's rich botanical resources find their way into all these areas, and more. This is an opportunity to share information, stories, images, news, and anything else related to this exceptional flora.
