On Nature and Artifice.

Somebody said to me today that she loves gardening because ‘it brings me closer to the earth, closer to nature.’ I can see the point up to a point, but only as far as it goes. It seems to me that gardening is fundamentally an artifice; it’s another example of our need to tame nature, to bring it to heel. Is that because we retain a race memory of being frightened of nature and the horrors it can visit upon us? Do we create gardens in order to manicure it, to pretty it up, so that we can pretend to be getting close to it when what we’re actually doing is forcing it to be pleasant and non-threatening?

This is a difficult concept to argue because gardens are beautiful things, and the perception of beauty is an abstract faculty which resides in the higher mind. What’s more, it’s probably a particularly human faculty, part of what sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. So is the beautifying of nature a natural process in itself which has its place among all the other natural processes?

For my own part I regard my garden as my sacred space. I love the look of it, I love the atmosphere of it, I love sensing the growth imperative; I even have a sense of ‘relationship’ with individual plants and trees and want to understand their needs so that I can better care for them.

And yet I dislike gardening. I dislike all that mowing and trimming and weeding and digging. I feel that a nettle has as much right to its life as a prize rose, and I don’t see what right I have to go around making hedges tidy and rectilinear when they want to be raggedy. That creates a certain conflict, but it’s what I have to do if I want the beauty of a garden.

I confess to not fully understanding this conflict yet. I wonder whether I simply don’t feel entirely comfortable with being on this earth. Maybe I don’t really want to be close to it; maybe I want to be somewhere more rarefied where beauty comes naturally without having to force something to produce it artificially.