How much of your gardening is informed by what your mother did? Or a maybe a book? I just read a quote in the Society of Garden Designer’s Journal – “Peter Korn doesn’t believe in practical gardening books. ‘If you read a chapter telling you how to do something, then you will not think for yourself.’
He has a point, and here is Ben Probert on the subject:
Ben Probert:
I’ve heard this quite a few times over the years, if not the sentence itself then the sentiment. The headlong insistence that the same practice should be continued endlessly without question is one that frequently surfaces in the gardening world, sometimes giving itself a thin veneer of respectability under the umbrella of ‘tradition’.
Now I have no problem with the idea of tradition. In the majority of cases tradition is a nod to the wisdom of times gone by. Your apple tree will fruit well if you look after it and prune it properly. But ‘wassailing’ won’t make the blindest bit of difference to the crop. If you want to gather under your tree(s) in the dark and sing songs, throw a slice of toast or some salt into the tree, and generally become ‘socially lubricated’ with liberal helpings of potent cider I’m not going to stop you. Call it tradition, call it a strange rural version of the ‘pub crawl’; you’re doing no harm so get out there and have a good time.
There are however times when tradition should possibly be laid to rest, and in horticulture this is as true as in other places. Maintaining tradition is only really helpful when the result is positive, or at the very least not negative. You’ll be aware that gardening is going through a revolution at the moment. How we create and maintain special green spaces has been re-evaluated and a new ethos has emerged, one that moves away from the garden as a three-dimensional stamp album for plants favoured by the owners, over to a more enlightened space that engages with the world around it.
For those of us for whom gardening is an intellectual pursuit, as well as physical and spiritual, the new way of looking at gardens brings great joy. To those of us who appreciate the beauty of decay in the garden, not chopping everything back as soon as the first frosts arrive isn’t an opportunity to be lazy, it’s an opportunity to celebrate another point in the natural cycle of life.
We’ve also become far more enlightened in how we approach what were, traditionally, considered the ‘problems’ of a garden. Once you embrace a group of plants better suited to your climate and conditions you strike a happy balance.
I’ve done this with bittercress (Cardamine sp.). This common and enthusiastic weed is capable of firing hundreds of seeds out over the course of its short life, likely with a 100% germination rate. But, and here’s the thing, bittercress is very small. It’s not exactly the strongest plant either, so rather than spend endless hours pulling it up I concentrate on making sure that the things I’ve planted are happy. The chances of bittercress becoming a massive nuisance in a well planted happy garden are tiny. There are exceptions: for example, those of you growing vegetables might find bittercress a nuisance, particularly in the early parts of the year when vegetable seedlings are small, and those growing tiny alpine plants will find bittercress a problem. In most gardens, with ‘normal’ herbaceous plants and shrubs, the need to remove this plant is nowhere near as great as you’d think. Pull it out if you have time or a very specific need.
But diligently pulling up every single weed is a fundamental part of traditional gardening. Yes, yes it is. It harks back to a time, long ago, when people had virtually nothing else to do with their time. Modern life is full of distractions, obligations and opportunities, all vying for the time of even the most committed gardener.
Let’s look at how gardeners traditionally feed their soils. Firstly you gather every possible piece of organic matter and put it into a heap. This takes lots of careful cutting and the pushing of endless wheelbarrows of leaves and plant shoots to the allocated spot in the garden. You then wait for months as nature takes its course, except that you don’t; your pile must be dug over periodically. Then, after some time has passed, you’re left with a load of compost of wildly varying quality. This gets moved back to the garden and spread on the border.
All the time you’re mindful that your garden seems to lack worms and beneficial insects, even though you took all their food away and put it in a pile somewhere else. Worms want fallen leaves, not year old compost, and the same is true with many insects. Remove their food supply and it’s no wonder they disappear! Lavish bug houses won’t make a spot of difference if you take away what many of these insects eat!
Yet the virtues of compost are widely touted. Every garden must have a compost heap to save the planet, as we’re constantly told. There are benefits to [correct] composting of course, but the idea that organic matter must be cleared away from borders and returned as compost is at best unhelpful. So if I know this and others do too, why hasn’t the practice of composting been challenged? The answer is that composting is so widely understood to be a part of the traditional garden that any challenge to the practice seems almost heretical. If I told you that the domestic compost heap only really became a thing in gardens during the second part of the 1930s, principally as a response to reduced availability of horse manure, you’d be surprised, yes?
As I say I’m not against tradition, but I do think it’s important that following tradition doesn’t become dogmatic. We’re constantly learning new things about the world around us, and it’s important that we remain open to new ideas, both in how we create gardens and how we maintain them. “We’ve always done it this way” is an excuse, not an answer, and we must not allow nostalgia to inhibit the future potential of our gardens.
Ben Probert
Website http://bensbotanics.co.uk/
Old boy surveying my going over daffodils this February says. You,ll be needing to knot those off now.”
And I saw some tied up daffodils this week!
“the garden as a three-dimensional stamp album for plants favoured by the owners” for some of us this is the definition of a “garden”. And we are quite content with that.
And slovenlyness is perhaps ok, after all it is your garden. But there is a difference between leaving the cone flower seeds up vs not cleaning up the nasty hosta leaves. Between leaving the faded hydrangea blooms (please try to remove them when you prune back your roses. old blooms and new growth are not the prettiest sight.) vs ignoring your roses in February and letting them flop over by June. (Not to be confused with pegging old style roses for improved blooming)
As our gardens resident tree sloth, I understand not getting everything done. But skipping basic maintenance and applauding that is a step too far.
Hooray! At last I can admit that I don’t compost! Few years ago I wanted every inch for plants – so no room for a compost heap.
Half the decaying plant material is sent away in green bin in late spring, but the rest is left where it falls or put under the hedge to break down. Result has been more insects in garden this year than ever! – also more birds, field mice, slow worms and life generally. Even stopped cutting back lavender in autumn as moths overwinter in base of the plants.
Am totally thrilled with this new approach to helping my garden and it’s residents thrive.
Great article and thanks for sharing.
Tradition in gardening can be both a blessing and a curse for a newish gardener like myself.
The idea of growing sweet peas appeals to me, my mother grew them, my grandparents grew them, I like the idea that the tradition continues…I don’t feel the same way about geraniums or summer cabbage which could each make its own impassioned plea to the past (summer cabbage, being the food of the devil, will never be grown by me but that is another subject for another time).
One tradition, or aesthetic, that I wasn’t quite aware of how embedded it was until I looked for an alternative, is that of growing climbers up a trellis. I have a Passiflora that I don’t want to put on a trellis and was thinking of growing it through a loose hedge (an idea that came about from the excellent book “Windcliffe”). For me as I have it in my smallish city garden, on a trellis it would stand on its own and look far too much like a museum artefact along the lines of “ behold! Look at my plant!” rather than a part of the garden.
After an admittedly short google search I couldn’t find any examples of someone doing what I wanted to do. There wasn’t even a result that was entitled “this is a bad idea, buy a trellis like everyone else”.
I’ll do it anyway and if its hideous, well its just a garden and can be changed.
Passiflora can be very vigorous, make sure your hedge is also. Lots of people grow clematis through their roses and I once grew a Zephirene Drouhin rose through a very boring Honey Locust tree and that was magnificent! – your last line says it all, really!
Brilliant, compost is an utter waste of time, though the turning is usually done by rats in my experience of other people’s heaps. The number of people offer received wisdom as a reason for not doing something that can be clearly seen to work is extraordinary and shows how fearful people are of innovation and experimentation in case they get it wrong and get frowned at by serious gardeners. Innovation and novelty are
not the same though, beware of people
peddling the later.
You might have to try, to find out….experimenting, with allied common sense.
oh my goodness I’ve spent the morning ranging through about a hundred wonderful articles starting here and then going through Anne on Decay to Anne* and everybody else on the Hadspen Parabola (googling all these people and their opinions and what they did there) and got SUCH a history lesson! Whoa! all that transformation in one garden!**
All this to say that gardening like any other art might be seen as tradition informing the search for the new, sometimes it means doubling back and questioning if we’re straying to the dogmatic, other times maybe indulging ourselves in repeating what we love and love to do. Maybe even more so since there’s such a blurr between the garden and the gardening.
*and also your wonderful rant about the NGS
**and by the way every link goes to the current website “The Newt” never mind that it was written about the previous iteration – I had to install a wayback extension to read the Telegraph articles!
Thank you Kathei for this. Very cheering on a gloomy day. I note your comment about the Newt links – and apologise. It is a terribly hard job to keep a website (in fact two websites) up to date. Never mind an actual garden! I’m touched that you went to the trouble of getting the older articles.
I’m fascinated too with the recent transformations at Hadspen/Newt and amazed there has been, as far as I know, so little comment on the amazing history – just praise for the latest effort. A confrontation with what becomes of all our efforts…
not your links! it was when I googled “Hadspen” and it all goes to Newt!
Oh – really!? That’s really like killing the history! Thanks for telling me – saved me some fumbling around.
Interesting…and educational. Anne offers sugestions and viewpoints we generally do not hear in the USA. So cheers for a fine holiday. JAY
why should municipal services be strained by taking away your debris when it can be composted within your own garden?
Better perhaps to give up composting altogether?
No! I think composting is important, if you have space to do it, but not so much for the sake of feeding your soil. Food scraps trapped and buried in land fills apparently produce large amounts of methane which is contributing to climate change. I put all kitchen scraps in a loose pile in the woods which is never turned. I just leave it to be investigated and pillaged by wildlife while it rots out of sight. I’ve read that kitchen waste alone does not produce the most nutrient rich compost. I don’t remember why, but I would guess it might have something to do with the relatively high water content of fruits and vegetables. In any case, it seems the recommendation is to add at least some brown matter such as dead leaves and garden clippings to boost the nutrient levels. An often-published soil scientist here in the US named Lee Reich has written about how he composts even his old clothes! Since organically grown veg is easy to come by here in rural New Jersey, I don’t bother with growing vegetables, but if I did have an out of the way vegetable plot like we did when I was growing up, I might follow family tradition regarding composting. My mother would simply strew the kitchen scraps across the top of the soil through the autumn and winter, turning it under at planting time. We did not, however, include our old underwear.
I’m wondering what your mother used to plant that involved turning the soil? Our garden is covered by trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants so none of that would quite fit. And we try to keep fertility down, not wanting lanky plants that need staking or fall over. So we have some compost heaps because they act as a dump for some garden waste but I have to give the stuff away when I can, having no use for it.
I’m already in your choir, but most people I know aren’t. The traditional way of doing something applies to more than just gardening. People are reluctant to change, even if you demonstrate/prove why doing something non-traditionally is better. . It’s discouraging.
I know. I have been struggling with this for 40 odd years now and even wrote a book about it. And still..…!!
My mother had a few ornamental things she grew, but she was a very practical farm girl who focused her gardening efforts mainly on growing veg. She had a large enough plot that it would be plowed with a tractor in the spring before she planted her rows of corn, tomatoes, beans, etc. Like you, I make little use of what I compost, but I would have to live in an urban setting again before I would give up composting kitchen scraps, none the less.
Thanks – I’m all for continuing education wherever it comes from. Challenge accepted.
Huzzah!
It’s not often that I see something that really changes a view…… this does! ****
Hope it brightens your life! Xx
I agree , but would add that I have known heavily cropping apple trees on overgrown neglected plots where no human has done any caring or pruning for years. Also wassail may not be actively helping the tree but it connects humans and tree at a different level than just control, it acknowledges that there are forces beyond our control that we are intimately part of.