Random Thoughts on Landscaping and Gardening

Landscaping and gardening have been among my lifelong passions. I'm very lucky as my wife shares and complements me completely in these endeavors. My interest began in childhood when those I loved most dearly, my parents, grandparents and uncles and aunts with whom I lived in a large multi-family house got down in the dirt and created beauty in the City of Brockton, MA. Their effort was a combination of English cottage and English formal with an emphasis on tea roses. In my mind it is still very beautiful. Occasionally, when I pass by the old place, I can still see a few signs of their garden outline and I am filled with pleasurable memories.

My spouse and I have owned four houses, and we've landscaped all of them. The first two, suburban houses in ordinary but nice subdivisions in the Washington, D.C. suburbs of Virginia, got the Capital treatment - lots of azaleas, rhodies, andromedas - lightly echoing the English park style. We enjoyed the work as well as the efforts at creativity and we loved the neighborly recognition for our efforts. Obviously, we were young.

We then moved to a Cape Cod cottage in a seaside village in Massachusetts bound and determined not to landscape the large lot as we were tired of gardening and all the work it entailed. Over the course of several years our compulsions got the better of us and the madness returned full force. The result was a much closer version of the English park style. Something along the lines of a 'garden undressed' that Capability Brown might have patted us on the head for doing a good job - for rank amateurs.

These labors of love were accomplished without much thought. I had read a lot of books on landscaping and gardening and developed a rather substantial collection on the aspects of landscaping design and horticulture. As I aged, however, I found these texts lacked something very basic - the reason we get into the business. Most of them simply assumed that the reader was interested and failed to explore the why of the subject.

The book that had the greatest influence on me was Geoffery and Susan Jellicoe's The Landscape of Man. It was from this marvelous text that I came to understand the why of landscaping, that gardens could synthesize man's great and opposite needs - a place to satisfy those of religious bent with a reminder of paradise and, for those possessed of logical minds, an environment in which to think deeply and contemplate. Sir Geoffery and Susan also offered the clearest insight that I have ever come across concerning the derivations of both formal and informal style of landscaping. Shocking to me in its obviousness - but again maybe not to you, dear reader - the formal is inspired by man's agricultural manipulation of the land and the informal from beautiful and romantic natural settings.

The Jellicoe's steered away, however, from the problems of small residential gardens and busied themselves in explaining the magical landscapes of great civilizations with which most gardeners are at least somewhat familiar. My collection is full of books that tell the reader how to create a front garden, side and back gardens, Japanese Gardens, formal and almost any other type of landscape, but they avoid the why one would do such a thing, assuming that I - and you - know why.

Surprisingly, some of the best books in approaching this problem are the most commercial Ortho books and others of similar vein such as the Readers Digest books on landscaping. Most of the other books in my library stress how to rather than why. How to attract birds or butterflies with plantings, how to use color in the garden and so on. Why would you do such a thing? Why to bring pleasure, of course, but it's far deeper than that.

We dig and plant to create a paradise for contemplation and enjoyment, and we're right back to what the Jellicoes have been trying to tell us. How should we use this spark of wisdom? To attempt to understand what our personal paradise would look like and attempt to create it, to try to see just what makes us tick and to satisfy it by manipulating a small bit of our world.

Someone ought to write a book on why a person should be motivated to create a personal garden in the first place. I'm not going to do it. Why not you, dear reader?

One practical thing that I've learned about gardens that has never appeared in print before this paragraph is that at least for one purpose a garden situated on the east side or end of your house is the best. The books usually denigrate the east side as not sunny enough or whatever. But in very warm climates such as that of Northern Virginia where I live and on hot sunny summer days in most places, the east side cools early in the afternoon. Before the mosquitoes come out and make sitting and contemplating impossible, happy hour is best experienced in such a garden. Don't say there wasn't anything valuable in this column.

Cheers,

Wildbill944