Waikato
A garden isn’t supposed to be perfect. Mine is a profuse jumble of plants in various stages of growing, being harvested, flowering and going to seed
In Sheryn Clothier’s garden, function trumps form
It is not, and never will be, a series of regimented rows of uniform, supermarket-shaped vegetables contrasting against bare black soil.
I believe gardens like the one I have described are like fashion models. Superficial and probably quite distanced from practicality!
I want a sustainable, productive, organic home garden – so function prevails.
This is not justification for a weed-infested neglected mess, and I deplore those who use that as an excuse and besmirch the philosophy.
But it does mean you leave plants to flower and set seed. Therein lies their beauty – the insects feed on the flowers and the seed is for next year. This means seedlings will pop up by themselves at random times in random places and, left to grow, will be happily edible with little or no effort.
Neat straight lines and regimented rows belonged in the 70s.
Symmetry gives way to succession in a home garden. No-one wants 10 cabbages maturing at the same time – who can eat all that coleslaw?
And bare black earth, so resplendent in photo shoots, becomes an anathema – its nakedness exposing soil to the harshness of the weather, the antithesis of nature’s nutrient-providing mulch blankets.
Growing organically means veges will be interspersed with companion flowers, for adding to salads or deterring bugs, and the line between the vege patch and the flower garden blurs as you realise parsley and coloured silverbeet are attractive and the asparagus patch is best sited under a tree.
Uniformity gives way to diversity but this doesn’t mean it has to look untidy.
Our human sensibilities of law and order can be gratified with structure and sculpture. Raised beds, paths and art contrast with nature’s chaos. My gardens are aesthetically pleasing (to me at least). They’re lush, very productive, and always evolving and interesting with strange things popping up all over the place. And I rarely have to buy seed.
Of course, at times it doesn’t look too good. The tomatoes went brown last year before the crop was ready (the dreaded
psyllid?). But I wasn’t going to uproot anything until I had my year’s supply in the freezer. And at the moment sorrel dominates a whole bed. But all is temporary and function overrides form.
Rows are my abomination.
When the suggestion was made to plant my orchard in north/south rows I recoiled in horror. I’ve never seen a row in nature. My orchard now contains a plot of bananas, a feijoa room, a grove of plums, a kiwi berry arch and a hedge of raspberries. Why shouldn’t an orchard be landscaped like a floral garden?
Dire warnings that this would increase my maintenance have proven untrue. Instead mowing is a pleasure I have to insist on as my right. I enjoy Sunday afternoons relaxing on the ride-on while visiting each tree in turn, and too bad that men-folk around here are deprived of doing wheelies around the apricots and drifts past the pears.
Over the years I have learnt to let go of the human desire to control.
Not to force nature into being unnatural and to enjoy and appreciate the unexpected. The oregano I threw out by the retaining wall thrives there better than the one in my herb garden. Pumpkins self-seed and flourish in the compost and thyme is growing better in the strawberry tower than the strawberries ever did. (Does that make it a clock tower?)
And it only takes one focal point, such as the NZ Gardener 70th birthday rose, sprawling amongst prickly pomegranates and gooseberries to turn a bramble patch into a dangerous delight of colour and perfume.
Combine this with the delicate blush of my ‘Giant of Gascony’ quince tree in spring blossom, or the vibrant autumn colours of my persimmon, and I think my productive garden holds its own against any manicured model.
I don’t garden for looks, but it’s gardening, it happens anyway (ok, a bit of thought goes into it too!).
The main difference is that my productive plants alter quickly, achieving the vision only momentarily. This daily metamorphosis is my own, intriguing and delightful with the appeal in its evolution. This is something I cannot share with visitors even if I wanted to. Some of them get the beauty of its function and some don’t.
That’s gardening for you – complex beyond comprehension, with its beauty in the eye of the beholder.