Why do I Love gardening? Why do my and I partner love choosing plants to put in the garden and then arguing for sustained periods of time, as to where we should position them before reaching a consensus? Why do you garden? Why do we as a species seem to have a soft spot in our hearts for growing plants and creating a space for them no matter how large or small? Well I am not sure I really know because I think the answer lies at the heart of what it means to be a Human on Planet Earth and rarely can we pin an answer onto those kinds of existential questions.
 |
| copyright Robert Widdowson 2014 |
This Rose was one of the first things we planted in our garden back in 2014
On the most basic level, when we bought our house from our Landlord, who specifically wanted our garden to be kept as a essentially a lawn, we both felt we wanted to create a beautiful space that was ours to tend to and enjoy. We had no real vision or plan but we did have a fair bit of knowledge stored away in our brains, imparted to us by our gardening obsessed parents and also from our education, as we both have PhD's in the Biological Sciences and this means at some point dissecting a flower and labeling the ovary, stamen and anthers and also learning about rhizomes and the nitrogen cycle and other such related matters. So we set about creating our garden by digging some basic borders around the edge of the lawn and sticking some plants in it. There the journey began.
 |
| Copyright Robert Widdowson 2015 |
Early summer 2015 and the garden was taking shape
As I have the most time spare to work on the garden I set about it full force last year and discovered as i was digging crisp packets and cola cans out of the soil in our new build plot that I didn't just like gardening, I was completely in love with the whole process. After a hard days work destroying my lower back with digging, weeding or planting on seedlings, I would stand back as dusk approached and look at what I had created that day. The whole process soothed me, it relaxed my soul and I became a calmer person. Well, partially calmer. There have been plenty of dramas; such as the destruction of half my of seedlings, as a female Blackbird decided she urgently needed the compost for her nest and set about collecting it from my decking based nursery at will, and the day the Chocolate Cosmos we had just bought wilted over for no obvious reason and lead to a lengthy discussion on what was wrong followed by a emergency transplantation into a sunnier spot with better draining soil. But overall I am calmer and I have learned to accept that you cannot foresee and control everything.
 |
| Copyright Robert Widdowson 2015 |
There have been several dramas in the garden, such as nearly burning it down!
But why have I taken to gardening so passionately? I think an answer may be potentially unraveled from something my Gran said to me when i was reminiscing with her earlier last year. We were talking about what me, my brother and my sister were like as children and she said something that surprised me: That I loved gardening. I thought she was spouting Gran-related nonsense at first but the more I look back into my childhood, the more I think she may be on to something. My parents love to garden and I am sure this has had some effect on me and i grew up in playing in a large and emerging garden that was and is never finished, but was always being worked upon and further created. I definitely remembered owning a trowel at a very young age, as I had planned on digging a hole to the other side of the world and definitely had got far enough that it required me to cover my excavation with wooden boards over night. I also remember creating a Wormery with some house bricks and garden soil, which led to the worms unfortunately being baked to death in the summer heat. Sorry worms! I remember reading a book on Bonsai Trees and then somehow obtaining some small Conifers, which I then, with little patience for the art or process of bonsai, pruned, wired and placed them in my bedroom all in one afternoon, which of course led to near immediate death. Sorry trees!
 |
| Copyright Robert Widdowson 2009 |
My parents garden: A place of mild chaos and great beauty
In fact, the more I think about my past, the more gardening seems to have been there somewhere close. Even at University, where I purchased and quickly neglected a Venus Fly Trap leading to yet another botanically related death. I think it was this time in my life, my late teen years and my early twenties (I am 36 now), that was the temporary demise of my love of gardening, as more seemingly attractive but ultimately fruitless interests presented themselves to me and perhaps even slowly erased my earlier childhood passions and memories.
 |
| Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016 |
My parents garden: Form and function
Why do WE, Humans, as part of increasingly modern and capitalist aspiring species like to garden? Have you ever walked past a meadow or grassland or anywhere where there are some grasses growing and plucked the seeds from the head and into your fingers before throwing them into the air and watching them disperse? Have you collected Acorns or Conkers as child or have you simply blown the fluff of a seeded dandelion head? I think most of us probably have, at least in here in the United Kingdom, picking up random seedlings if you live in a Tropical Rainforest may lead to being bit by a spider or snake or slowly poisoned, I am not really sure, but I guess there are similar occurrences of unconsciously spreading seeds all over the planet. Is it therefore possible that cultivation is inside of us in some way? Genetically, epigenetically? We certainly did not start our human journey as an agricultural species. We were of course, hunter gatherers, but eventually an agricultural society began to prevail, whether it be from the discovered convenience of planting crops for harvest or whether it had been through necessity, for our continued human survival. Was there a time when there were the old ways of hunter gathering were running in parallel with the new ways of farming and civic society? If so, maybe there was a collection of behavior types or even genes which conferred these seed spreading behaviors, that have been passed down through the successfully proliferating agricultural communities of the time. Behaviors that most of us now carry? I am engaging in speculation but maybe the reason I garden, you garden, the human species, given the chance, gardens is because in some way, we have to?
No comments:
Post a Comment