Structural Gardening

by nannorrhops · Published February 1, 2019 · Updated May 10, 2020

As I was setting up this blog, I came across a short, sweet on-line gardening course called Managing Perennials. Noel Kingsbury is the tutor and the course is about Piet Oudolf’s design principles.

Oudolf is a prominent figure in the New Perennial movement, responsible for the design of a number of very well-known and popular garden spaces — The Battery and the High Line in New York among them. The key concept seems to be structure: it’s concerned not so much with particular plants as with the relationships among them; not so much about building toward a particularly glorious point in the year as balancing combinations of plants so that they provide variety and visual interest all the time.

Structuralism is aimed at understanding the way language generates meaning. Structural gardening would seem to turn the project on its head, asking something like how does gardening speak.

Tags: Noel Kingsbury Piet Oudolf Structuralism and gardening

I’m not “good” at gardening, in the sense that I've always worked with plants, or that I find it easy. I don't. I started late (click here for a description of the beginning). Having spent most of my life thinking in abstractions — ideas, generalities, theories, I cherish plants for resisting such things vigorously, energetically, relentlessly. I love to step back from actual plants and think about relationships, contexts, implications. I’m constantly turning the garden into a metaphor, that is, as the weeds continue to grow. The most prominent metaphor is, I’m sure, the garden as an empire. The power of a person over plants is so clear and available that it’s almost impossible to avoid the role of emperor. The idea is so “naturalized” in writing about gardens that by now it’s difficult to even notice it. Only in the past twenty or thirty years have a few people raised serious challenges to this model – corresponding to a gentle shift in our sense of ourselves with respect to “our” planet. What was so long an empire might be a republic, a commune or a democracy instead. And the political metaphor isn't the only one! The garden seems to adapt itself to just about any kind of comparison that features small structures in relation to larger structures. Words make up sentences, for example. Or things that appear on a surface have roots that are not visible but are critical. Plants compete with one another. And soon the metaphors are in need of pruning.

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Structural Gardening

Growing Metaphors