Is gardening only a hobby?

This is it. I have no lawn.

Well, in the USA it's hard to think of it in any other way, isn't it? Just check iTunes for garden podcasts, or any media directory. What category do you find "gardening" in?

I was listening to Ken Druse's Real Dirt podcast recently. I always enjoy Ken's podcasts, especially his interviews. Last week he talked to Bart Ziegler, gardening columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Ziegler's is a thoroughly enjoyable gardening column, far superior, in fact, to most available in US media. I like the guy, so please don't think this is an attack on him, or on Ken.

But at the end of the interview, Ziegler's closing remarks just set my teeth on edge. Well, actually, it started earlier. Ziegler talked about his "yard," not about his "garden." Not a mortal sin, I suppose, but so revealing about American attitudes toward gardening.

Okay, the offending words that set me off:

"Learn to relax. It's only a garden. This is not brain surgery. It's supposed to be a hobby, it's supposed to be enjoyable, and if you end up driving yourself crazy, it's neither of those..."

In context, there's nothing wrong with this, I agree. But in the US, it's come to be almost the only acceptable attitude toward gardening. We mow our lawns (we all have lawns, don't we?), we spray Roundup on the dandelions, we grow native plants if we're of a certain political persuasion, we grow vegetables to feed ourselves (the newest widely condoned fad), we may even weed if we're "serious" gardeners. Hell, we may even sit and take pleasure in our yards (or gardens ... but most of us think using the word "garden" may be pretentious).

There's far more to it than this. Gardening has a long and illustrious history--thousands of years--as a very important part of human culture, often as the place for practice or contemplation of spirituality, aesthetics, philosophy (the "good life"), even politics--yet our culture relegates it to the "hobby" category. What happened?

Can anything be done? If you're interested, take a look at this website:  thinkinGardens. The people here are at least trying to change things. The site is British, of course, but gardening is much more highly valued there than here. So take it where you can get it.

Planthropology: The Myths, Mysteries, and Miracles of my Garden Favorites by Ken Druse

We’ve grown to expect beautiful books from Ken Druse, notable for his excellent photography, and an easygoing style that makes for a good read. I enjoyed this book and, as with Ken's other works, I’ll go back to it to recollect a fact, get a jolt of visual stimulation, or just to pass the time in pleasurable reading about gardening and plants. The publication is just in time for the holiday season. The eye-catching dust jacket, with big red poppies yearning for your attention, makes it just look perfect as a Christmas or Hanukkah gift.

Planthropology is a ramble through Ken Druse’s head – a very entertaining ramble – profusely illustrated with his beautiful photographs, and rather lavishly produced. Though the book has a clear structure, it’s really a miscellany (in a good sense) full of personal reminiscences and anecdotes, intriguing plant lore, history, and an occasional dose of science.

Ken tells the stories of plants. He writes about the heroic adventures of early plant explorers, about evolution and surviving “living fossils” like the ginkgo and dawn redwood, the uses of plants through history (as food, medicine, poison), the universal patterns governing the growth and structure of plants, seashells, and other natural phenomena. But trying to list its subject matter is hopeless; it’s far too wide-ranging for easy summary.

This book will be an immediate draw for the plant lovers among us. Some readers will enjoy just turning the pages, looking at the pictures, reading the captions and maybe a bit of the text here and there. Others will read the book from cover to cover, as I did, then return, dipping into the flow of prose almost at random. You can easily drop in at any point.

Although the book is structured into major sections organized around broad themes, Ken takes every opportunity to segue into diversions on particular plants, personal reminiscences, his experience growing his favorite plants, or any number of other interesting side stories. This loose structure is what makes the book so easily accessible.

Perhaps one of the greatest virtues of this book may be its clearly stated goal to capture the interest of people, especially children, who are unaware of plants. The last chapter in the book begins with a discussion of what Dr. Peter H. Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Gardens, calls “plant blindness” – the inability to most Americans to even see plants, much less know their names or anything about them. Planthropology is full of the kind of information about plants that could delight children, that parents could use to reduce “plant blindness” in future generations of potential gardeners and, in doing that, contribute to an awareness of the natural world, and a concern for preserving it.

(photo: Clarkson Potter)

Planting Design: Gardens in Time and Space by Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury

About time for someone to take perennials so seriously they write a manifesto.

I've read all the books by Oudolf, Kingsbury (and occasionally others in changing combination with one or the other). I have to fess up to ordering this book several months before it was published by Timber Press (bless Timber Press for their wonderful selections). I'm a fan of these guys.

At first I found this book off-putting, distubing. It seemed to be trying too hard to make a point - or several points. Now that I've read it three times, I realize it simply contains so much information it's almost bursting out of its covers. Gardening is getting political. If you remember an article by Michael Pollan in the New York Times magazine several years ago, in which he ripped such authors as Ken Druse for promoting "natural gardening," a term which he and others have claimed as virtually meaningless, you know how political it can get.

If Planting the Natural Garden was poetry, this book is, indeed, a manifesto, but it is much more. Its focus is herbaceous perennials, and the art of designing with plants to make gardens, as opposed to landscape architecture, which is usually practiced with minimal use of plants and minimal knowledge of how they grow.