Setting the Enclosure
Welcome to the garden. Oxford Languages defines ‘garden’ as “a piece of ground adjoining a house, in which grass, flowers, and shrubs may be grown.” (Oxford Languages, 2023) This definition of the garden is limiting. For one, not all gardens are connected to a home. Many gardens do not include any grass, flowers, or shrubs. These days, gardens may not even be a piece of ground as with London’s Sky Garden, covered in glass on top of a building. So, what is a garden?
A garden implies a place to be gardened - planted, watered, clipped, nurtured. Humans have cultivated gardens for pleasure, food, medicine, collection, privacy, research, and beauty. Each comes with unique management strategies, but all have one thing in common - human interference. Nature, on the other hand, is different. Nature is wild, untamed, and the thing to be appropriated in service of human consumption.
The garden also involves some kind of enclosure or container. “When we dig up the garden for its etymological roots we find Indo-European gher 'fence' and ghort 'enclosure'.” (Erp-Houtepen, 1986) The garden is something protected and bordered. The garden has a defined edge between control and the unknown.
A ‘landscape’ is different from a garden. Oxford University Press says a landscape is “all the visible features of an area of land, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.” (Oxford Languages, 2023) In this case, a garden could be within a landscape and vice versa. They are not the same, even though they are sometimes used to describe the same thing. A landscape is what is being viewed, while the garden is the living, breathing, working system. A landscape is not a dynamic term but a static image seen by the human eye.
Some landscape views are so important that they are protected and immortalised. The top image is a painting by JMW Turner in 1809 of the view from Richmond Hill (Turner, 1809), and the bottom is a photo taken from the same spot in 2019 (Ivanchenko).
In order to think like a gardener, these differences become important. From a landscape perspective, the goal is to achieve an image or moment that people find aesthetically pleasing or enjoyable. From a garden perspective, it is more about collaborating with biological processes already in motion. In a garden, things live, grow, and die. The sun rises and falls at different times of the day throughout the year. Plants bloom in different seasons. Animals and insects hibernate, mate, and move around. This is the nature within the garden. To understand the garden, one must also understand nature. Not the untamed, wild nature but the natural systems within the confines of the garden. Some of these processes are uncontrollable, serendipitous, and sometimes destructive to the garden.
However, if one thinks like a gardener, these can be embraced to create rich ecosystems.
Claude Monet’s paintings embody the essence of how ephemeral gardens are. Both paintings have the same subject but convey different moments in the garden’s life. Impressionist painters were taught to capture light and colour as they saw it, as it changed, which is what a gardener must do too. (Top: Monet, 1919; Bottom: Monet, 1916)
The position of the human is significant here as well. The garden implies that there is a participatory process going on, one based on listening to the garden’s needs and tending to them - a gardener. A landscape creates a different relationship based on a curated view. In a landscape, a sense of detachment exists while sitting at a “God’s-eye” view, looking at a scene - a viewer.
The Viewer. In Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, a man stands at a “God’s-eye-view” of the landscape before him. (Friedrich, 1817)
The Gardener. In Frederick McCubbin’s The Gardener, the figure working blends into the garden as if to disappear into the scene. (McCubbin, 1910)
These levels of engagement with the land uncover gendered undertones. If a garden is based on collaboration and listening, it could be described as having feminine traits, while a curated and controlled landscape would hold masculine traits. Psychological studies break down feminine and masculine attributes within human consciousness (see Hill, 1992). Describing it this way does not mean that one is technically male or female, but the qualities that make up each term are charged with masculine and feminine agendas. It is also important to note that one is not better or worse than the other but together help develop an understanding of connection and tension.
Gender also shows up in the cultural roots of Western society. Gardening labour is tied to historical roles divided between men and women. The imagery and interpretation of nature as female underpins so much of our cultural understanding of the role women play or could play in the management of the garden.
What does gender mean in nature, and what role can it play in helping us understand how to be planetary gardeners, though? How does this impact contemporary processes within the built environment?
In a world where time is money and nature is controlled to serve human needs more than ever, how can the gardener’s voice be heard? As Landscape Architects, we should be able to think like a gardener at all scales of a project. To imagine options that balance the garden that is already there with what a client’s goals are for any particular site.
So, welcome to the garden, a place of immeasurable possibilities at any scale imaginable. Home to many different inhabitants. Some familiar and some not so familiar.
This body of work is organised in the same way a garden is, non-linear and is meant to be explored at the leisure of the reader. Each section is meant to complement one another but not set out in a particular order. Instead, each is in conversation with the other in an attempt to understand the garden. It is also not exhaustive. Sections could be added to continue the journey to becoming a global gardener.
Throughout this exploration, we will weave through personal narratives that have guided my understanding of the garden with theory and research about the history of gardening, its’ gendered background, and contemporary management styles that aim to work with rather than against natural systems. To frame these stories, I have also included a log of my garden at home in the hopes of further understanding these processes up close and personal.
This garden has many plots to walk through - all searching for what it means to ‘think like a gardener’.
