To be honest, we have been spending much more time looking at the garden through the windows than we have been working in it at the moment. Perhaps it has been the change in the weather, or the earlier evenings, or the fact that most of the fun of harvesting is over, or perhaps it is all of the above.
That is not to say that there isn’t still work to be doing outside: there are autumn and winter vegetables to protect from the slugs and the caterpillars, and there is a little tidying to do. But for the most part, our gardening is cerebral at the moment; shopping for seeds, planning our spring sowing and reading about gardens.
In that last category, two recently published books deserve special attention: The Accidental Garden, by Richard Mabey and The Garden Against Time, by Olivia Laing.
In this post, I’ll look at The Accidental Garden, which has gone some way to assuage my guilt for my light touch in the garden at the moment. In a later blog post, I’ll explore The Garden Against Time, which has filled me with inspiration to look at my garden – and the history of gardening – in a whole new light.
The Accidental Garden
We have long been fans of Richard Mabey’s writing. Food For Free (1972) remains our go-to guide for foraging, while The Unofficial Countryside (1973) and Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants (2010) have helped completely reorient our perspective on plants. Like the growing assortment of illustrated wildflower identification books we seem to have collected, Mabey’s writing captures the chaotic beauty of Britain’s wilder edges: the flora and fauna that flourish without human intervention, or even despite our attempts to remove them.
In his recently published The Accidental Garden, Richard Mabey focuses that wild perspective on what, at first sight, might seem like the least wild of all outdoor spaces: the domestic garden. He admits as much himself:
‘The commonly understood definition of a garden is […] an arena for the display of the gardener’s tastes and ideas, and their mastery, or at least paternal stewardship, of nature. […] Whether you come armed with weedkiller or a charitable bug-hostel, you are in dominion over all the garden’s other citizens. If this was a human community, we would call it colonialism.’
Yet, Mabey and his partner Polly bring an alternative approach to gardening, and The Accidental Garden captures the varying fortunes of their garden, the ‘thwarted ambitions, philosophical musings, moments of delight and serendipitous accident’.
The Accidental Garden highlights a tension that has frequently troubled us with our (admittedly much smaller) garden: how can we strike a balance between the desire to have an outside space that is beautiful and productive, while also ensuring that our garden is as wild and natural as possible.
The solution normally offered is to create a ‘nature-friendly’ garden, and this is certainly an immediately appealing idea; something that is simple to understand, easy to communicate to children, and phenomenally lucrative for those selling the ‘stuff’: bug hotels, bird feeders and hedgehog homes. Yet, that’s probably where the problems begin. After all, does nature really require our intervention, our support, our ‘stuff’?
There is nothing ‘wild’ about most of our attempts to make our gardens wildlife-friendly. Nature is more than capable of creating its own paradise if left to its own devices, as any gardener knows. Step back, even for just a week, and nature will quickly reclaim your garden: given a year, and you may have your own rewilding experiment – no doubt much to your neighbours’ distress! But you do so to the detriment of your garden’s productivity.
The Accidental Garden doesn’t offer any easy answers to these problems. Perhaps there aren’t any. But in the course of its ten short chapters, it examines the problem from a range of different – often very personal – angles, and encourages you to bring the same level of attention to your own outside space. From wildflower meadows and hedgerows to exotic planting and heritage roses, Mabey’s interests are varied and wide-ranging, and he encourages us to see how these things are all interconnected, ecologically and philosophically.
There are no ‘right’ answers. Richard Mabey only suggests some of the ‘right’ questions we should be asking when we are looking at our own gardens, wondering if we should do something different next year:
‘We can play other roles beyond the planning and planting and pruning, roles that are also special to our human identity. Be interpreters, scribes, witnesses, neighbours. The welcomers at the gate.’
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