The first garden I ever looked after was traditionally landscaped, with patios, lawns, ornamental shrubs, stone walls, gravel terraces and a swimming pool. It was my first serious exposure to the activity of home gardening and I quickly grew to love spending time there, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that this type of gardening involved a lot of work for not very much gain. After a full days’ work in the garden (pruning, weeding, mowing, trimming) it would look nice for a couple of weeks and then it would start to get messy and would require exactly the same jobs (pruning, weeding, mowing, trimming) to be performed all over again. Most people just accept this as normal (like getting a haircut every six weeks), but it reminded me of a treadmill where you have to keep running just to stay in the same place. Keeping things as the garden designer had intended actually meant continually fighting against nature; trying to keep ecological niches open while nature was trying to fill them. This gardening-as-constant-battle-with-nature seemed like a contradiction and didn’t make any sense, as I had always thought that gardening was supposed to be about communing with nature, not suppressing her.
I still enjoyed working in the garden and kept at it, but eventually reached the conclusion that it’s main function was to keep the gardener busy. This wasn’t what I was looking for at all, I really resent wasting my time and energy to no useful purpose (I’m no puritan devoted to finding backbreaking work to suffer so I can feel righteous), so I began to think and read about ways to make the garden more productive and less labor intensive. I didn’t realize it at the time but that garden had actually planted a seed in me, and over the years my idea of what a garden should be and do has changed radically. I eventually decided that the primary purpose of the garden (or at least any that I would want to be involved in) should be to grow food. This should not be just any food though, but the healthiest and most delicious food it is possible to get. I also wanted a garden that looked good, and would produce a wide a variety of foods and other products, while requiring a minimum of external resources to establish. Ideally it should also comfortable, efficient and function with a minimum of maintenance (and be self-sustaining in fertility too).
I eventually discovered that the kind of garden I was looking for wasn’t really new (very little in gardening is), in fact fairly similar gardens have existed for a long time in many third world countries (Guatemala, India, China, Tanzania, Nepal), where country people use a small piece of land to produce most of their own food. Often known as “Home Gardens”, they consist of several layers of productive plants, in an apparent jumble (though often carefully placed) of fruiting trees and shrubs, vines, perennial and annual flowers, herbs and vegetables. In addition to supplying food they also produce medicinal herbs, fuel, craft materials, animal feed and building materials (and often extra income from the sale of any surplus). The original European cottage gardens were similar to these home gardens in many ways, because they were the result of similar circumstances. These were found around the houses of better off working people (mostly self-employed artisans such as weavers), who owned a small patch of land and used it to provide food and other necessities
These kinds of gardens aren’t (or weren’t) primarily designed to be attractive (though they usually are), they are made to be productive and local knowledge and custom helps determine the most efficient placement of each component. The crops are mostly vigorous and easily grown species, carefully placed to maximize productivity in a small area and growing in informal plant communities that are often self-sustaining to some degree. The whole area is commonly enclosed by productive hedges and taller trees that alter the microclimate in beneficial ways, as well as protecting the garden from animals. Any new useful or attractive plant that comes along will be given a chance to establish itself; if it grows easily it will stay, if it doesn’t it will die out. Those that thrive will eventually be passed around to neighbors and will become common. Often there are also chickens, bees and even other small livestock. This kind of garden isn’t just a place for production though, it is also living space and provides somewhere to sit and talk in the evening, somewhere for the children to play, a place to dry laundry. The toilet is in the garden and the ‘night soil’ and urine eventually used as fertilizer.
Unlike modern gardens with their constant demand for fertilizer, labor and other inputs, these gardens can actually help us to reduce our impact on the earth. We use less energy and water to grow our own food, and they help us to reduce, reuse and recycle our waste products. They can also supply many of the materials needed for their own construction (and perhaps for crafts and other purposes). Of course they can also be just as beautiful as any ornamental garden, as well as being more pleasurable because of all of the other things they produce. This last point is extremely important, as the garden should be a refuge, a place where we can reconnect with nature and soothe frazzled 21st century psyches.
I’m not pretending to be the first person to think about reinventing the garden to make it more productive. This is an idea whose time has come and innovative productive gardens have been growing up all over the world in response to problems in the way food is produced. Edible landscaping, permaculture, forest gardening, natural farming, intensive vegetable gardening (and others) are all parts of the solution and I have used ideas from all of them in the creation of my own garden. I like to think of my contribution as helping to demystify some of these things and to provide some hands-on guidance from someone who has dirty, calloused hands.
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