Garden Authorities

It’s raining. Again. In short, the weather is better-suited to reading and writing about gardens than to actually weeding or planting or musing, and it is making me think about the general run of “garden writing” — the prose that appears on websites, in catalogues, labels, and magazines directed at “hands-on” gardeners (possibly best exemplified in Gardener’s World). It varies, of course, but on the whole I am developing a pretty strong resistance to such writing. The reason, I suspect, is that the relationship between writer and reader tends to be one of authority to novice. That somehow seems to reinforce the gardener’s idea of exerting authority over the garden. 

Novice that I am, I should surely be grateful for authoritative advice. But I also resent it somehow. I came to gardening far too late in my life to suppose that there is any “right” way to do it, any more than there is “right” music or “right” art or “right” poetry. If your garden is really yours, you’re likely to start chafing against any kind of authority pretty quickly. And if, like me, you don’t feel quite like that, you’re likely to want to be sharing responsibility with plants and soil and weather rather than with other people. Authorities contradict each other regularly, sometimes dramatically. Another objection might be that writers of plant descriptions and care directions do not, in general, exhibit any particular respect for language or any sense of poetic precision. But all that is almost an aside: of course it’s wise to respect precedent and experience, and it’s stupid to overlook the obvious. But in the end the writer and you are different people, with different aesthetic judgment. Each to his own. 

image: https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/a-gardening-book-for-those-who-hate-gardening-books