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The Deep Middle


Gardening & writing in the prairie echo

Is That Garden Beautiful? To Whom?

10/1/2017

3 Comments

 
I sure get frustrated seeing social media post after social media post proclaiming how a garden or plant is beautiful (sure, I'm guilty of it, too). I predict I'll be frustrated the rest of my life. A human proclaiming a space as beautiful is just one phase of many phases in what makes that space beautiful. What's beautiful to spiders and caterpillars and beetles and birds? What's beautiful to air, water, and soil?

Beauty from the human aesthetic standpoint is a judgement based on emotion. And there's nothing wrong with it per se. We are part of nature, part of what is alive both animate and inanimate, and our spiritual bonds to wildness are necessary to our psychical and psychological survival. What is less a judgment, what is less subjective, is how a space is beautiful on a much deeper and more profound level. When we say a garden is pretty, we are treating the space as something to consume -- it's on the same level as most art, a momentary engagement, even if we have MANY momentary engagements that cultivate new responses. Our understanding of the art is limited, perhaps willfully limited, to what we perceive in the blink of an eye or the grazing of a hand over soft leaves. Our environmental crisis demands more than this simple engagement.

Again, those perceptions are good and powerful, but it's only the perception of one species -- a dominate species that seldom considers the perceptions or needs of others. We proclaim to act on nature's behalf simply by having a garden, as if any assemblage of plants -- particularly if it wakes in us a sense of awe -- is the only or primary goal of a garden or wild space.

How can we hope to garden ethically for all life if we don't comprehend even one additional aspect of a space, if we don't redefine beauty in a time of climate change and mass extinction? We may find an exotic plant beautiful and functional, but it may be ugly to wildlife. We may find a plant cleans water or stabilizes an embankment, but why can't or why isn't it doing more? We limit our response to life when we stop at calling a space beautiful simply because we find it so -- a culmination of our culture and our family's expectation passed down to and through us. A freshly mowed lawn is beautiful, but it seldom benefits the kind of biodiversity and ecological function we force upon it to defend our aesthetic choices. A butterfly bush is beautiful, but it supports no larvae and a very limited number of adult insects.

What is a new garden ethic? How do we get there? Why is it important? What do we defend about our perceptions and beliefs, and why do we defend them so fervently? Is that garden beautiful? To whom? How are gardens an act of social justice that awakens or builds a new compassion and resolve to honor all life and cultivate equality?
3 Comments
Terrence Kavanagh
10/18/2017 12:01:32 am

I appreciate that you are writing in this vein because, just like my tiny collection of plants outside my door, it represents an effort based upon a realisation; a realisation of the fragility of the bio-spherical status quo. Yet faced with the weight of "civilation," the onslaught of billions of tons of motor vehicles creeping their polluted, unnecessary way along millions of square miles of paved highways, and millions of tons of military might rocketing across the sky, the sea, the fragile landscape of the ecosphere and exploding with violence against life herself, expecting the Earth to submit, roll over and play dead so that we "humans" can drown in our pride. So we are put in our place; and in tens of thousands of years the Earth will recover, all in good time. Of course some humans will survive to roll with the changes, the seasons, the challenges. Humans willing to accept the ways of Mother Earth; I hope that you are one such survivor.

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Benjamin
10/19/2017 10:48:33 am

The Earth will recover, and it will likely take millions of years, but it won't be a recovery so much as a totally new world. We should ponder well, and feel deeply, the loss we are causing now, the permanence of our human supremacism, and the conflict it simmers inside of us.

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Terrence Kavanagh
10/21/2017 03:42:45 am

Hello Benjamin.

Thank you for your prompt reply although you appear to think that the Earth will take a very long time to repair and the result will be altogether different to what we currently experience. You may well be correct but you say it as though you think it's a bad thing, whereas, I myself, am not convinced that there is such a thing as an ecologically sustainable climax community (change is rife in this universe; reaction is her paramour); however,as you probably know, the more complex the community the more minute are the reactions to change, or, to put it another way, the reactions are buffered in a complex community. A garden lawn is essentially a monoculture (a mass planting that is pleasing to the eye of some beholders because it's neat). A monoculture must be protected by its cultivator - changes in a monoculture can be disasterous.

Your project is a complex community of plants that fosters a natural level of stability unknown to monocultures. It's not likely to turn around global warming, fix the radiation leaking out of the Fukashima meltdown(s) nor mend the psychological trend towards a monocultural human society, but it certainly represents a big step in the right direction; for this reason, I applaud you for daring to be yourself, for caring enough to break the mould, for sharing your ideas with all who may listen.

The purpose of existence is love. Reality is love (actual reality, not the pretend, commercial, exploitative version). To encourage the natural, the native, the stable, is to encourage reality. The Anthropocine is dying even before its maturity; time for humans to grow up.

Before replying I read some of your contributions to Houzz. Very nice. Keep up the great work. I can see that you are getting results. I must read your book soon; your ideas are interesting.

Terrence Kavanagh/tarunkrsnadas. Australia.

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    Benjamin Vogt's thoughts on prairie gardening in Nebraska. With a healthy dose of landscape ethics, ecophilosophy, climate change,  and social justice.

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    In a time of climate change and mass extinction how & for whom we garden matters more than ever.

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prairie inspired  design

Lincoln & Omaha, Nebraska

Monarch Gardens is a prairie-inspired design firm. We specialize in lawn to meadow conversions as well as urban shade gardens.

Employing 95% native plants, our designs are climate resilient, adaptable, and provide numerous ecological benefits while artistically reflecting wilder landscapes.
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