Does your idea of your own garden jibe smoothly with society’s? Do you embrace new information, or cling to outdated practices and over-hyped myths?
In the garden, every person should feel at peace with themselves, and perhaps find common ground with others. Historically, worldwide, for the most part humans generally share a love of fresh homegrown herb, veggies, and flowers, and both appreciate Earth’s natural tapestries and admire our own deliberately laid out beauty.
But while we all garden alone, what we do is a communal dance, watching and learning from one another, sharing tips for success and commiserating readily with strangers over weather, pests, and failures.
But once we get past the surface and start really comparing notes, the camaraderie often starts falling apart.
Let me back up here, by sharing my personal, carefully-worded definition of what a garden is in the first place: a planned, human-centric space of any size, indoors or out, where plants are cultivated and displayed alongside manmade materials.
It’s that simple; as individuals we are free to do what and how we want. But it can get complicated socially, when folks with different personalities and tastes, backgrounds, worldviews, and abilities start gardening side by side. That’s when normally-amicable neighbors start squabbling over this or that approach to design, style, plant/material choices, or preferred level of maintenance. Rules come into play, to be kept or broken.
I’m not talking here about self-appointed taste-makers, or those suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect who overestimate their own abilities or knowledge based on just a little gardening experience or a smidgen of horticultural training. Those who feel empowered to downplay or badmouth the efforts of others.
Reminds me of the beans or no beans chili crowd; some buy into what they are told, without question, becoming so polarized they are unable to see that theirs is not the only way. Groupthink affects collective judgement, in effect creating the illusion of neighbors being either insiders or mavericks.
And I’m not dismissing the over-managed perfectionists, odd-socks outliers, or those tortured souls who gleefully antagonize others; it’s just that most of us follow a more-or-less conventional laissez-faire live-and-let-live approach, and guide our gardens gently along a meandering course, adjusting as we go with the flow.
As a professional garden advice guy, I find myself nearly daily refereeing disputes between otherwise reasonable folks who don’t see eye to eye on issues even though, in the big picture, their different approaches are equally acceptable both socially and horticulturally.
A few easy ones come to mind, without counting the arguments over dozens of factually incorrect myths like whether or not eggshells add calcium to the soil (they don’t), or if nandina berries kill songbirds (actually, nope), or can we bury meat in a compost pile (yes; the operant word is “bury”). Or the ethics of non-GMO seeds and the occasional squirt of Roundup.
I’m actually more astounded by how many people argue over subjective, artistic, or stylistic issues. Whether or not it’s okay to prune crape myrtles. Manicured or mow-what-grows flower lawns. A few guilt-free non-native flowers in the garden. Glass bottle trees.
Truth is, gardening is a big tent where it is okay to choose to live in glass house neighborhoods with strict landscape covenants, or to simply eschew the lockstep thing and settle in to a more relaxed neighborhood, or move to the country.
To mow or not to mow is not really the question. Gnomes are not superior to plastic flamingos. Butterflies don’t care that those zinnias are not native.
If we can’t find common ground, can we at least respect others’ choices?
Felder Rushing is a Mississippi author, columnist, and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to rushingfelder@yahoo.com.
