What triggers us to plant?

In his brilliant blog (www.groundeddesign.com). American landscape architect Thomas Rainer (see left) wrote about why we plant – not how to, but why. 

It is, he suggests something we do purely for pleasure.  This is true if you discount productive gardens and I have often thought about why gardens mean so much to us.  Thomas quotes Fletcher Steele, another American landscape architect, who said that the chief vice of gardens is to be merely pretty.  It sounds austere, but I suspect most of us want more than exterior decoration, that gardens give us more than just a pretty picture.

My own take on why we plant involves otherworldliness.  Good gardens for me are places where human time stands still and you start to feel that there’s something going on under the surface e.  If that never happens, if the garden does not communicate some deep emotional message, then all the flowers and designer tricks are pointless.

Thomas thinks that the goal of planting in gardens is to remind us of some larger moment in nature.  After Britain’s Industrial Revolution, city dwellers made nostalgic expeditions to watch haymaking or harvesting, or simply to enjoy the fresh air that no longer surrounded them.

Today, because so many people live in towns and cities, nature is no longer part of everyone’s daily life.  Unlike the Victorians who actually knew what they were missing, some people have no memory of the sound of wind in long grass or walking under trees.

I think it is true that, deep down, there must be some shared subconscious memory of the natural world, but I also think that there may be another kind of nostalgia that governs our planting – and which I suspect most landscape architects might scorn.  

For many people the gardens of their childhood - of visits to a grandmother perhaps, or to a place they went for holidays – may also influence why they plant.  This is a different kind of memory, a recalling of the lost world of childhood, that might some might dismiss as sentimental.  Maybe. But I’m sure it’s equally as compelling as the idea that we are triggered by a collective nature reflex.

(Article in The Garden (RHS magazine), May 2012 by Mary Keen)

Also see: http://www.rhs.org.uk/