August 15, 2023
Gardening for Others
Perhaps it is time to start gardening for others. By this, I do not mean other people.
Gardens have been human-centered from inception. They continue to be so. One of the major emphases in our current thinking about gardens comes from the recognition of their healing powers where people are concerned. We now understand the value of gardens for those in hospital and prison, for urban populations deprived of greenery, for children. But this is still a garden ideology based on the needs of humans. We use plants to help people.
Another current focus is on planting natives. But this trend is also rooted in what is good for humans. As in: we need pollinators to produce our food. As in: we need caterpillars because they are a primary agent of converting the energy of the sun stored in leaves into the food chain. As in: natives are beautiful and people love butterflies. I admit to having emphasized the latter in designing the native plant garden at the Bethlehem Town Hall. Since Carole and I wanted people who saw the garden to desire such a garden for themselves, we sought to create a garden aesthetic that people would wish to have at home, one with lots of color, one with lots of butterflies floating by.
While Sara and I were on Cape Cod these last two weeks, we attended a talk, sponsored by the Cape Cod Seashore National Park, on eels. It was one of the most interesting things we did. Eels, it turns out, are fascinating creatures and they are in danger from a variety of sources. But, as our lecturer pointed out, eels don’t have charisma. Pandas and sea otters have charisma. Butterflies have charisma. It would take a PR genius to make us care for eels.
Very few insects other than butterflies have charisma. Yet 97% of bugs are beneficial to humans. Nevertheless we are destroying at an alarming rate species we may know nothing about and that may provide valuable services. But people point to China, where fruit trees are pollinated by humans, to argue that it doesn’t matter because as humans we can deal with any mess we make.
Appealing to a creature’s value to humans to avoid extinction therefore seems a losing game. So let us base our behavior not on what is good for us but on what is good for other creatures. As gardeners, might we not have a unique opportunity to demonstrate what this might mean? Can we create gardens based on what is good for bugs, not because bugs are good for us, but because bugs are good for bugs? Is it possible for us to begin to question if what brings us joy, what feeds our sense of beauty, what provides us solace may reduce the joy and safety of another species and therefore we should change what we are doing?
I know this is a hard ask. But the native plant movement in some ways calls the question: why do we garden and who/what do we garden for. This shift of focus I am suggesting is, I believe, the logical outcome of the movement toward planting natives.
I realize that in some sense it is impossible to escape the human point of view, even as we seek to center other species. But the effort to do so is the best effort we can make. Especially now, as we proceed to alter the environment at an ever-greater rate without knowing the impact of these changes. We are just beginning to acknowledge the intelligence of plants on any kind of significant scale and to explore the nature of that intelligence and how it works, but we continue to mess with plants just as we continue to extinguish bugs and on an equally significant scale. What happens to a plant’s way of communicating with others of its kind or with plants of different kinds when it is genetically modified? We don’t know but still we act.
On this basis, I see no reason not to act on the basis of centering others. We don’t know what will happen if we do so but why not see? The problem of course is implementation.
While I was on the Cape I was intrigued by the plants I saw growing there in the scrub. It occurred to me that were I to live on the Cape at this moment in my life I would fill whatever space I had with the plants I found in the scrub and could identify as part of an ecosystem that existed before the importation of exotic invasives. My interest would lie in watching how these plants related to each other and to the insects they attracted. I would not be planting them because I found them attractive but because I was interested in centering them and whatever life they supported. I would want to believe I gave the leaf and the bug the same priority as myself.
If I were to begin my career as a gardener now, I would begin from a basis I did not have 45 years ago. I would start with an education in ecology, one that would lead me to design and plant differently. I can’t do that, of course, but I can do my best to honor the toad and the beetle. I can speak out on behalf of bugs. And I can point out the independence of plants.
Plants don’t exist for us; they exist for themselves. They may use us for their purposes, as Michael Pollan has so brilliantly argued in The Botany of Desire. But they don’t exist for us. They were here before us and they will be here after us. It is time we recognized this essential fact, with all its extraordinary implications.
Indeed, one of the greatest gifts of the garden is the recognition that we humans aren’t the center of the world. Spend one hour examining the life teeming in a handful of dirt and it will shatter your sense of importance. Or spend an hour exploring the intricate beauty of a Columbine flower and take in the fact that the columbine is not being beautiful to attract you. As I take in the exquisite geometry of a succulent or the intricate pattern of an unfurling fern, I experience relief in recognizing that neither plant is intricate or exquisite for my sake.
In some deep sense the garden allows me not to matter so much. And, paradoxically, that is perhaps its greatest value to me.
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