A few days ago, the following quotation came to my attention. It was written by the science fiction author Ray Bradbury, (Fahrenheit 451) and dates back to 1954.
“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
I’m starting to get on in years. Not having kids to fuss about, I have to say that worrying over a material legacy is not something that I give much thought to. Whatever is left when the time comes will be disposed of neatly and a significantly large chunk of it will end up supporting Canadian conservation charities … but I was quite taken by the thinking in the quote above because gardens matter A LOT to J and I. While I know our gardens, all gardens, are ephemeral and will perhaps be transformed when we can no longer care for them, at least we will know that for a while we made a garden that we enjoy and that makes life easier in some small way for wildlife. I am confident that our final garden will be “ … changed from the way it was before we touched it, into something that's like us after we take our hands away.”
Happily, the social norms of gardening are changing a bit for the better lately. There is still far too much unimaginative monoculture lawn care going on, too often outsourced to noisy contractors busily cutting the grass to within an inch of its life. For all that though, the gardening media and the internet carry increasing numbers of articles about rewilding, habitat restoration, native planting and pollinator gardening — important things that we strive to apply ourselves. Over the years, neighbours and friends have visited us asking to see what we are doing on our plot – and clearly they like the concept but often don’t know where to start.
A typical visit starts with a youngish family coming around the side of the house to be faced with a wall of green, bursting with native flowers (50+ species and counting) in all colours. On a warm day, it is buzzing with bees and other pollinating insects while birds sing from the bushes. Before the questions start coming (“Beautiful, but I wouldn’t know where to start”), the children almost always run down the paths between the plantings and disappear into the small wooded area to the rear under the trees and behind the pond where they lose themselves while we adults talk. This is the part that I always like the best and probably the best way to spread the word by example – especially for the children, who have usually never seen a garden corner where they can lose themselves unsupervised, without adults watching their every movement. All this in a modest suburban plot of just 15,000 sq.ft ! Of course, there is a place in the world for more formal and traditional garden design, heaven knows we have done enough of it ourselves in former years. This is not the place to be prescriptive about what others should do. Each to their own, so long as it doesn’t involve leaf blowers.
My grandfather was a gardener, as was J’s father. A good start for the nurturing of future gardeners. As a kid, a lifetime ago, I enjoyed nothing more than the couple of weeks each summer we stayed with him. He let me have the run off his land in a small village on the edge of the Exmoor National Park in the West of England. It was just a regular garden, like ours, not the parkland around the “Big House”. At the front there was a lawn because this was the sixties and he was born in the 1800s, but in the back he had a small fruit orchard, vegetable beds, trees, and bushes and a chicken run and that was where I liked to be. I learned about digging and soil preparation and pruning, and spent hours picking raspberries for the family to eat and collecting eggs for breakfast. There was no formal instruction, but I learned a lot just by watching and “helping” as kids do. Subsequently, we lived in several houses, all with at least some garden. Our last house in England before we came to Canada in 1998 was not much more than an average bungalow but the garden was large and with beehives at the bottom of it. Wonderful things are beehives. Mostly, we learned our craft by trial and error and much reading. Hands-on training is best, getting a feel for soil and seeds and recognizing what the leaves on plants are telling us about their needs.
Today, in what is more than likely our last garden, we have removed the lawn entirely, installed a pond with a “bird magnet” waterfall and filled the open space with multiple (mostly) native plants. Many of them grow as tall as we are and by July and August are heavy with gorgeous flowers. Insects abound – though not as many as there should be due to climate change etc – and the trees and bushes are the homes of many species of birds. Our garden bird list after 25 years stands at a round 120 species, of which we regularly see 80-90 in any given year.
It’s wonderful.
And so “… the difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
One intention of this journal, apart from narrative pieces such as this, will be to share a more or less, weekly personal portrait of some interesting species that can be enjoyed in parks and gardens of suburbia. The 1001 Species. Most examples will come from west of Montreal but all can be seen anywhere people live if they look around as they travel or sit in the garden. Our wildlife neighbours, plant and animal.
Coming soon under the heading of Weekly Wildthings.