MAINTENANCE IS GARDEN DESIGN
The garden is a dynamic creature, hatched and etched in the mind
The beast is sometimes drawn on vellum or on paper with borders
Drawn to scale one quarter inch is one foot, one eighth of an inch is one foot
It is birthed and grows awkwardly
Stumbling through the natal stages called planning groundbreaking and installation
Well, a garden is not a set, not a one time deal, not an exhibit in a gallery
It is a creature very much alive, a demanding life form that requires care and love and
Maintenance
Imagine the garden as a mutually beneficial, symbiotic endeavor between people and plants
Words can only approximate
The scene behind the magnolia tree the dew hanging poppy and the cheerful summer iris
Maintenance seems a word
Better suited to five years or 50,000 miles, car maintenance
Or keeping up with a certain standard of living – maintaining ones status
There is a monotony melancholy mistaken misery in calling the action filled gardening tasks of
Pulling pruning planting propagating, digging turning building amending cultivating
Maintenance
Do you call tooth brushing facing washing eating breakfast stretching exercising working
The basic duties of life –
Maintenance? How sad that sounds, where is the joy in ‘maintenance’?
Perhaps there is no better word though
Let’s just fudge and nudge this one, rather than invent something new
Okay garden maintenance it is
Maintenance is design
In the best garden designs
There is a human built into it
Because you recognize that – no human no maintenance no design – it is that simple
Because the tree grows big and grows old
Way past the 10 foot circle drawn on the original landscape plan
A shrub limbs stretches and bows and starts to swallow the sun loving lavender lily loropetalum
A good gardener can prune a shoot here, take a tip there, keep it in line
Then scoot a perennial this way, and move the lemon tree outa the shade
Encourage the ground cover, and meticulously pluck the weed seeds emerging
Mold it, work with it, adapt it to fit, so the design holds and stays intact
The flow the mood the balance the unity – the design
In the best garden design
The person who thought up the design
Is, was , will be until they die, a gardener
A gardener of dirt imbued with the scent of daphne philadelphus pittosporum
A gardener who has been educated in the finest university lab research vessel of all time:
A little plot of sun lit land putzed over and over and over again
A learning studio of a few rows of daisies and columbines fading and seeding
A rectangular lot with warm rays and moss bit shadows
Tulip tree leaves gathered on the ground in conference
Tulip flower petals fallen in the sun, unveiling the bare ovary
The best designer is a gardener –
A plants person trained by time, wetted by rain splattered by mud
Scarred and attacked by berry thorns and yellow jackets stingers and sticky spider webs
They know what plants need, how plants grow, why plants die
These are the forces you have to meet and greet, the forces that you have to work within
To dream up a nice garden design
Field knowledge is foremost, accumulated by you and gardeners like yourself
Working sharing discussing observing experimenting
In a world of experience and stories
Tilting the academic and theoretical knowledge on an edge –
The long charts graphs spreadsheets what the current research says the latest book of facts
Second hand third hand fourth hand knowledge –
The beveled edge cushioned against the mind and the body and the earth heart the earth guts
So stay intimate stay close to whats goin’ down
Be a good gardener playing in the dirt, the fading sun on the left cheek and sweaty forehead
Then you will be a good designer
So to summarize thus far
In garden design, remember that
1) A person a person a person has to care for the garden over time
2) The garden is a living creation that will grow and change
3) The best designer is a gardener, a maintenance gardener
The worst garden designs – there are so many
Part of the problem is that the design feedback loop is not complete
The circle is not a circle, it is just a climbing wiggly line
The designer does not learn from the mistakes of oneself or that of others
And who points out stuff like that? “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it at all’
Hard to learn from things gone wrong, when they go wrong not at the beginning
But one year two years three years five years ten years down the line
By then the designer is outa there
And the errors problems methods continue to advertise and repeat and fester and spread
Leaving the clean up improvement rearrangement editing to the gardener
Leaving the yanking butchering root digging ransacking demolition of a garden that never was
To the maintenance gardener
In the worst designs, the designer does not know the site
They do not design based on drainage compaction hard pan runoff rodents disease
They forget to acknowledge the wind and the fog
They dismiss the power of the southern sun and the darkness of the north side
Suffice to say that without an understanding of how life forms fit together, dwell with one another
The design flops
Such a garden betrays the relationship of interconnectedness, forfeits a chance at communion
And, destroys the union of plants and human beings
Nature has her own design principles , they are easily seen – If you take a walkabout
In the mountains rivers foothills forests grasslands scrub vacant lots and open fields
Examine life, and the design patterns will light up
In the worst designs, the designer has no respect for maintenance
Has never done maintenance – pure design
Been to school, but never sowed a seed, made a cutting or scarified a legume
Never fixed a valve on a sprinkler, have a pipe break and have to dig it up
Never repotted a plant or pruned some roots or lowered the canopy
Never had to clean the algae off the walkway or whitewash the greenhouse
Never hauled a half ton boulder, or bucket carried 20 yards of decomposed granite
Never had to clean the gunk out of the fingernails or take a wood splinter out of the hand
Never had sore knees and a pulled back and the shoulders a wreck
Never never never never
Then they design , in the top down style
Of all things, a garden
And you wonder why why why why why why why why why
Who what how who what how who what how
A gardener, a person, takes care of a garden
A gardener must have plant knowledge, site knowledge, and knowledge of oneself
In the garden – the planner and the doer are one, human and design work in harmony
At the end of the day
In the garden, we are sitting around, tools have been put away, hands are washed
We are enjoying the fish tail fronds lit up by pink red orange clouds
While a big white waxing moon smiles in the blue sky
Good designs
Thank you for writing this. So unique… so “down to earth”!