Let’s Embrace the Culture in Horticulture
I’ve been reflecting on one the one-year anniversary of the pandemic. It’s been a year of lock-downs, social distancing, quarantine, rapid change, and incredible loss. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the dramatic transformation of our social norms and infrastructure. As an introvert, I “recharge” my mental and emotional batteries through inwardly focused alone time (gardening, gaming, cooking, etc.), and suddenly working from home and isolation was the norm. My introvert was thrilled.
The feeling didn’t last. By June I was craving real, tangible, in-person social experiences again. You know it’s bad when the introverts get twitchy. With nice weather we were able to connect outdoors with a small pod of friends, but that quickly changed with the arrival of winter and a spike in cases.
I know this experience isn’t unique to me by a long shot. We all felt and feel disconnection, depression, grief, and anxiety. This has been a powerful shared experience and we know it will shape our culture for decades to come in ways yet unknown. Despite so many terrible headlines, I think many of us have a newfound appreciation for the power and importance of empathy, community, and connection.
I also learned to appreciate a new mindset: a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. To assume and pursue a “return to normal” invalidates the incredible and astounding events of 2020. We risk repeating our failures if we can’t and don’t learn, adapt, and change.
In this spirit and with these themes in mind, let’s finally begin to change how we garden. Please.
For more than a decade I’ve worked in public gardens and had the incredible privilege to learn from experienced plantspeople, designers, and ecologists who have promoted and espoused the need to change how we garden. New signature public spaces like the Lurie Garden and Brooklyn Bridge Park are reshaping the traditional public garden model by creating accessible, diverse, beautiful, and ecologically vibrant landscapes. These public spaces are role models and resources for homeowners and municipalities alike.
On January 20, 2016, Adrian Higgins wrote in the New York Times, “The two disciplines of ecology and horticulture are merging like never before. We have entered an age of environmental gardening.”
But we’re not changing fast enough. Our traditional gardening habits, behaviors, and norms are deeply entrenched. With the arrival of spring, I’m watching garden centers, gas stations, and big box stores in my neighborhood unload pallets of bagged and dyed bark mulch, artificial fertilizers, chemicals, and imported, over-bred plants. The minute the snow melts we emerge into the landscape and begin to “tidy up” the garden (a process with no natural precedent). Lawns continue to be the largest irrigated crop in the nation with more than 40 million acres under cultivation.
There was an explosion of gardening in 2020 with some 20 million people picking up a trowel for the first time. A majority felt successful and intend to continue, with 86% planning to garden the same or more this year. Eighty-two percent of 2020 gardeners felt successful, with 65% describing themselves as beginning or casual gardeners.
How can we leverage all of this? We have a growing network and infrastructure of exceptional and accessible public spaces, we have a network of experts eager and ready to share their expertise, and we have more people gardening and aware of plants than ever before. It’s a perfect storm to catalyze the change we need.
My suggestion: let’s talk about plants like we talk about people. Let’s crank up the CULTURE in horticulture.
Plants crave social interaction, just like people. Plants thrive in diverse communities, just like people. Plants grow best when their basic needs are met and their environment provides what they need.
Put another way: no plant evolved to grow in bark mulch.
Seriously. Visit any “natural” ecosystem, from prairies to woodlands, and you won’t find any uniform, finely ground bark mulch. You won’t find plants spaced at predetermined and regimented arrangements.
You won’t find plants growing in isolation. You will find them growing in community, together.
Think about how miserable you were this year in quarantine, introverts and extroverts alike. When we distance our plants with a sea of bark mulch and weed barrier in between, we’re essentially forcing our plants to live in perpetual quarantine, a stay-at-home order that never expires. When a plant dares to grow in the space between (we often refer to them as “weeds”), we swoop in and pull them out.
If you have weeds in your garden, nature is sending you one simple, clear, loud message: plant more plants.
Nature abhors a vacuum. Exposed soil is subject to erosion and further disruption. The role of “weeds” is to stabilize these spaces as quickly and efficiently as possible and allow robust and vibrant plant communities to return. Weeds are a cry for help, a tourniquet to stop the bleeding (of soil).
Speaking of soil, let’s abolish another horticulture myth: there is no such thing as “bad” soil. I so often hear gardeners refer to their soil as “good” or “bad” because we’ve been taught that the “correct/right” soil is rich in organic matter, easy to work and dig, and produces big, lush plants. When we have “bad” soil we add fertilizers and soil amendments, often haphazardly, in pursuit of some arcane ideal imposed by… someone.
No matter what soil you have, something will grow there. Let’s choose our plants for the place we have, rather than change our place to suit the plants we think we want to grow. You’ll discover amazing plants that thrive in solid clay and sandy gravel alike, and your gardening experience will become more rewarding when your plants are happy, too. If you’re looking for a contemporary resource with lists of plants and design suggestions, I highly recommend New Naturalism by Kelly Norris.
I hope this moment can be a call to action for anyone who is passionate about plants and making our world a better place. It doesn’t matter if you’re a home gardener or nursery owner, author or garden center, ecologist or horticulturist. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. The opportunity lies before us, we simply need to own it.
If you’re ready to make a change, there’s certainly more to learn. This post isn’t meant to substitute the incredible breadth and depth of resources and expertise in the world, rather it’s intended as a catalyst for thinking and conversation. If you want to learn more, I’m sharing a list of my favorite resources below.
Gardens remind us we’re connected, and they encourage us to connect.
Let’s embrace the culture in horticulture, and let’s grow stuff.
Resources
New Naturalism, 2021, Kelly Norris
Garden Revolution, 2016, Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher
Planting in a Post-Wild World, 2015, Thomas Rainer and Claudia West
Plant-Driven Design, 2008, Scott Ogden and Lauren-Springer Ogden
