After reading Michael's email today about the phenomenal growth we've had here in Victoria and how he hasn't achieved what he imagined he would during lockdown I wondered why we constantly strive to try and control our gardens when nature has stacked the odds against us. Why can't we celebrate some unruly growth and just accept that the weeds are big winners this year? After all they're plants too. Unless we have a team of gardner's and a bottomless budget we'll be forever disappointed with our efforts. I'm not suggesting that we let everything go wild but sometimes we need to accept that we can't always be in control.
This is a HUGE subject Chris, and I’m glad you’ve brought it up.
I love that Reginald Arkell (gardening nonsense poet of early last century) wrote ‘A garden should be rather small or you will have no fun at all), while Jean Galbraith (possibly the garden writer with the longest active life in Australian history (first started writing in the 1930’s and was still writing for The Age in the early 90’s when I started contributing)) reckoned that a garden should be too big for you to quite manage – that our need to control had to be managed.
Anyone who doesn’t follow Kurt Wilkinson on instagram should do so, as he is pushing the boundaries of weed-tolerance (he’d probably call it trash-tolerance) more than any other gardener I know. He doesn’t weed, and he doesn’t dead-head. The way he gets away with this is to have a few conspicuous elements in the garden that are under total control – exquisitely crisp, clipped Italian cypress and spheres/domes of (primarily) natives that provide a strong sense of control or at least ‘deliberateness’ amongst all the paddock grasses and weeds. It’s a perfect balance. Perhaps it comes down (at least visually, setting aside the practical considerations of retrieving a weed-ridden garden from destruction) to ‘legibility’. If the garden – it’s layout or planting design – is still able to ‘read’ strongly despite the weed invasion, then why not just let it be?
Hummm, a very a propos topic if we draw a parallel to the present Covid crisis. How much can we afford to relax things before they go haywire, in the hope that some kind of acceptable equilibrium will one day be reached…
To come back to our gardens I think that beyond what mother nature throws at us we gardeners are also the source of the problem. We try to take control of things when we painstakingly amend and enrich soils in our gardens to make sure that the optimum conditions are met for our plants.
If I look at my backyard where much effort was put at the onset, our very wet spring has caused so much growth that most of my perennials are now a bit lanky and will struggle to cope with the hot summer weather. I am almost inclined to cut them down now and let the growth reset in a more compact and heat friendly manner.
If I then look at my frontyard where little to no work was put in improving growing conditions, sure the plants benefited from the wet weather but in a more manageable and sustainable way which leads me to think that they will be just fine in summer.
Don’t get me started on the curse of imported soil. My most out of control weedy area is where soil was brought in. There are weeds appearing in that area that are completely new to my garden. It’s like some sort of mad scientific experiment gone wrong.
Hey Chris and Gilles,
We are most certainly the source of the problem. We create the problem. Your Covid analogy is really apt, and goes further still when you think a pandemic like this is all the more threatening, and potentially devastating, given the hugely sophisticated (if fragile) economy that we’ve cultivated. In simpler days, the threat to life alone would have made up the measure of this thing.
And so, as you say, the more we’ve cultivated our conditions towards the optimum in our gardens, the more fragile and intervention-dependant the result.
I was blown away, while researching a tour of naturalistic perennial planting worldwide in 2018, to discover that the Germans, in particular, were experimenting with the idea of controlled stress factors – that much of their perennial planting flies in the face of what has been considered good gardening practice for generations – that being the modification of conditions to achieve the greatest performance in plants. I’ve now become obsessed with the idea of how much the system can be ‘cheated’, and my question now is ‘which plants are still going to provide me with, say, 60 – 70% of optimum performance in notably sub-optimal conditions?
And meanwhile, as I’m thinking this through, there’s Kurt Wilkinson actually doing it. The pathways he’s exploring there have HUGE potential for us here in Oz.
If you’re interested, take a look at my video with Bettina Jaugstetter on YouTube, when we touch on a bit of this
This is massive subject. On one level my first reaction is, a garden by its very nature, fundamentally, is about control. On another hand though, there does have to be a point where we know we have to let go.
I fall firmly on the side of gardening being all about control. I think every garden is a contrivance to mimic nature to some degree. And naturalistic gardens take even more thought and contrivance to pull off than more blocky, stylised plantings, which logically sounds oxymoronic.
To confound further, naturalistic plantings I’ve undertaken are undeniably easier to look after than the stylised blocks, which need certain jobs done and very certain times of year. The former is free flowing and and relaxing but the latter is very regimented, though not displeasing.
It’s challenging for me to turn up to a client’s place and see weeds amongst the naturalistic style looking right at home. I had a follow up visit to a client in Geelong, where I’d planted out a naturalistic style garden this winter. Low and behold, smack bang at the front of one of the beds was Chilean needle grass in full bloom – one of the most noxious and ‘public enemy No1’ plants you could possibly imagine here in SE Australia. It looked right at home amongst the other plants in the bed, even attractive. But it was swiftly removed!