Author: Lorraine Shannon

“In the country it was as if every tree said to me ‘Holy! Holy!’ Who can ever express the ecstasy of the woods?” (Ludwig van Beethoven).

Late last year I joined the newly formed Wild Mountain Collective and have since become the convener of an annual series of seminars. The first was titled ‘Celebrating Trees’ and featured environmental artist Janet Laurence speaking on her commissioned work in the MCA Gallery and Louise Fowler-Smith talking about sacred Trees in India. Both speakers clearly felt a great affinity with trees and saw them as in some sense sacred.

I was reminded of my own introduction to the notion of sacred trees and groves when reading Ursula le Guin’s EarthSea Trilogymany years ago when I was living in County Meath in Ireland. My cottage was close to a collection of Neolithic passage tombs and the atmosphere of ancient human activity immersed in nature was palpable. My fascination with sacred groves in fantasy fiction and the surrounding sense of mythic antiquity led to my becoming a frequent visitor to the Balrath Woods with their massive old beech trees.

Although the Beech tree is not native to Ireland it is connected to Ogma, the Celtic warrior god who is credited with inventing the Ogham alphabet, known as the tree alphabet and in general beech trees are symbols of study and knowledge, books and learning. From an etymological perspective there is a strong connection between ‘beech’ and ‘book’ in many European languages. Gilford’s The Wisdom of the Trees, for example, states that ‘boc’ was the word for beech in Old English and later became ‘book.’ German uses ‘buche’ for beech, which later became ‘buch’ (book) and buchstabe is the word for alphabet. Likewise, collections of early manuscripts also have aboreal origins as ‘codex’ is a later spelling of the Latin ‘caudex,’ meaning the trunk of a tree.

I travelled round the country visiting many sites of Ogham stones, which date from around the fourth century AD. They were in use for about 500 years and many of the letters are linked to old Irish names for certain trees. Each Ogham symbol has a name, for example, the letter ‘b’ is called beithe– ‘birch,’ and the letter ‘c’ is called coll– ‘hazel.’

All this enhanced my fascination with both trees and writing that had its genesis in my childhood in New Zealand where bedtime stories often included Maori myths with their reverence for Tane, the lord of the forest who brought this world into being by separating earth and sky. He had his roots in the earth and his head in the heavens. He fashioned the first humans, adorned the heavens and brought the baskets of knowledge, wisdom and understanding down from the sky to human beings. All trees in the forest are seen as mimicking the god Tane, as the tree holds the sky aloft, bringing light into the world. As a child I was enchanted by this notion of trees holding up the sky but the removal of a giant Rimu tree, amid much angry protesting, at the end of our street to provide space for more housing constantly erupted in my nightmares.

Although there is no Maori equivalent of Ogham, each of the biggest and oldest Kauri trees are given personal names. One, called Tane Muhutahas a trunk like a lighthouse and was already 400 years old when the Maori first arrived from Polynesia. Colin Tudge writes in The Secret Life of Treesthat, “many a redwood still standing tall in California was ancient by the time Columbus first made Europe aware that the Americas existed. Yet the redwoods are striplings compared to some of California’s pines, which germinated at about the time that human beings invented writing and so are as old as all of written history. These trees out on their parched hills were already impressively old when Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, or indeed when Abraham was born. So it is that some living trees have seen the rise and fall of entire civilizations” (p.2).

Trees matter in the world. Not just iconic trees, ancient trees with names, huge trees that are a tourist attraction, but all trees. And writing matters too. Nowadays it would seem we would prefer to relegate trees to the odd splash of greenery among shopping malls or confine them to areas where it is impossible to farm. Why I endlessly ask myself do so many of us in industrialized countries find trees anathema and it there an unacknowledged disdain also for nature writing: writing that calls us into life amid the trees.

Years later studying for a PhD I read Robert Pogue Harrison’s book, Forests. The Shadow of Civilization in which he writes of our paradoxical attitude of reverence and hostility towards forests, of how we somehow see them as opposed to civilization. He quotes Giambattista Vico, an Italian theorist of the eighteenth century who offers an imaginative insight into this psychic split with his story of the first men, brutal giants, living in dense forests that shielded them from the sky. When they experienced their first thunderstorm they “were frightened and astonished by the great effect whose cause they did not know, and raised their eyes and became aware of the sky.”

Because they saw nothing, or at least nothing definite, they pictured the sky to themselves as a huge, animated body: a body not seen but imagined as there beyond the treetops. Harrison writes of how, “this act of picturing an image within the mind marks, for Vico, the first humanizing event in prehistory. The giants produce an image in the empty space of their minds – a space as empty and abysmal as the sky itself. In this manner the first human idea was born, that of Jove, father of the world, hurling the lightning bolt from his abode in the sky. In the guise of Jupiter and Zeus, this deity will later reign supreme among the gods of antiquity.”

In Vico’s story enlightenment began at the moment when it was possible to see beyond the treetops, and so the opposition of forest and civilization began. The forests came first, before the human world with its cities and civilization and it was the forests that hid god from the people. Vico’s crucial insight was that the dread and fear of forests in western civilization derives from the fact that, at least since Greek and Roman times, we have been a civilization of sky-worshippers, children of a celestial father and only by creating clearings in the forest could we establish a world.

How very different the many Indigenous and pre-Christian relationships with trees are in comparison. The dualism that pervades western understanding of life is absent and the pernicious need to destroy trees while at the same time cultivating a nostalgic and sentimental attitude towards special trees to remind us of what we have lost is not in evidence.

In European culture the word ‘savage’ was derived from silva meaning a wood and the progress of humankind was considered to be from the forest to the field. However, in the pre-Christian era forests were also considered to be the site of miracles and the source of great spiritual awakening. The forest itself was seen as a primitive church and the first temples were forest groves although subsequently replaced by built structures. Such sacred groves were imbued with powers beyond those of humans. They were home to spirits that could take or give life. Druids, known as those with tree knowledge, used trees as places of gathering for worship. They valued the trees and even planted trees to form groves in which they could worship. For their most sacred places they chose the deepest parts of woodlands and either planted trees or used existing groves as places of worship.

Centuries later William Blake praised the Bards, the first order of Druids, who understood trees as doors to the spirit world.

O hear the voice of the Bard

Who present past and future sees

Whose ears have heard the holy Word

That walked among the ancient trees.

How, then, might we turn this destructiveness around and return to a viable sense of trees as sacred? It is possible? Janet Laurence and Louise Fowler-Smith both approach trees through visual images but, taking the Beech tree as my cue, I would like to explore language and specifically writing as offering another small step in the right direction. Apart from the Beech, there are many varied examples of direct connections between trees and writing. In the Old World of Mesopotamia, for example, an ancient Egyptian cosmology has a central axis of the universe which is a gigantic tree with the Sun God perching in its branches. As in Nordic and Celtic cosmology, the Egyptian Tree of Life is closely linked with the alphabet and writing.

Fred Hageneder in The Heritage of Trees describes how the temple of Ramses II in Thebes “shows the god of scripture, Djahuti (Thoth), and the goddess Seshat inscribing the king’s name on the leaves of the sacred Persea tree … It was the tree itself that gave the knowledge of writing” (p.50). Hageneder details a multitude of examples of how the vocabulary of both ancient Germanic languages and Icelandic all suggested that social concepts of growth and communication were strongly associated with the woods. “Perhaps,” he writes, “the most astonishing link of all is the origin of the simple but profound words withand without – vid (Icelandic), ved(Danish) and wad(Swedish) – in the same root. The Icelandic vid-oetanmeans ‘without’ – literally ‘outside the forest.’ Inside the forest the human being could be visited (vitja) by wisdom (vitra) or witness (vitna) a revelation or vision (vitran) that completely changed his or her consciousness (vita; Anglo-Saxon witan). Under trees people could mature into a true leader (viti), a prophet (vitki) a wizard or witch (vitta), or a sage (vitringr)” (p.125).

There are far too many of these linguistic links to detail here but I’m also reminded of Buddha finding the ‘ultimate and unconditioned truth’ under the Bodhi Tree, the Tree of Enlightenment. Early Buddhism apparently did not depict the Buddha in human form. All that was shown was the tree, with the vacant space at its foot where Buddha should be seen. Buddha was at one with the universe and could therefore be represented best by the Cosmic Tree itself. Furthermore, the earliest Buddhist texts call the Bodhi tree – and not the Buddha – the Great Awakener.

So these are a few of the alternative ways of being, ways that hint at a different sort of wisdom and knowledge to that of western Enlightenment with its need to destroy trees in order to establish civilization. Early non-western literature also explored such ideas. The most famous is the epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s oldest work of literature, composed about four to five thousand years ago. In this story Gilgamesh kills Humbaba, the guardian of the forest and then proceeds to indiscriminately fell the great cedar trees. The very beginnings of literature therefore recognized the symbolic significance of trees and the consequences of humankind’s destructive impulses against nature.

Last year I was on holiday in Japan and one kilometer from the site where the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima there is a tree that miraculously survived the bombing when everything around it was destroyed. It still survives and continues to grow. I took heart that a tree could withstand one of the worst acts that humankind has inflicted on the earth.

Around the world trees continue to survive although sadly not in the abundance necessary for the health of the planet. In Australia we thoughtlessly destroy old growth forests for timber or clear-fell vast areas for agriculture. Regenerative agriculture offers a glimmer of hope by planting trees to capture carbon from the atmosphere and allow their deep-rooted systems to recycle nutrients from the soil. Some farmers diversify by incorporating fruit and nut trees while others provide trees as sanctuaries for depleted wildlife such as birds and insects. These trees also prevent erosion, keep waterways and the air clean.

Fortunately western literature also has its alternative writings that claim trees as sacred, forests and woods as places where wisdom may be gained or a change in consciousness experienced. This ‘regenerative’ writing disputes the notion that trees exist solely ‘for the good of humanity,’ that their wellbeing is important but only if it serves humankind. It is not writing in which an active knower examines a passive object. A tree for a regenerative writer is something to be encountered and addressed directly, as a fellow being in all its immediacy; an object of empathy, not simply of manipulation. It involves a reasoned reflection about humans and their place on the earth as well as acknowledging mystery. Our use of trees can never be heedless. They lead their own lives and have their own agenda. Much of the point about writing about trees is communication. In recognizing the tree as part of a community of discourse, we are hopefully shaping acts and attitudes; we are generating a manner of writing that is true to the task of sustainable dwelling at peace for humans and the earth alike.

The poet Alice Oswald captures the overlap of trees and writing in her poem:

If you bend a branch until it’s

Horizontal, the sap will slow to a

Stopping point: a comma or colon,

Made of leaves grown into one

Another and over one another and

Hardened. Out of this pause comes a

Flower which unfolds in spirals,

As if the leaf form, unable to keep to

Its lines, has begun to pivot.

The first edible garden festival in the blue mountains, organized by Susanne Rix, is open to the public this weekend, the 3rd and 4th of March. Over thirty edible gardens, including school gardens, community gardens, and several commercial gardens as well as many private gardens are available for viewing. Unfortunately I had to withdraw my garden due to a family funeral so I’ve decided to write some essays featuring aspects of edible gardens including photos taken in my garden and some of other gardens in the festival. Below is a photo of a henhouse in a Blackheath garden.

My own garden is designed with several factors in mind. First, (but not in order of importance) I am a plant person and can become obsessed with acquiring a wide range of rare and unusual ornamental perennials. There is, fortunately a limit to the number of plants that can be squeezed into the existing flowerbeds, especially given the restrictions of climate and the need for drought resistant plants.

Second, no garden as far as I am concerned is complete without vegetables, fruit trees, soft fruit and hens. Although aesthetics are of prime importance any garden worth its salt must, in my opinion, do more than nod to self-sufficiency.

Third, I am deeply committed to creating a space that provides habitat for as many species as possible. With this in mind my plans for the garden include a range of insect hotels, nesting boxes, and possum boxes. At present it features several birdbaths, bee baths, designed habitat for skinks and blue tongue lizards and a wide range of insect and bird attracting plants. My aim is to craft all these features to also act as interesting and stimulating garden art.

Hence, my chicken run was designed, not simply to accommodate my chooks as commodiously as possible but to also provide space for art and design work. I am consequently looking forward to seeing other chook runs in the mountains where backyard hens are common. Of course the Internet abounds with images of fancy ‘chook palaces’ and ‘chook mahals’ but it is local creativity that interests me along with the opportunity to meet up with like-minded gardeners.

The practical aspects of having hens obviously include eating beautiful, fresh, organic eggs as well as creating a sustainable system of feeding scraps to the hens, using the manure for liquid plant feed or adding it to the compost system. Hens are also wonderful pest eradicators, delighting in a lunch of caterpillars, grubs and snails. The less practical, but equally important aspect is the emotional enrichment the chickens bring to my life. Each one has a unique personality:

Black-eyed Susie, the Australorp loves to be picked up and stroked. She is also exceptionally nosey and has to watch everything I do.

Hyacinth, a beautiful Brahma with feathered feet is top hen but motherly and placid. Bluebell the Araucana is raucous and full of importance.

The two little silver laced Wyandottes, Snowdrop and Blossom are very young and yet to reveal their individuality. Each day as I watch them dust bathing, pecking and scratching they teach me that life is not meant to be lived in a rush. Above all they make me laugh.

My hen house and run is octagonal, built to be fox and snake proof and includes fruit trees in the run to provide shade in the summer and protect the fruit from ever-hungry parrots.

It was built three and a half years ago when my partner and I bought the property and replaced a section of the previous owner’s vegetable garden. This meant it could be erected without removing established plants although the downside was losing an area of fertile soil.

The design required a great many complicated measurements. The central section has an octagonal house with two nesting boxes and art deco mosaic patterns on the outside.

A larger octagonal area above the house and extending beyond it is covered with clear roofing material to provide shelter from rain. It is surrounded by a narrow decorative green roof planted with sedums. I plan to rain-proof more of the roof area as in heavy downpours there isn’t sufficient dry areas. This is the only part of the design that didn’t work out completely satisfactorily. Although surprisingly the wire mesh roof proved to be snow-proof when we had a heavy fall two years ago. The snow sat on the roof all morning creating an eerie semi-darkness in the run and the chooks seemed unable to decide whether it was day or night.

At the moment I have five hens, all heritage breeds and plan to extend this small flock later this year. I am a big fan of heritage hens for many reasons, although exactly what heritage means is up for debate as chickens have been domesticated for approximately 8,000 – 10,000 years. Annie Potts writes that:

As early as 1500 BC depictions of chickens emerge in Egyptian hieroglyphic art. … Fourth-century Greek records state that Egyptians had mastered poultry husbandry and had been practising artificial incubation of chicks for many years.

She also notes that early remains of chickens have been found in sub-Saharan Africa, while in the eighteenth century Captain Cook noticed chickens on the Easter Islands, New Caledonia and elsewhere in the Pacific. In South America the Araucana chicken may be the result of interbreeding between native grouse and early unrecorded visitors to the Americas. The Araucana, however, is unique among chicken breeds for its blue eggs.

The range of heritage hens available today, however, is the result of selective mating of breeds during the Victorian era when breeding and showing animals, including poultry, became a national pastime in the UK. By the start of the 20th century scores of new breeds had been created, quickly followed by publications, which listed the ideal physical and temperamental characteristics of recognized breeds.

Sadly, chickens have since been reduced to the most manipulated beings on the planet. This is what rampant capitalism does to the voiceless. Before World War I chickens were kept for eggs with meat obtained from home slaughtered young cockerels. Eating chicken meat was far from an everyday occurrence. As soon as FKC and McDonalds became part of daily life in Australia 500 million broiler chickens have been killed each year while 11 million battery hens produce 93% of the nation’s eggs. Instead of a natural lifespan of around 12 years, a typical farmed chick today lives for about 6 weeks, never having experienced sunshine, rain or grass. Layers, likewise, live indoors, subjected to artificial lighting in cramped cages, unable to preen, scratch or even turn around.

There has been a vast number of articles published on the inhumane treatment of hens subjected to industrialised practices but for detailed information I recommend Annie Potts’ book Chicken, published in the Reaktion animal series in 2012. It was when I became aware of the shocking treatment of battery hens that I decided to acquire some backyard chickens. My first chooks were Isa Browns rescued from a battery farm. Unfortunately Isa Browns are so highly genetically modified for constant egg laying that after about three years they develop massive tumors and die. I decided I could no longer keep Isa Browns as I felt I would be supporting the breeding of these poor creatures. And so began my love affair with heritage breeds, including discovering they are inclined to go broody and get cranky, decide to moult just when you are hoping for extra eggs. In other words they are delightfully themselves and refuse to be subjected to human demands.

There is no doubt that having decided to be part of the more or less fashionable suburban chicken movement I was propelled into a whole new world of experience. On one level it was a declaration of independence – however small – from the food conglomerates that treat animals as commodities. It was also a political statement in support of a more just and sustainable society. Having backyard chooks speaks to a larger movement toward increased responsibility for ourselves, our communities, the land and other species. As Clea Danaan writes:

… we are overturning the illusion that we are separate beings who can do whatever we want. Raising chickens is a vote for a more compassionate, nature-based economy. It is an education in interconnection, responsibility and compassion.

It has been an inspiring day today wandering through the edible gardens of the Blue Mountains and seeing so many happy and healthy chickens, ducks and geese, such an array of imaginatively created hen houses and runs. Long may it last.

And I have come home inspired to start work on a large insect hotel which will also double as a decorative front wall of my garden shed. This will feature in my next post.

Winter in the Blue Mountains this year has been remarkably mild; a little chilly in the mornings followed by clear sunny skies. Perfect gardening weather I think as I busy myself uprooting seedling blackberries and other undesirables. And yet at the back of my mind there’s a lurking anxiety which, combined with my memory of extreme high temperatures in the summer, inevitably raises the spectre of climate change and all that it implies for gardens, biodiversity, our very existence.

As soon as a plant inexplicably dies or another fails to flourish, in fact whenever anything out of the ordinary occurs, an imaginary headline screaming “climate change” flashes into my mind. Needless to say I’ve read endless articles in an effort to keep pace with climate change data. Many refer to the “long emergency;” to what is known as a “wicked problem.” Gardening problems are of course merely the tip of this melting iceberg in which interrelated effects including global phenomena such as biodiversity and geophysical impacts, population increase and migration, urbanization, disparities in wealth appear to have no panacea within the capitalist machine.

These wide-ranging issues may seem to reduce my elephant in the garden to insignificance but there’s no escaping the fact that these days it is impossible to garden without experiencing intense anxiety and uncertainty about the future. I am hardly the only gardener to feel at a loss, powerless to effect any meaningful change.

So I am rather surprised when, in the midst of brooding about the future and the fears this engenders, the notion of generosity comes to my mind. This strikes me as incongruous until I remind myself that generosity is at the heart of all life. It is, perhaps, stating the obvious to say that everything animate on our planet comes into being needing to receive from another or others in order to survive. Receiving nutrients be it soil and moisture for a plant or milk from a mother is inseparable from the act of giving. This integrated movement of giving/receiving is, we might say, a primary impulse of life and we lose something of our humanity when our generosity is curtailed.

On a broader scale I ask myself what will happen to us when more and more people become displaced by climate change. Already our government refuses to allow many in genuine need to be welcomed into our land so that we are denied our primary impulse to give sustenance to others in distress. And what of those who are displaced? Those who have suffered unimaginable losses and are then confronted with rejection; who are deprived of a promising new life and whose opportunity to be grateful can only wither within them. How do any of us find solace in such a world?

Inevitably I find myself gravitating back to plants in an effort to escape from the seemingly inescapable. Plants and gardening are my panacea that I like to imagine exist outside the capitalist machine. Gardening is where I attempt to find a modicum of agency. Plants are emissaries of life and delight. They work with, rather than against, the powerful flux of life – regardless of their origin, of whether they are native or exotic, cultivated or weeds. Nevertheless, it is true I have been known to wage war on weeds, to uproot in a frenzy those exotic escapees listed as invasive, as dangerous to the long-term ‘purity’ of the native bush.

It is only recently that I have begun to question the need for that solid dividing wall between undesirable exotic plants and weeds and carefully chosen garden species. And I have scrupulously avoided comparing this practice to that of refusing entry to foreigners who arrive uninvited on our shores.

Of course, I’m aware that drawing comparisons between human migrants and alien plant species is probably not very smart. There has been a long contentious history concerning such analogies. Hard-line nativists or restoration purists have been accused of xenophobia, linked to a Nazi blood-and-soil ideology or ethnic cleansing. The American garden designer Jensen, for example wrote:

“To be true to yourself, I mean true to your native landscape is a very fundamental issue – it is to be or not to be. In the garden you give assent to one idea and outside its boundary to another. Strange things, grotesque things … will creep in and the purity of thoughts in garden making suffers. Freaks are freaks and often bastards – who wants a bastard in the garden, the out of doors shrine of your home?”

However, despite the many disadvantages, I’m intent on exploring this analogy because I believe that climate change necessitates raking through the diverse possibilities of metaphors of human, plant and animal movement: primarily I’m fascinated by the ways in which gardening can stimulate psychic movement, how the admittedly limited freedom of movement and agency I find in gardening and writing about gardening works to offset the curtailment of movement and suppression of agency in other areas of my life; how the activity of giving and receiving moves writing from the page to be received by the land, where gardens become poems written in the elements and in living matter. Where the movement of plants, their global wanderings resist bioregional control, where humans might expand their horizons, collaborate with these global wanderings and adopt the perspective of wild, opportunistic plants. Where the borders around gardens are no longer fixed.

To find new, possibly gentler, more creative and generous ways of living and acting in an imperiled world requires that we alter our perception of what constitutes a garden. Simon Pugh, for example, describes a garden as offering “an image of nature that has been internalised to protect against fear of the ‘outside’ a possible source of panic and fear.” For him, “the garden represents fear as much as it represents control of that fear.” In contrast, I find myself increasingly drawn to the idea of a garden where cultivation does not equal control but instead experimental mixtures of the wild and the artificial, the human and non-human. As a place where, instead of fear, the force and efficacy of growth and generosity opens up a space to critically revisit different practices and their implications.

Such a generous gardening practice was alluded to by Val Plumwood who described gardening as “adaptive,” as a complex project in which the garden negotiates with or comes to terms with its environment. In adaptive gardening there is a dialogical relationship with surrounding elements both of natural and cultural heritage, including the past. This accurately reflects the gardening practice in some of the famous Blue Mountains gardens in Mount Wilson, which contrary to popular belief, sought from the time they were established to create a synthesis of the global and local. It has become commonplace to interpret these gardens as stemming from a colonial disdain for Australian flora. The attitudes of the first resident gardeners were, however, more complex. Although without doubt well-to-do and colonial in attitude, rather than slavishly recreating English gardens of the time they planted a wide diversity of cool climate plants while being equally fascinated by the natural history of the area and collecting indigenous plants and corresponding with experts in Sydney.

This resulted in the 1920s in a complete survey of the vegetation conducted by Sydney University – the first ecological study undertaken in Australia. Ultimately these gardeners’ passion for natural history led to the early conservation of much of the vegetation in reserves long before the creation of the national parks or the granting of world heritage status.

In the 20^th century some of these gardens were bought by botanists who scoured the world for rare and spectacular plants as well as raising hybrids and variants of their own. These gardeners, then, rather than recreating a narrowly nostalgic replica of the English garden epitomized the blending of local and global.

A present-day example is Merry Garth which features a wide selection of plants from the European Alps, the Rocky Mountains and natives of Spain, Portugal, New Zealand and Japan. This planting blends with indigenous flora – tall tree ferns, most over 200 years old and in the lower section indigenous remnant rainforest species including giant Banksia integrifolia blend into the bush.

It is, of course, easy to romanticize these gardens, to see them as typifying some high point in Blue Mountains gardening from which the dictates of climate change make decline the only option. It is true that they are examples of a more conservative understanding of the garden, where the gardener must constantly battle against the gathering chaos on the other side of the fence. It is also true that the more the climate changes, the less adapted these gardens will be to current conditions. If fire and water regimes fundamentally change trying to maintain them will be difficult, if not impossible.

However, I prefer not to describe these gardens as on the cusp of decline but to imagine them as a stepping off point for developing gardens in which uncertainty and anxiety gives way to meaningful action, action that not only enhances our humanity but reduces the impact of our rapacious human-centered activities. Such gardens would be understood as generous not only towards exotic plants but would also include modifying our attitude towards those despised species known as weeds.

For me the first step in coming to terms with the notion of an open and generous garden is not simply to understand a garden as a miniature version of global climate problems but to reverse this metaphor and examine how the positive and negative aspects of large-scale processes and big-picture global patterns might transform dwelling in a garden into a new poetics in which fundamental boundaries begin to come undone or be traversed.

With this in mind I want to argue that caring for a garden demands an alternative grammar, a counter-text which, like the subaltern writing of postcolonial resistance and diaspora refuses preservation, the fusion to roots, yet also refuses displacement without an investigation or counter-practice. My focus is on what might constitute this counter-practice, in terms of our stance towards both plant and human life.

Proponents of re-wilding, such as Emma Marris and French gardener Gilles Clement provide versions of this sort of counter-practice through an examination of the long-term results of movement among plant species. Emma Marris in her book The Rambunctious Garden describes the unruly entanglement of weedy species that follow in our wake. She writes of how:

“we are already running the whole Earth, whether we admit it or not. To run it consciously and effectively, we must admit our role and even embrace it. We must temper our romantic notion of untrammeled wilderness and find room next to it for the more nuanced notion of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden, tended by us.”

Marris argues that because nature is ever-changing, on the scale of Earth’s history these rambunctious gardens are as legitimate as any other manifestation of nature. We should, she says, embrace our creations not shun them as monsters.

I admit, at first reading I’m appalled. I think of numerous agricultural or forestry creations that have proved to be truly monstrous in their effect on climate change, biodiversity and human communities. I think of David Quammen writing of the unavoidable prospect of a planet of weeds which he describes as a “crummier place, a lonelier and uglier place, and a particularly wretched place for the two billion people comprising Alan Durning’s absolute poor.” Although my ideal is a generous garden I have perversely spent a lifetime regarding a garden as an oasis, a peaceful enclave protected from unwanted weeds, undesirable invasive species. So, how can I learn to embrace this monstrous world of our making? Is it possible let alone desirable to resist it?

Marris is neither especially concerned with economically and socially disadvantaged people nor with private gardens. Her concern is with advocating human intervention, arguing that in “different places, in different chunks, we should manage nature for different ends – for historical restoration, for species preservation, for self-willed wildness, for ecosystem services, for food and fiber and fish and flame trees and frogs.”

I find Marris most persuasive, where she proposes one solution that applies to all her different goals: to preserve open land, to protect it from development even if it is a so-called ‘trash ecosystem’. Marris asks us to renounce nostalgia and celebrate a biological order that evolves over vast periods of time. She writes, “this conscious and responsible and joyful co-habitation is the future of our planet, our vibrant, thriving, rambunctious garden.”

However, I find it is Gilles Clement whose celebration of an evolving world that is moving from a mosaic of cultural and biological monads, closed in on themselves, to one of multiple interconnections that opens up for me a space for generous gardening. Clement includes the global movement of people at the same time as he critiques the human urge to control nature. He calls for a new way of conceptualizing nature that asks us to re-envision what he calls the “third landscape,” the space where nature is left to its own unsanctioned processes. He sees these areas as a place of refuge for diversity, a genetic reservoir for the planet, in which the movement and agency of plants is beyond human control.

Clement does not see this move from local to global as part of the globalising logic of reducing difference and standardizing solutions. Rather he views globalisation from the perspective of generosity towards the diversity of beings and practices that challenge human notions of order and permanence.

He moves between writing – novels, essays, papers – and making interventions in landscape, seeking a type of love, of giving and receiving in our world that points towards a poetics of interstices, crossing boundaries and engaging with inventive and exuberant life.

In his writing on the third landscape he brings into focus agency beyond the human, critiquing a fusion to roots and investigating the displacement of human control. He offers a vision of counter-practice which critiques a style of human politics and legislation that imposes obstacles to the free biological movements of plants, to the freedom of people to give and receive.

Here are some sections from his In Praise of Vagabonds:

“Plants travel. Especially grasses. They move about as quietly as the wind. We can’t do much about the wind.

Were we to harvest clouds we would be astonished to find a weightless seed mixed in the loess, a fertile dust. Unpredictable landscapes take shape in the sky.

Chance organizes the details, exploits all possible vectors for the distribution of species. Everything is conducive to travel, from marine currents to shoe soles. Travel essentially belongs to animals. Nature charters berry-eating birds, gardening ants, calm subversive sheep, whose wool holds field upon field of seed. And the human – an animal shaken by incessant movements, free trader of diversity.

Evolution benefits from all this, not society. The slightest management problem runs up against provisional timetables … possibilities emerge at every moment. How can we manage the landscape and manage its expenses if it is transformed at the whim of hurricanes? What technocratic grid could we apply to the overflow of nature, to its violence?

In the face of winds and birds, the question of what to regulate remains. Innovative nature sends the legislator back to his documents, in search of reassuring language.

And if we were to ensure against life? Such a project – security at all costs – finds unlikely company among the ecological radicals, the keepers of nostalgia. Nothing should change, our past depends on it say the ones; nothing should change, diversity depends on it, say the others. Everyone rails against the vagabonds.

Discourse goes further. As a politics, it brings minds together around the necessity of eradicating species that come from elsewhere. What will we become if strangers take our ground? We speak of survival. …

To begin with, we oppose life-forms that have no business here … Eliminate first; we’ll look into it afterward. … We prepare a lawsuit, establish a protocol for action; we wage war.”

Clement’s writing on the third landscape provides a glimpse of how uncultivated areas might be celebrated in writing; of how such writing might critique regulations on the movement of people as well as plants. However, he is also a gardener and as a gardener he speaks and writes of the questions that unite the garden and the landscape. He calls for the borders between garden and non-garden to vanish into the “Planetary Garden.” Instead of being limited to a small space that we attempt to control, “the garden is placed within the limits of the biosphere. This is the new enclosure,” in which global mixing is essential to evolutionary process, including that of the human.

The Planetary Garden, clearly closely resembles Marris’ rambunctious garden about which I have had such misgivings. When I ask myself whether I am capable of altering my gardening practice to be more in harmony with the ideas proposed by Marris and Clement I find there is little in their visions

to allay my anxiety, the underlying dis-ease I feel when gardening. Albrecht refers to this as eco-anxiety, as “the generalized sense that the ecological foundations of existence are in the process of collapse.”

The core of my conflicted feelings stems I believe from Marris’ and Clement’s enthusiasm which has allowed them to jump across a psychological barrier without pausing to consider that climate change is as much a psychic phenomenon as it is a concern over biodiversity and geophysics. Before we can celebrate life in the rambunctious or planetary garden we need to find a passage through despair and melancholy. We need to learn how to read loss as a source of future possibility. We need to accept the weedy aliens lurking in our psyches as having an equal right to dwell within us.

It is such acceptance without resignation or denial that Bill Plotkin describes in “Rewilding Psychology.” He argues that “a mature ecotherapy does not attempt to decrease our anxiety, outrage, fear, grief, or despair in response to the ongoing industrial destruction of the biosphere; rather, it helps us more fully experience these feelings so that we can revitalize ourselves emotionally and, in so doing, enable our greatest contributions to a cultural renaissance.”

So, how exactly do we “work through” a wicked problem that includes not only eco-anxiety but also what has become known as solastalgia. Solastalgia is defined as that sense of distress people experience when valued natural environments are negatively transformed. It is the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where we reside and love is under assault. Solastalgia is not about looking back to some imagined golden age, nor is it about moving, finding another home; it is about the dislocation and distress experienced when a loved place is destroyed.

I believe solastalgia can equally be applied to anticipating with dread changes that are yet to happen. So how might we develop a counter-flow of theory and action that replaces a sense of powerlessness with agency and empowerment, enabling a joyful kinship with ‘impure’ gardens that are part-controlled, part-trash ecosystems? And on the broader front how can we extend our generosity to those whose have been displaced from their beloved homes and left adrift, confronted wherever they turn by barriers and blockades?

Once again I find myself drawn back to the individual response. The only solution I have been able to find is a personal one: to recognise and accept my own tiny sphere of influence; of the need to creatively change my practice in gardening and writing, believing, hoping, that relatively small changes can advance the possibility that alternative forms of gardening and writing can become sites for political change, change that will be kindly disposed to those in need.

Without doubt both global and local political and climatic changes have left me grappling with ways to bring my garden experiences into language.

When I try to envisage Australian rambunctious garden writing or writing of the third landscape it seems essential that it encompass rather than discard our particular heritage in which writers have struggled with Indigenous dispossession as well as imported concepts of Romanticism and the pastoral.

Also it is only when we become capable of setting aside our fears and anxieties about change that a generous attitude can enter, bringing with it the realisation that movement does not necessarily bring chaos. Clement, for example, describes how the new breed of gardener would tend a garden. S/he “… keeps an attentive eye on the wanderings of the plants and animals and that enter into the garden.” This allows “everything present in the garden to play an equal role in producing a dense and richly overlapping whole.” The arrival of a new “weed” in the garden might be met with interest and observation – how will this plant interact with others? Does it provide food for insects? How does it affect the overall appearance and experiential qualities of the garden? This does not imply a free-for-all chaos. If a plant proves to have overly “invasive” propensities it can be limited through well-timed interventions. What it does imply is the search for ethical stability rather than a yearning for the past.

These new concepts in garden design take movement and plant agency into consideration. The naturalistic planting movement of Piet Oudolf, in particular, has become a significant global influence. Throughout Europe, urban areas have been planted in parallel with third landscapes to provide city habitats. These small gardens on traffic islands and streetscapes include perennials that self-seed and constantly regenerate themselves. Seed heads are left over the winter to provide food for birds. Oudolf’s work might be thought of as a counter-practice that adapts to aspects of the rambunctious garden yet resists the demise of the garden as such.

The high plant density in an Oudolf garden is a fundamental major break with the past. Density approaching that found in natural plant communities is far more resilient than traditional garden planting with spaces between plants. Plant communities are chosen for their hardiness as well as their aesthetic appeal and suitability for local growing conditions. The high level of diversity and openness to dynamic change that biodiversity needs is taken into account, thereby creating a plant community aimed at creating a convergence of ecology and design.

Such gardens combine the traditional gardener’s passion for unusual herbaceous perennials, trees and shrubs but place them in combinations with both exotic and native grasses. By allowing plants to spread and self-seed notions of order and permanence are challenged. These gardens draw strength from the movement of vibrant plant growth, collaborating with the agency of global wanderings, celebrating an ethos of interconnectedness. I have come to believe this is what gardening is about – giving and receiving to cultivate a terrain of hope where we can live with other species and aid them in their inventiveness. Likewise, we can celebrate human communities that are diverse and open to dynamic change; communities in which generosity flourishes.

As Gilles Clement writes:

“the future lies not in any precise place. It lies between. Between the apparently fixed points marking our path. The landscape under construction will always host more vagabonds than permanently secured beings. Mobile beings, in our image, vagabonds invent solutions for existence.

They accompany us.

Let us join them.”

Without doubt climate change has altered how gardens are designed and how they are “policed”; it has given rise to much anxiety and terrible fear of species losses, human displacement and hunger. But in my daily examinations of how fragile or endangered plants might be suffering in my garden or how many exotic “weeds” have crossed the fence; in my daily perusing of the news headlines of how many people are desperately escaping across borders from life-threatening situations I constantly bring to mind Raine Maria Rilke who wrote, “perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that needs our love.”

The poet/gardener Alice Oswald writes: “I don’t know anything lovelier than those free shocks of sound happening against the backsound of your heart … spadescrapes, birdsong, gravel, rain on polythene, macks moving, … seeds kept in paper, potatoes coming out of boxes, high small leaves or large head-height leaves being shaken, frost on grass … also when you look up, … the landscape as a physical score, … – weather, daylight, woods, all long unstable rhythms and dissonance. When I’m writing a poem, the first thing I hear is its shape somewhere among all that noise” (Oswald, 2000, p. 35).

Garden noise for Oswald is a catalyst for creating a poem and it is the way she evokes a garden saturated by sound that specifically interests me. Listening while working in the garden, Oswald says, is a way of opening a poem out to what lies bodily beyond it. While the eye takes in surfaces, the ear tells us about volume and depth – like tapping a water tank to find how full it is. Listening in such a way, she says, creates poetry in which language is open, porous, allowing what we don’t know to pass through it. It opens a space within human language that reveals the mystery of otherness.

An ecopoetic practice such as Oswald’s disrupts the purity of human speech, and returns it to an enlivened wholeness. For example, she claims that the sound and motion of raking garden leaves puts humans in close contact with otherness. A rake is “a rhythmical but predictable instrument that connects earth to our hands.” Through this kind of close contact you can, she writes, “ hear right into the non-human world, it’s as if you and the trees had found a meeting point in the sound of the rake” (Oswald, 2005, p. xi).

Oswald is unusual in that the sounds she mentions are a combination of noises created by human activity along with the sound of wind, rain, leaves and birds. It is this mix of ambient sounds that are a major influence on her thought and poetry writing.

Traditionally gardens have been associated with visual pleasure but after reading Oswald I have been experimenting with combining sight and sounds to open up a space that allows us to apprehend otherness, that puts our minds into imaginative flight beyond the confines of the garden and lets us sense the depth and breadth of life beyond the human.

Like Oswald, I think of a garden not simply as a humanly cultivated space, but as a layered field of poetics involving “groundwork,” it is a place to think about thinking; to enact and embody our physical relationship with the world. It is also a soundscape within which poetry can either be created or encountered in written form, offering us a route to explore multiple layers of otherness and stimulate us to respond sensitively to nature in general.

The notion of reading poems placed in a garden while working in it or wandering through it as a visitor is derived from garden practices that extend
from the Renaissance through to the eighteenth century. These gardens, known as poetic or emblematic gardens, contained complex iconographical programs that visitors could ‘read’ as they strolled through the grounds. They were often laid out as a circuit so that the visitor walked along a path, which in many ways resembled seeing successive pages of what were known as emblem books – books that combined images, mottoes and inscriptions drawn primarily from classical literature. The educated reader seeing a particular phrase or image would know its traditional meaning and associations.

Variations on this tradition have been revived in some twenty-first century gardens such as Little Sparta in Scotland, created by the poet/gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay. Finlay was particularly attracted to inscriptions, a traditional aspect of gardens – the words on sundials are an obvious example. Part of the appeal of inscriptions has always been that they were a means of bringing the outside world into the garden through the simple expedient of alluding to it.

Fragments in a Finlay garden – quotations out of context, solitary words, are like icebergs, just the tips of a world that we cannot see but must assume to be there, fractions of a larger and mysterious world under the surface.

For example, Finlay’s many ‘WAVES’ in whatever language function in this way, as scraps of a larger ocean, as tokens of the sea that is absent yet almost obsessively remembered and associated for Finlay with the sacred.

My interest in using ecopoetry although similar has a somewhat different emphasis. Ecopoems can be defined as “provide[ing] models of altered perception that promote environmental awareness and active agency” (Scigaj, in Lynch & Naramore Maher, 2012, p.128). They “signal a conscious re-engagement with a world that is familiar and strange, full of animals and plants that we must answer to, and which we need to address again, more carefully, to define the questions that will help us to renegotiate ways of living in an uncertain future of biodiversity loss, climate change and the consequences of disposability” (Borthwick, 2012, p. xvi).

Ecopoetry in a garden is not necessarily didactic like the eighteenth century emblematic garden but provides visual fragments as imaginative stimulation, an entry into the depth of otherness that Oswald writes of.

Wandering through a garden, working in a garden, aware of sound, and encountering a poem creates a pause, a moment of thought in which we become aware of the sounds and rhythms of the poetic fragment placed within the background of garden sounds.

This search for an ecopoetics in which garden others break through and alter our consciousness closely resembles poet Martin Harrison’s comment, “That we must listen to what is other than human and how it is speaking to us and that the act of attention between self and the environment is intertwined and interdependent and completely mutual” (Harrison, 2013, p. 11).

The following few photographs illustrate some initial experiments in creating eco-poetic emblems in my garden.

My aim in choosing poetry and including it in a concrete form in the garden has been to articulate and constantly re-experience ecological issues and deepen my apprehension of the mystery of otherness. Working in the garden I find myself implicated in the ground’s world, thought and earth passing through each other. For visitors walking through the garden these poetic fragments hopefully stimulate thoughts of “a way of being toward the world and toward the self that are not separable” (Elvery, 2013, np)

The first is a fragment from Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem “On a Raised Beach.”

We must reconcile ourselves to the stones
Not the stones to us.

We are immediately faced with a sense of geological time, of how short human existence has been on this planet in comparison to great rock formations or even the humblest pebble and of how, as he writes, “what happens to us is irrelevant to the world’s geology. But what happens to the world’s geology is not irrelevant to us.” Inevitably I find it leads me to consider how I continue to see myself as a self-contained subject imagining I control the garden.

For me, therefore, this fragment of MacDiarmid’s poem placed in the garden articulates the fundamental problem of ecological thought: that of fallaciously thinking we exist outside the world of nature. Yet it also draws attention to how language can set us outside nature. In its entirety “On a Raised Beach” highlights the essential paradox of ecopoetics: that language is both a barrier and a conduit to our experience of the natural world. It asks what poetry is actually capable of representing – in a way defining the limits of ecopoetics.

As a contrast, the quote from Goethe, “All is Leaf” moves us into the realm of animate things. Like McDiarmid, Goethe is dealing with large-scale ideas, of becoming aware of form – his leaf is an idea that is realized in all manifestations of a plant: seed, foliage and flowers are all different forms of the ‘leaf’ idea.
The plant is nothing but leaf, so inseparably united with the seed to be, that the one cannot be thought of without the other – leading me to contemplate how humans cannot be thought of outside their origin and end in nature.

Moya Cannon’s poem “Eros” brings human love into the equation.

The deep and tender earth assails us with dreams, breaks us, nourishes us, as we tug apart its own black crust.

Cannon comments that, “Nothing perhaps, causes the everyday to fall away, or transfigures the ordinary, like the encounter with Eros. This, one of the most earthed of all our human experiences, binding like birth and death, … opens us to some sense of limitlessness in ourselves …”(Cannon, 1995, pp.1-3). It evokes our creative and destructive drives and our need for hope, which Emily Dickinson describes as “the thing with feathers.” Her deceptively simple metaphor captures the fragility of our aspirations. For her hope is a soft songbird that “perches in the soul,” a metaphor for the more-than-human within the human. Hope as a songbird is neither tame nor in captivity, but merely perching so if it does fly away, it may return. By having the hope-bird never ask for crumbs and implying that the speaker supplies them out of love, Dickinson demonstrates her belief that the tiniest amount freely given can keep hope alive. This exchange of loving generosity between the human and bird provides an antidote to a sense of hopelessness about a world where the more-than-human are invariably deprived of “crumbs.”

References:
Borthwick, David. Introduction, Entanglements: New Ecopoetry, edited by David Knowles & Sharon Blackie, Isle of Lewis, Two Ravens Press, 2006.
Cannon, Moya. Editorial, The Poetry Review Ireland, No. 47, Autumn-Winter, 1995, pp.1-3.
Elvery, Ann. Editorial, Plumwood Mountain, Vol. 1, Issue 1013.
Harrison, Martin. The Act of Writing and the Act of Attention, TEXT, Vol. 17, No. 2 (October) 2013.
Lynch, Tom & Susan Naramore Maher (eds). Artifacts and Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley, University of Nebraska Press, 2012.
Oswald, Alice. The Universe in time of rain makes the world alive with noise, A Green Thought in a Green Shade, Milton Keyes, The Poetry Society, 2000.
_______________. Introduction, The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet, London, Faber and Faber, 2005.

It’s National Tree Day on 29th July and sadly after days of wild winds the sound of chain saws dealing with fallen trees is a background constant. So time to think of planting some more and I have a few in mind. A group of Silver Birches at the side of the house – a special variety, Jack Monty, bred in Victoria that are resistant to borer, and near the shed at the bottom of the garden a Pink Dogwood and Judas Tree.

I had planned an essay on trees but time has got away from me so instead I’m posting a few of my favourite pieces of writing on trees. There’s many more I could include but for the moment I’ll stick with four. The first is a poem by my late dear friend and Kangaloon colleague Martin Harrison (www.kangaloon.org) called simply “Plum Trees.”

What the plum trees were doing
was loading galaxies of flowers
like the night sky’s sprawling fire
in the middle of daylight.

Space turned into bloom and fruit.
Soil rose into juice and scent.
Electric, shaken, utterly still,
unpruned wands thirsted for Spring.

Like gluttons, the trees sucked everywhere
from hidden water, seemingly nowhere –
that was the ground inside the dark
as we walked day earth, dead grass.

Unreasonably, not beyond forgetting,
it’s that year’s dry light which falls away
as if plum trees flare in unfenced shadow, momentary as thought, or as a trace of thought.

And with Martin in mind my second piece is quoted from Anne Whiston Spirn’s book The Language of Landscape published by Yale University Press in 1998.

“The wide path up the Hill of Remembrance in Stockholm’s Forest Cemetery is steep at first – climbing eased by low stone steps, deep stone-dust treads, landings every dozen steps; then the slope tapers, steps pass between trees through an open gateway atop the hill, ending just inside low walls. At the beginning of the ascent, steps are set into the hillside, so the slopes enfold the climber; at the end frames of trees and wall enclose. Form and material shape the experience of path and refuge; all modify processes of movement and grieving, in agreement with the meaning its author intended: ‘To give form to a sorrow that cannot be told,’ and experience of difficulty, comforted.”

And now a short piece that opens the chapter “Growth” in David Suzuki and Wayne Grady’s Tree: A Biography, published by Allen and Unwin in 2004.

It has been sixteen years since the fire. The burn is no longer a black hole in the forest but a swath of fresh greenery, lower than the unburned portions but obviously returned to vitality. The smell of charcoal has long left the air. After an exceptionally wet spring, with more than 150 centimetres (60 inches) of rain, the summer has been hot and dry with vigorous forest growth. It is early fall now, and the stream is invisible from the ridge, although there is a sense of it – a line of glossy green – flowing among the dark trunks and writhing roots of the forest floor. The forest is still quiet, but it is not the silence of death, as after a fire, but rather the stillness of rest, of waiting.

There are so many extracts I could quote from Roger McDonald’s beautiful book The Tree in Changing Light but the book happened to fall open at page 125 so here is a short paragraph.

“A tree grew from a rocky crevice. Out of the torn earth’s mouth came the old cry of praise. So whatever the tree was, counted. Whatever the bird was, was perfect in the bird. Poets were born with a stone in their hands, staring and listening until they died still holding it, leaving their words escaping it.”

Growing vegetables is, for me, neither a hobby nor strictly speaking a necessity. Rather I see it as an aesthetic, political and philosophical statement which attempts to follow in the tradition of poet-gardeners of the eighteenth century whose practices were revived in the twentieth century by the poet-gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay in his Scottish garden, Little Sparta. Placing suburban vegetable growing within this grand tradition may seem heresy but I believe to do so is to adopt the tactics of transgression that in Noel Carroll’s words indicate, “the artist’s conception of what must be done in order to rectify or reform … pre-existing practices.” It is an attempt to transfigure our commonplace existence in which ecological degradation and food security are becoming increasingly pressing issues.

In expensive cities such as Sydney real estate prices demand that houses are accompanied by slickly designed ‘rooms outside’ with expensive pavers and the odd specimen plant in a pot beside the pool.

Meanwhile the middle-class owners of these unsustainable paved yards pay high prices for organic vegetables in order to eat what was once more or less freely available to everyone. These newly created luxuries are simply commodified versions of what Ivan Illich referred to as the vernacular. Yet to bring about a return to the vernacular without being dismissed as unrealistically romantic, a luddite, or out of touch with the realities of the economy and the property market requires rethinking the vegetable garden as a creative, artistic space far removed from the stereotype of poverty and scraggly rows of cabbages that was a common sight in post WW II suburbia.

I’m not going to deal here with gardening practicalities – What I’m concerned are our social obligations to restore backyards to health and wholeness through artistic, political and philosophical creativity. I’ll start by taking a brief look at the eighteenth century landscape garden as background before examining Finlay’s garden, Little Sparta as a model for how a suburban vegetable garden might function in Susan Stewart’s words to “question historical knowledge as a model for virtuous action [even] as it asserts the necessity of historical knowledge as a model for virtuous action.”

Traditionally, poets, artists and scholars have created gardens. From the Renaissance on, in Britain and Europe poets often sought what Alexander Pope referred to as a ‘place to stand’ by creating a garden. Within this domain the poet-gardeners established a counter-order so that they came to be seen not as amateur horticulturalists but as social thinkers distilling ethical values through the transformation of landscape. The eighteenth century landscape gardens of poets such as Pope and Shenstone placed classical content within gardens that cultivated an untamed, natural appearance and it was this mix of the classical and the natural that haunted the English garden.

Gardens such as Cobham’s at Stowe did not simply express the idea of freedom by their less contrived scenery. They also included emblems of freedom, justice or goodness, which invoked classical prototypes. The Elysian Fields at Stowe, for example, represent an allegory of good and bad government. John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis write of these gardens: “the assimilation of Classical ideas was not merely a matter of imitation … but of registering the difficulties as well as the opportunities of cultural obligations.”

Gardener-poets such as Pope understood that the two disparate forms of classicism and the natural in fact had much in common. Instead of defining nature as political territory dominated by man, the neoclassical and landscape garden aimed to give voice to natural order. Meanwhile the inscriptions and citations returned to a classical, mythological landscape that was rendered present without being real. It is this use of written words, of emblems and iconographical signposts that Finlay revised in his Little Sparta.

It is impossible to do justice to t he range and complexity of Finlay’s garden practices here but a starting point is that his decision to place poems and quotations in a natural environment resulted from his need to reflect on the conjunction between the aesthetics of power in the modern world and the power of aesthetics.

Finlay saw classical antiquity as a means whereby he could make a poetic statement not just on the decline and death of great civilisations but on human life itself. His garden, like those of the eighteenth century poet-gardeners functions as a garden of ideas. He revived essential concepts about the relationship of garden spaces to the outside world through emblems and quotations.

His fascination with inscriptions clearly emerges out of his earlier work in concrete poetry and he commented in the early 1960s that ‘concrete’ by its very limitations offers a tangible image of goodness and sanity; … “It is a model, of order, even if set in a space which is full of doubt.”

Finlay referred to his use of classical vocabulary as a ‘rearmament programme’ with which to analyse human conflict. “Certain gardens,” he commented, “are described as retreats when really they are attacks.” This manifesto is represented in the inscription on his garden temple. It reads,

“To Apollo: His Music, His Missiles, His Muses.” Apollo patron of the muses is the archer who dispatches messages of death yet at the same time he is the lyre-player offering messages of music.

In a similar vein, he designed fountains and bird tables as aircraft carriers, carved stone hand grenades as finials and a statue of Apollo clutching a machine gun. Miles Orvell writes of Finlay’s use of militaristic themes such as warships: “On the one hand the domestication of armaments within an ordered space implicitly mocks their power over our lives. But the playful reduction does not remove the charge of violence from the objects. Rather, it is the special order imposed on instruments of violent disorder that creates the tensions and paradox in Finlay’s armament works.”

Radical suburban vegetable gardening provides a counterpoint to Finlay’s rearmament. It takes as its classical forebear not Apollo but Epicurus.

It replaces Apollo’s arrows and music with an Epicurean understanding of pleasure. By doing so it attempts to create a special order that also critiques the instruments of violent disorder in contemporary society and it comments not just on the decline of human life but all life on the planet. Today we not only have the warship as temple but the mining industry, coal fired power stations and giant corporations such as Monsanto dominating the market with pesticides and hybridised seeds. The Epicurean backyard provides a small space on which to stand, a space which enables us to both attempt to offset the forces that bring about death of non-human species and to ponder the forces of destruction such as global capitalism and the commodification of food.

The vegetable garden confronts us with necessary violence: that we must destroy in order to survive; that harvesting and eating what we have nurtured requires imposing a special order on our backyard microcosm that cannot but include the use of power. As the eighteenth century landscape garden sought to give voice to a natural order so the Epicurean backyard seeks to partake of an ecosystem while interrogating the misuse of power.

Finlay examined a somewhat different heritage and his garden is dominated by the notion of terror in Arcady, represented by a tank in an idyllic setting. In contrast the Epicurean backyard places less emphasis on terror as a useful strategy. Without disavowing the reality of terror, it instead regards the room outside as a sterile, dead arcadia that fails to offer a convivial space for plants, insects, birds and animals; that fails to provide nourishment for any of these species including the human.

The notion of garden attacks does, however, continue to have some purchase and has provided valuable twenty-first century precursors to the Epicurean backyard. One example is Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates, or replacing front lawns with vegetable gardens. Described as an attack on lawns, Haeg states, “We used ecological values to challenge traditional aesthetic values, and [the lawn] a socially treasured object became suspect. … Ecological thinking has transformed how we see the lawn, and our concept of beauty has been transformed with it.”

The effectiveness of such attacks seems to fly in the face of Epicurean pronouncements about retreating into the backyard to grow vegetables. However, this is precisely what Epicurus did. He chose not to become a revolutionary and instead retreated from the political turmoil of his time into a garden that, through the communal participation of all involved, blossomed into one of the most vital and life-affirming schools of the ancient world. Although he sought refuge in his garden he never ceased to acknowledge the reality from which he was taking flight. To adopt Epicureanism as a gardening model is to return to a philosophy that was specifically developed in conjunction with a vegetable garden, a garden that was a place in which reality could be reconceived. It was an attack in the sense that it was a place where possibilities could be re-imagined. It was a place where social virtues could re-flourish under carefully husbanded circumstances.

Epicureanism provides an overarching outlook in which the human shares the fate of whatever grows and perishes on and in the earth. Epicurus’ fundamental belief was that there was a direct correspondence between human moral, spiritual and intellectual cultivation and organic cultivation of a garden.

As well as providing physical nourishment, Epicurus believed pleasure was the most precious fruit of the garden. However, his understanding of pleasure had nothing to do with the gratification of appetites. In fact, he repeatedly condemned excessive indulgence of any sort. Nothing could be more antithetical to Epicurus’ ethic of cultivation than today’s unbridled consumption. But to describe this garden as an attack is not wholly accurate. Although he would undoubtedly have denounced our so-called age of entitlement his garden school did not presume to come to the world’s rescue. And today, there is of course no guarantee that small steps will lead to large ones. The Epicurean backyard’s ambition is far more modest and hopefully, like Epicurus’ garden finally far more efficacious: to make room for all life to flourish in dark times by giving it soil in which to grow.

The solutions offered by the Epicurean backyard include that branch of philosophy that understands all animate life as founded in vegetal life. It offers the possibilities of plant-like subjectivities that broaden relational ways of being in the world. Politically it works to establish the suburban vegetable garden as a modern Arcadia that replaces the deathly room outside and for its aesthetic inspiration it looks to the classical past as well as to present-day eco-art.

Politically, the Epicurean backyard is an attempt to refuse to regulate the human relation to plants. From genetically modified seeds that do not yield renewable crops to artificially induced scarcity to maintain high market prices, the capitalist agro-scientific complex militates against vegetal life and ethics alike. The Epicurean backyard calls upon us to care, to nurture endangered ecosystems and to practice an ongoing co-creativity with plants, insects, animals, soil and weather. It seeks to transfigure our shared commonplace existence rather than dominate and commodify it. Its aim is to relinquish control in favour of consecration.

Aesthetically, by assimilating classical ideas the Epicurean backyard does not merely imitate but registers the difficulties inherent in transforming pre-existing practices. The aesthetics of power are clearly evident in the expectations of the real estate market which looks to the room outside to enhance market prices. Yet an Epicurean attack on this sterile environment is today a cultural obligation and the power of aesthetics is beginning to make itself felt in such ventures as the Edible estates and the prize winning garden Future Feast in the Garden of Flow/Accumulation designed by Suzanne Briggs and Patrick Picard. Briggs states: “My belief is that the root cause of global warming and unsustainable practices is accumulation.” She symbolises deforestation with charred wood rising from a lifeless under-story of slash; extinction with fossils in a sea of sterile dirt and stones. In contrast to channels of “accumulation” are channels of “flow” symbolized by oak seedlings—hope to restore the depleted forests; plants that attract insects, bees and butterflies—hope to guard against continued extinction.

In the centre of the garden is the symbol of hope – the Future Feast table resting on local reclaimed redwood legs and using the technology of green roofs for its living surface.

So what might the tentative beginnings of an Epicurean Backyard look like? Firstly, unlike the eighteenth century landscape garden, which was an exclusive Arcadia for the elite, the Epicurean backyard has a domestic scale – it provides a contemporary Arcadia for anyone and everyone. It would of course continue the tradition of the garden of ideas by producing not only physical food but food for the mind – poetic statements on the state of western culture in this age of the Anthropocene. It would see vegetable growing as inextricably linked to ideas of power and control, personal control over the basic requirements of life and power to attempt to transform the deathly forces of capital; power to relinquish ways of life that set the human outside ecosystems.

The Epicurean vegetable garden is a place to dwell creatively; it is both serious and playful, philosophical and aesthetic, productive and attractive. Drawing on Epicurus and extending through Goethe, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty it might use quotations such as Heidegger’s statements on dwelling poetically or Goethe’s understanding of plant metamorphosis in which the leaf is primary.

It might playfully find ways to grow vegetables in tiny spaces proving yet again that small is beautiful. Or it might draw on eco-artists who have created habitat sculptures or reclamation projects.

The ephemeral works of artists such as Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy bring attention to human responsibility for the environmental crisis, to what Agnes Denes describes as, “mismanagement, waste, world hunger, and ecological concerns.” Lynne Hull writes of her habitat sculptures, “My sculpture and installations provide shelter, food, water or space for wildlife, as ecoatonement for their loss of habitat to human encroachment.”

In addition the Epicurean backyard might explore the origin of words such as the emblem, which was of Greek origin but in classical Latin was used to refer to mosaics. Emblem also had a figurative meaning: speech studded with citations used as rhetorical ornaments. Mosaics might then be studded with vegetable plants as rhetorical ornaments that provide ready-to-hand salads.

On a general level, a garden feeds us on many levels and the more disconnected we become from the garden, the more reckless we become with the way we occupy the planet. To create vegetable gardens as art is to return to the creative practices of the vernacular; it is to follow in the footsteps of the poet-gardeners who established a counter-order to transform the landscape; and it is to follow Epicurus’ example and recognise our obligation to make room for all life to flourish in dark times by giving it soil in which to grow.