"Gardening is a thoughtful activity, but thinkers tend to look down on it. It is practical and repetitive, they think, and it is often very dirty."
Passing time in activities with care and deliberation, we summon that feeling of safety. When gardening, for example, if we enclose ourselves between the butterscotch earth and the ceramic sky and get right down to the tasks at hand, peace comes upon us. We rest our minds and focus deliberately on the minutia of the life cycles before us.
Is it possible that gardening also summons our dormant intellectualism? A form of expansive wonder and processing deadened by the onslaught of data without thoughtfulness?
Classics scholar and head gardener at Oxford University's New College, Robin Lane Fox (born October 5, 1946), would say, "Yes!". "Gardening is a thoughtful activity", notes Lane Fox, but thinkers tend to look down on it. It is practical and repetitive, they think, and it is often very dirty."
In addition to being the world's foremost expert on Alexander the Great, Lane Fox is a British gardener of the first order, sowing both exactitude and whimsy. Gardening, he believes, will thoroughly expand our knowledge, even intellect. (I agree; I feel most intelligent when speaking about gardening.)
Gardens at New College, Oxford University. Perhaps because of his academic surroundings, Lane Fox is sensitive to gardening's rude offerings and unintelligent persona.
Gardening is a thoughtful activity, but thinkers tend to look down on it. It is practical and repetitive, they think, and it is often very dirty. A few universities give degrees in landscape design and professional horticulture, but their emphasis is on weed suppression and mass propagation... I have heard thinkers blame the English love of gardening for England's industrial failure. I have even heard them dismiss gardening as a substitute for proper study.
Lane mentions ignorance but doesn't dwell on it. He takes for granted that gardening can be thoughtful, engaging, and enlightening. He focuses on what results when that happens.
In July, I would go off to my favourite small garden, Helen Dillon's walled garden at Sandford Road in the Ranelagh district of Dublin. At that season, her drooping dieramas are at their best, and her two different coloured borders complement each other down the length of what used to be the Dillons' perfect lawn. Go and see what the acknowledged queen of small hardy plants has done to her garden's grassy axis. At every turn, the small groupings of plants here are works of genius, beautifully grown and understood.
The collection of characters spans from Yves St. Laurent's Moroccan garden to Nancy Lancaster's effortlessly stylised borders, which she frequently watered in the wee morning when she couldn't sleep.
"I water in the mornings,' she told me, 'when I cannot sleep, so it is for you to see that I have not caught pneumonia when you wake up.' When we had the babies, she compared the colour and texture of their cheeks in cold weather to ripening nectarines. Meanwhile, it was for me to accompany her with the long-handled pruners and to listen to the stream of memories, down-to-earth comments and questions which came at me from the middle of an over-sized deutzia or a favourite lilac which needed dead-heading.
Lessons in naming, style, formation and, most of all, deliberation (two hundred years after Thoreau defined it perfectly.)
Gardens at New College, Oxford University. Learn more.The gravest attack on gardening is not from intellectuals (as much as it bothers Lane Fox that none of his undergraduates could identify a primrose) but from those who approach gardening casually, without thought.
I blame trends. Stolen, gutted style. Garden trends are something Penelope Lively explored beautifully in her exposition-cum-memoir of those who sought soul through gardening. I also blame modern efficiencies that place no value on trial, failure or patience. Think of today's low-maintenance high-structured shrubbery so desired in American landscaping: an anathema to bees and aesthetics both. That is not gardening; it is furniture arranging with plants.
Bronze cast sculpture model for "Meridian" by 20th century artist Barbara Hepworth. New College, Oxford.Like many books I feature on The Examined Life, Thoughtful Gardening: Great Plants, Great Gardens, Great Gardeners is about caring. Caring about something, being deliberate, concerned, hyperfocused, curious, and open. Giving over time, effort, brain space, fingernails, all of it to this benign battle with nature, nurturing and nourishing our outer and inner landscapes, and giving us space for mental ambles. Read more about my care for gardeners and their beloved sacrifices in There Is No Collective Noun for Gardeners. 