Gardening Skills—Why Bother?

Great Landscape Design Starts Here

Placing the bench in the right spot is important but imagine if we hadn’t made sure to add the flowers…design and gardening go hand in hand.

Decades ago, I studied landscape architecture at the University of Hawaii and lived on an organic farm. They were two distinctly different worlds and I was pulled in both directions. In class, I learned about design styles, theory, materials and drainage coeffecients. On our working farm, I amended the soil, planted crops and dealt with pests and wildlife. We sold the produce to the newly established organic food stores - a revolutionary idea at the time. My life was theory (in school) versus practice (in my vegetable plots), and neither side seemed to recognize the other.

Michael Pollan, the author and journalist, described my situation well when he wrote in the New York Times Review of Books in 1991:

“I was perplexed at how few of the more literary garden books bothered to talk about so basic a gardening operation as digging, or even planting—there was little about the processes of gardening… Everybody seemed to jump right from wintertime sketches and plans to the glorious blooms of July.”

https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/a-gardeners-guide-to-sex-politics-and-class/ - this is a wonderful piece on garden writing