Gardening while the planet burns

It was the height of the pandemic, 2020, and in the middle of lockdown, there was a lot of interest around gardening creators. I’d been contacted by a literary agent from one of the big London outfits on the back of the podcast – still going, by the way, next series in the works (the phrase “in the works” does a lot of heavy lifting for me, but I’m presently editing the first episode and lining up guests for the rest). Turns out this particular agent had a terrible idea for a terrible book that was so ill-suited to my particular horticultural schtick that to this day I wonder what he can have been smoking. Nonetheless, the experience was useful, since I’d been thinking that I really ought finally to write a book, and it spurred me on to seek out more suitable representation. And it was in the process of pitching the agent I would sign with that I unleashed a short proposal I’d been kicking around as an idea: something I could write from that uncomfortable position in which I would both practice and preach the benefits of a form of low impact, wildlife-friendly gardening, while being fully aware that it makes very little difference when ranged against the vested interests driving anthropogenic climate change.

It went something like this.

I’ve always been interested in the stories we tell ourselves about our place in the world, and how we choose to portray the people we think we are, through the choices we make. The jobs we do, the cars we drive, the places we shop, the food we eat. The areas we live in, the houses we buy, the way we decorate our homes. And the way that we garden.

After all, what is a garden? It’s a piece of wilderness that we’ve stuck a fence around, where we like to tell ourselves we’re in charge.

And that’s something we have to admit, to own.

Because even the most environmentally conscious of us are KIDDING OURSELVES if we think that we’re getting back to nature when we garden.

Don’t get me wrong. I love gardening. I am a gardener. I understand as well as any the benefits to our mental and physical health of that connection with plants and nature and the soil. I am all over that stuff.

But when does nature ever choose to build a garden? She doesn’t.

Because a garden cannot happen without a human decision to bring it into being. And so gardens are, at their very root, anthropocentric, speciesist, and steeped in privilege. And when we behave in such a way that would deny this, even implicitly, you can add a large dose of hypocrisy to this list.

So, I tell myself, suck it up, hippy. It might make you uncomfortable, but there it is.

And so, broadening this out, this is the background against which we’re gardening. Social injustice, huge global inequalities, gender politics, animal exploitation, climate change. COVID19 as an outworking of some of those things.*

And in this context, I and many like me have escaped to the garden, for solace and refuge and healing and sanctuary. All these things. And I feel good about my connections to the landscape, and I garden in sympathy with the rhythms of nature, and I eschew slug pellets and decry peat in my potting compost. And this makes a great deal of difference TO ME.

But the planet’s still going to shit.

I feel like this being-in-touch-with-nature should be having some effect, making some difference. But really, is it anything more than a middle-aged white man playing with his petunias while the world burns? I’m not sure.

So, am I about to stop gardening? Am I hell.

Am I going to find a way to make sense of this? You can be sure I’m going to try.

For the record, I have still to make sense of this.

And it turns out that the book I wrote wasn’t, in the end, that book, but this one which, if I’m honest, was much more within my wheelhouse. In fact, Darryl Moore’s Gardening in a Changing World. Plants, people, and the climate crisis, which came out a year or so later, did far more justice to these topics than I’m sure I ever could have done. So it all worked out for the best, as far as the books are concerned.

As far as gardening while the planet burns... well. What else have we been doing these past few weeks? Never very far from my mind, it’s all brought it back into sharp relief, and while I’m not growing any petunias just now, I have been tending to my garden, and helping others tend to theirs, while the second extraordinary heatwave in a matter of weeks has been wreaking havoc across western Europe.

There are moments when you have to extend yourself the grace to wonder, what am I doing? What’s the point?

And then there are other moments – thankfully, more of this kind – where I remind myself that simply because gardening, or any creative endeavour, really ought to mean something, that’s not the same as saying it ought to do anything. It’s fabulous, exciting, and powerful when these results collide, but I don’t think one has to be contingent upon the other. I will always choose to garden in a way that’s sympathetic to the wildlife that shares this space with me, just as I’ll choose to look down my nose at those who don’t, while defending their right to garden in whatever god-awful way they choose. That speaks to the meaning I make from what I’m doing out here, not why I’m doing it. I’m not daft enough to think nature needs me in that way – though she’s probably quietly appreciative that I’ve not covered the soil with plastic grass or concrete, or unleashed a barrage of neurotoxins upon the local pollinator population.

When we’re honest about what we expect of this activity, we see that we spread a weighty burden of expectation over our beds and borders. But there’s nothing altruistic about a private garden, or indeed a family garden, because most of us don’t start a family for the benefit of society at large. A garden is an inherently egotistical enterprise, and I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense, but as a literal and grounded outworking of our ego. I think that’s fine. But figures from the RHS suggest that gardens cover three times as much land in the UK as nature reserves, while the wildlife trusts highlight the part they can play in a national nature recovery network.

I admit to finding these statistics thrilling, and to being excited by what we, as private individuals with gardens, can achieve together to counter the destructive influence of modern land-use upon the natural world. But then I see that while domestic gardens sit upon half a million hectares of UK soil, agriculture alone occupies 34 times as much at roughly 17 million hectares, and the scale of what we’re demanding of ourselves and our gardens hits home. I’m back to fiddling with my penstemon cuttings bulking up in their peat-free growing medium, sprayed with nothing more noxious than a bit of foliar seaweed, while the yellowing grass of the footpaths across the fields out back tells me at least where the farmer’s glyphosate has oversprayed from the boom at ground level, if not quite where it’s drifted on the wind (it’s all about nozzles, by the way. If you ever do a spraying course, you’ll learn to hold forth at length about the different kinds of spray nozzle, like some land-based Ancient Mariner). Our best, most well-intentioned efforts are dwarfed by vast systemic power and wealth, and while it maybe be popular to dance upon the putative grave of late stage capitalism, it’s more than a bit previous.

It’s crushing.

I’m aware that my viewpoint vacillates wildly between Pollyanna one week, and Chicken Licken the next – the sky is falling, but it’s burning as it comes down on us. On balance, I don’t – can’t – live in a state of despair, and so I have great optimism for the future of our planet at a Gaia level, if not perhaps quite so much for our own place on it, or for the global ecosystem we’re familiar with. And the increasingly hectic schedule of extreme weather events only serves to remind me that the reassuring fictions we spun ourselves in the noughties – reduce, reuse, recycle, the green economy will save us – were naive at best, and quite likely something entirely more sinister to keep us distracted. Am I going to fix any of this with my garden? I am not. And neither are you. And neither is the whole, wonderful community of gardeners. Not even when some of them are also regenerative farmers. Ain’t going to happen.

In today’s discourse you hear a lot of “it’s not to late to avert disaster, but it’s getting uncomfortably close to that point.” You have to hold onto that, and trust in our resilience and inventiveness as a species to find a solution at the eleventy-eleventh hour. But let’s not burden our gardens with the responsibility. Maybe the solutions will come to us while we’re out there, in our sanctuaries, our retreats, the living green spaces we have assembled to help us to understand, recover from, and face again the wider world. But the reason we garden is to have a garden, and that has to be enough. We might be doing it while the planet burns, but we have to trust that in doing so we’re putting ourselves in touch with a deeper wisdom that somehow, in a way we’ve yet to comprehend, has it all in hand. Quite what that means for you and me and the kids, I have no idea. Meanwhile, there are roses to deadhead, fennel leaves to rub between our hands and sniff, and a huge crop of blackberries on the way.

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