Full Monty: enjoy space to breathe
Space is not just about the size of our plot, it is also a relationship with nature that lets in light and air, allowing plants – and us – to breathe, says Monty
The other day I was interviewed – via Zoom, of course – by someone writing a book about space. Not your astronautical space, but the type that is all around us – what space is and means, and what influence and effect it has on the way we feel and live our lives. He was talking to lots of different people about this for his book and my niche in his scheme of things was, unsurprisingly, gardens and space. As I thought it through, it made me realise how this amorphous, vague notion is so central to our idea of gardens and how we use them.
We tend to think of space as what we can measure – the size of our gardens. In this country, if you have, as I do, a bigger garden (chosen, in our case, so our limited resources could stretch to a bigger garden than was possible in a city), there is inevitably tut-tutting along the lines of, “It’s alright for some”. A bigger space gives you, of course, more options in your garden, but size is the less interesting aspect of space. Much more intriguing is our relationship with that space and the effects it has on our wellbeing.
While a significant minority of around eight million people in the UK have had no access to any kind of garden during lockdown, well over 55 million of us have – and for many, this extra dimension to their domestic life became very important. Some of this was due to horticulture and how gardening expands the possibilities of space. An ‘ordinary’ back garden can contain hundreds of shapes and interpretations. It can become a mosaic of intensely focused plants or one sweep of outdoors. It can harness the changes of daylight and seasons or impose a firm structure that overrides the vagaries of nature. It can be – as people are increasingly finding
– a portal to the natural world in a way that is so much more intimate and immediate than the most brilliantly made wildlife programme on TV. Even the smallest garden can fulfil big dreams and be the doorway to the natural world, in which we are such a tiny part.
This connects us to the entire world beyond the garden gate and, in doing so, the sense of space contained within a garden is hugely increased, regardless of its size. The other element of any garden that I always feel is undervalued is the sky. Our gardens go up and up for ever. The swallow that soars at the edge of our vision is as much part of the garden as the flowers in a border.
The ease with which birds flit between our realm and the limitless dimensions above is a gift to which gardeners have special access. It is there, of course, for everyone everywhere to observe, but most of us are too busy, head down, stuck in a car, earth bound or, God forbid, glued to our phones. The sky is an element of freedom that extends our gardening dreams as far as imagination will take them.
The Japanese have the concept of ma, which is the significance of the space between things. In the West, we tend to define space by the objects or lines that bound it, but ma throws the emphasis the other way, and gives weight and meaning to things by the gaps between them. These can be stones, trees, petals, even words in a sentence. But for gardeners this is most easily understandable through the training and pruning of shrubs and trees. The vastness of the sky is all part of that idea. And the space between the pots and plants on the ground, and the highest wisp of cloud are all part of the same garden.
But, in the end, the most important spaces that gardens can create are the ones within you. Time in the garden can expand your sense of self and your relationship with the rest of mankind in an extraordinarily direct way. I am not sure how this happens but know that it does. There is a community in gardening that reaches beyond the boundaries of individual gardens or gardeners. And that is powerful magic.
The most important spaces that gardens can create are the ones within you