Essay on Gardening

"This book was published about three years ago. I was introduced to it after a visit to Strilli Oppenheimer’s garden in Brenthurst, Johannesburg. The book is based on the philosophy of gardening where you accept natural intervention as part of the garden. So you let weeds grow where they look good. You don’t try to order nature. It is all about aesthetics. If you are happy with what nature is doing, you include it. In other words, there is no hierarchy between gardening and unregulated nature . You accommodate them both. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter That’s an interesting idea, and the book itself is beautifully done. It is privately and expensively produced in a very stylish way. As a writer who does illustrated books, I am deeply envious. And it is very inclusive – it covers topiary, borders, and flowers. Borders, for example, are planted and allowed to self-seed. So if a plant takes over it takes over, and when they grow out another plant takes over. What you get is, at best, an amalgam of the best of a meadow or wood and the best of a garden. At worst, it looks a bit chaotic. Yes, it is inspiring. What I love about this book is the combination of a really interesting new idea and a beautifully produced book. The author, Henk Gerritsen, is a superb botanist and plantsman. I am not a plantsman, so I admire and respect his deep knowledge about plants growing in their natural habitat and how he applies that to the garden. I think that you cannot isolate human beings from the chain of nature, this incredibly complex jigsaw that we are quite a small piece of. You have to be responsible, because everything connects to everything – from the trillions of bacteria in a square foot of soil beneath your feet to you and your hugely inflated ego. I am talking about all of us here! We are just one of those bacteria, and until we see and value ourselves as a component part of this fabulously rich ecosystem – and stop trying to destroy other parts of it along the way – we will never survive. “I think that you cannot isolate human beings from the chain of nature, this incredibly complex jigsaw that we are quite a small piece of” In order to sustain our world in connection with the soil, we have to sustain as much other life in the soil as possible. I don’t see it as any more complex than that. It strikes me as a kind of hubris to think that we can sculpt nature, or push different aspects of it, without paying some kind of a price for our actions. I don’t believe that."