This morning, I was fortunate to have a slice of time to sit on the porch with coffee before figuring out what to do with this mercifully rainy Sunday. A dude in a baseball cap walked by with his boxer in tow and seemed to shake his head disapprovingly at some offending thing in his line of vision—which was my front garden. He didn’t have earbuds in so he wasn’t responding to something beyond my earshot. His dog was behind him and not doing anything wrong, so it wasn’t directed at him. His gaze was definitely pointed at the general front line of my garden and the gesture seemed somehow obvious enough to be intended for me as attendant audience, but also stealthy enough to be somewhat excusable if called out. I had just been talking about refilling coffee cups and closing the front door—nothing controversial—so he was aware of my presence, but apparently his gesture indicated that my presence didn’t manifest well enough in my plant-dominated garden. And I can’t get his shaking baseball capped head out of my head.
This is what he was looking at.
My extra tall goldenrod seemed to nod in defense. But he wouldn’t know it was goldenrod because it’s a month away from blooming. Yesterday, I had a privileged moment of leisure in which I scoured the garden, deadheading and primping, and inserting some echinacea where I felt it needed more filler and color. The Echinacea pupurea are leaning over and I tied them up in a haphazard way so they wouldn’t smother the mistflowers (Conoclinium coelestinum) which I have found to be really reactionary when disturbed in any way. And I was going to clear out the violets and volunteer chleome from the edge of the sidewalk but why? I couldn’t bring myself to do that because it would just unearth more weed seeds. I thought I did a good job by the standard of the man-on-the-street, but this man-on-the-street made his disapproval known.
There are Turk’s-cap lilies, bronze fennel, gladiolas (I know, but they were free), phlox, false sunflower, Joe Pye weed, gaura, all in bloom. And it is all sandwiched in between a very manicured square of acid green lawn and a rental property lawn outlined by snuffalupagusses of English ivy. The neighboring yards are both kind of invisible in different ways because they are expected. My garden is a hectic pastiche and I know I have some editing to do to make the human hand more present, but it’s not like I’m going to make HIM do any of the work. So why was he so mad at the plants, at me?
It feels awful. Because it means my garden might not be working on the audience it is intended for and I’m just preaching to the converted. I even put some exotics and nativars in there just for this dude and he still gave me a hard pass.
But how do we reach this man-on-the-street? How do we get him to un-learn what he thinks is right about leaf blowers and edge-trimmers and turf builder and this tyrannical aesthetic of artificial order?
And why does it hit such an emotional chord with him, and with me?
I was listening to a podcast about the Moms of Liberty convention at the Museum of the American Revolution recently and they mentioned Dennis Praeger’s keynote speech in which he condemned “the Left’s” desire to create chaos in defiance of the order that God created. (He loves binaries like that to sound more lofty and sound byte-y.) God = order. The Left = chaos. Without engaging in the facile, reductionist logic here, there is something to this statement that might reveal where this dude’s anger might be coming from. Anything that is a threat to his perceived idea of order is is a threat to the structures in place that fix people like him in positions of power. An ecosystem that is built for nature and not to support the economy of power tools and lawn chemicals goes against the existing order and threatens economic collapse. Having to consider creatures other than humans turns the economic hierarchy on its head and it’s scary!
But back to gardening, how do we flip this dynamic? How do we make lawn deadscapes the picture of disorder, and make prairie and naturalistic gardens that prioritize reciprocal relationships with nature the embodiment of the true natural order? What kind of PR campaign can we launch to drill this into the public consciousness?
Maybe it starts with emotions, addressing this fear of chaos. This kind of fear often seem to come from lack of access to information. I know so many smart, environmentally conscious people who couldn’t name three native plants, or tell you why it matters that we’ve lost 39% of our bird populations since 1950. All of this information is locked up in information silos. There’s no overarching gatekeeper who’s regulating the flow of information. It just seems to leak out of the silo in drips here and there. I wish there was a consolidated campaign to make this information commonplace, to normalize anti-lawn rhetoric, to get people (including the angry dude) to realize the power they have so they aren’t angered by what they don’t know.
This simple gesture of negating my space only strengthens my belief in the power held within a garden.
If someone can walk by flowers and get angry…
(I need to repeat that)
If someone can walk by flowers and get angry…
it proves that gardening is a political act of radical resistance. Now grab your shovels, dig up that lawn, and put some good plants in the ground!!!
Decolonize the Garden 