I don't know about anyone else but I honestly don't aspire to a neat garden. Lines and rows are good if you are farming but really unless you need to be able to harvest a lot of one type of plant quickly I feel they a totally over rated. Problem is I am not all that visually imaginative. Give me a pile of seedlings and regardless of my general feelings on the topic everything ends up vaguely lined up and sorta straight. For someone that believes in a diverse ecologies being more stable than a few different species, showing people around my garden at times is almost embarrassing.
The problem of course was I am human and humans find it extraordinarily difficult to be in any way random. We like patterns.. we like patterns so much that the first thing we do with any novel stimuli is try and match it up to past experience.. to find a pattern. In cases where we can't find one we are often tempted to make one up. That's the reason why garden designers that are looking to create natural looking landscapes use weird and wonderful techniques to attempt to inject randomness into their designs.
One of my favourite was, I think, attributed to Edna Walling. It is said that she was creating large native style bush gardens she walked around the space with a sack of potatoes and human randomly threw them around. Where they landed is where the trees were planted then the other plantings were arranged around that. One of the reasons this really appeals to me is that it reminds me that the only way for most of us to be even close to random is to give up as much control as we can and give space for chance.
It was to this end I created my diversity box. It's in this reused icecream container that I collect all my close to code seed as well as the tiny seed for that season such as lettuce and chamomile. Unlike my normal careful germination method, in cell trays the seed in this box just gets randomly throw in various areas before rain. It's conversely interesting and frustrating, have I ever mentioned I am just a biiitttt of a control freak, to watch what comes up.
So, What's in the box at the moment?
Beetroot Early wonder
Plantain
Scorzonera
Collards, Georgia Southern
Clary Sage
Mini Broccoli
Broccoli Shogun
Kohl Rabi, White Vienna
Carrot, Lubyana
Spring Onion
Carrot 3 Colour Purple
Swede, Champion Purple Top
Turnip, Milan White
For someone like me this box is a challenge. It's a lesson in loosening the grip, of accepting, and celebrating the results no matter how unexpected they may be.
5 comments:
I was thinking of doing something like that with my herbs. But I was a bit slow and the rain went away, thus endth the wet season, all 3 weeks of it. sigh
Actually, according to permaculture experts, lines and rows aren't good for farming.
Insects just view it as a smorgasbord, and start munching at one end, working their way easily down very visible rows of neatly arranged food!
Messy is much, much better.
I know I'll be doing the messy at our new farm, if only because I'm exceptionally lazy!
Nature is messy, and gloriously wonderful :-)
Hi Nevyn,
That seems to be an unusually short wet season. I hope at least your tanks are full.
Hi Daharja,
Yep, nature is messy and gloriously wonderful.
The problem is that our monkey nature tends to take over when we are planting.. I hope you do better than me when to planting out.
Kind Regards
Belinda
Howdy,
SOme excellent reflections. Edna Walling's writings are great.
For my two bits (as a pro gardener and ex brewer and lit student) it's good to know the styles of house and landscape to compliment eg Federation gardens went for curvy paths, interest in native/australiana and some exotica from asia..
but I recommend Nietzche's first book "birth of Tragedy" where he delineates Apollo .. principle of order, control (human formalism of culture) and Dionysius.. principle of dynamism, life, music. It's a great dualism that holds relevance to so much in our lifes.
Great art (tragedy) is where both exist in balance... where culture harnesses and allows the richness and dynamism of anarchaic life to shine forth.
I think these principles really work in gardening too. Apollo is cultivation, lines, containments, human forms, paths etc .. but only to enhance the real power and majesty of the plants for they are the force of life, the source of joy, renewal, wildness... so diversity contained but overflowing the containment , contrasts of controlled and busting forth.. these make for good gardens.
i love discussing tidy versus messy, control versus free in the gardening topic. I find that I need some kind of structure in my garden, some way to visually sort it when I need to. So I like gardening in the potager style- formal kitchen gardening where raised beds create a design and a kind of order. But within that structure I let a lot of mingling occur as well as letting volunteers flourish. I also am "cultivating" dandelions in the gravel pathways of my monastery raised bed garden (because the dog can't get to that part of our yard) and I enjoy the wildness and untidiness of that.
But then when I really crave some order I can clean everything up and there is an underlying structure to guide me and sooth my eyes.
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