Andrew Timothy OBrien - To Stand And Stare: How to Garden While Doing Next to Nothing

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How to
PLANT A BULB

How to
DIG A HOLE

How to
SOW A SEED

How to
WATER A PLANT

How to
DEADHEAD A ROSE

How to
HEAR A BIRD

How to
STAND STILL

How to
PICK AN APPLE

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To Bill

who preferred to do his staring
while sitting on my foot

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Lets get one thing straight. Your garden will get along quite well without you. It just wont be your garden. It will be that piece of land where once a garden was, and there is no tragedy in that. Every square inch of our planets surface is trying to get back to a state where it feels at ease with itself, a way of being from which forestry and agriculture, road building, town planning and, yes, even gardening continually strive to hold it back. This is not whimsy. This is science.

I can see it happening in my lawn, in my flowerbeds and borders and, particularly, in the more forgotten corners of the garden where plants I dont remember inviting in make themselves at home, sinking roots deep down into soil while reaching ever skyward to gather in the suns largesse. I plant roses and paeonies, giant scabious and salvias, hardy geraniums and bold, bright geums I water and feed them, stake them against wind and rain, deadhead and chop them to prolong the floral show. And as I labour, unseen by me, someone else plants nettle and cleaver, herb robert and wood avens, wild strawberry and creeping buttercup, foxglove, dandelion, forget-me-not, and dock each will grow, flower, and set seed, and all of this while asking nothing of the human gardener. Ash tree seedlings will appear suddenly as if from nowhere, now six inches, now six feet (never turn your back on an ash seedling, it will be a rangy sapling tree before you know it), blackberries reach out to snag me across paths, defying summer drought to grow surely a foot a day with no need for the watering can without which my sweet peas would transform as I watch into a crackling tapestry, warp of dried raffia, weft of crinkled biscuit.

To please pollinating insects, I mothball the mower for several weeks and give the lawn leave to run to seed. Hoverflies and bees skim merrily from daisies to clover, selfheal and ribwort plantain. Blackthorn seizes the opportunity to rouse questing roots sent outward on previous excursions from the boundary hedge, and diminutive sloe bushes shoot upward through the turf. Bramble primocanes, having reached the peak of their trajectory, arch and plummet, taking root where they touch the ground. My garden wants to be a woodland, and seemingly the only thing in its way is me.

A garden is created out of intention and held in that state by force of will. It involves partnership and compromise, a coming together of human and nature. It can be a beautiful relationship, or one fraught with frustration on both sides.

En route to woodland lies scrub that place of scrappy, shrubby growth, not quite meadow nor yet quite forest, where tussocky grasses and wildflowers exist in a jittery kind of half truce with thistle and gorse, bramble, and briar. This is a temporal, as well as a physical reality for the land out of which my garden is carved, within the biome of the temperate deciduous forest, and one of its cardinal agents of change seems to be compost. Long before you or I were exhorted to reduce, reuse, and recycle, nature was composting, and doing it with an efficiency that not only disdains our own half-hearted attempts but lies at the heart of a process that sees bare, inhospitable rock become host to rich communities of life; a transformation begun by the first doughty, pioneering plant, root winkled into a rocky crag, dropping leaves and succumbing itself to the passage of time; environmental enzymes and microscopic organisms breaking down vegetative tissue, the parts combining with minerals weathered from base rock to form a scanty soil just sufficiently rich to encourage tentative communities of slightly greater diversity. And so it builds, from cold stone to grassland, from grassland to scrub, from scrubland to forest.

Every gardener has a little misplaced bravado inside; palm outstretched against the approaching green tide like Englands King Canute, constantly anticipating the overwhelming waves that we know deep within ourselves were powerless to resist. We hold the land at a tipping point, sensing its deep desire to transform itself but unwilling or unable to embrace the wilderness, to welcome the wildness into our domestic space. The dynamic tension this creates lies at the heart of our conflicted relationship with nature and the manner in which she manifests her will in our gardens, a phenomenon intruding upon our notice through the presence of those plants weve come to think of as weeds. An entire industry has sprung up in order to educate us in regard to which plants are desirable and which we should dedicate our spare time to eradicating from the garden, towards the furtherance of which noble effort they just happen to be in the position to sell us the requisite weaponry. Its a phony war, and its exhausting. What if we were to ignore the accepted wisdoms and surrender to nature, just a little? Give in to the overwhelm and roll joyfully where the verdant tide takes us.

A garden is never, as frequently and lazily opined, all about the plants. Neither is it centred on the people who will spend time within its bounds. Not entirely natural, nor wholly a construction of human artifice, rather the garden is a collaborative effort, a coming together with anything from a bashful kiss to a collision. Fundamental to the way in which we garden will be quite how we view our own selves in relation to the natural world do we feel part of nature, or is it something we need to harness and tame? Do we revel in the welcoming embrace of the elemental, or does the notion of wilderness fill us with fear and trepidation? All of which can sound a bit high-falutin, but it comes down to this. Next time you find yourself weeding, ask yourself, why? For what reason do you go to such lengths in pulling out plants that grow so well on their own, while the expensive garden centre specimens greedily demand your time and attention before they consent to perform, or hold over you the imminent threat of their demise? We find ourselves unquestioningly perpetuating a narrative that is partly to do with control, partly about imposing our will upon the landscape, partly even about those notions of dominion that descend from the book of Genesis, all the while overlooking in the excitement of being given authority over natural resource the obligation to ensure that the earth is replenished. To be good stewards, rather than careless consumers.