I initially created this blog many years ago to document my garden successes and failures, and as a platform to voice my screeds about the virtues of organic gardening. But this is a space that has become pretty crowded in the Gardensphere. There are so many gardening blogs by impassioned gardeners sharing their love of plants with the world, so I don’t feel like it’s useful for me to add my voice to the din of people telling everyone to plant milkweed. (Although you should all definitely do that.) And you don’t need me to tell you how to turn your hydrangeas blue because Google.
What I am most interested in now, where I sense the urgency and energy, is panning out above the Gardensphere, the Meta-Gardensphere, to zero in on HOW we talk about plants and gardening, and how we relate ourselves to this concept of the natural world—to unpack how we have been programmed to perpetuate structures of meaning that are very much locked into paradigms of white supremacy, colonialism, and extractive/destructive relationships with the natural world. The colonial narratives we bring to the center of horticulture and the language we use to talk about nature are studded with landmines. Little destructive virus-like bombs that keep us all at arm’s length away from this concept of nature. We’ve been programmed to think that nature is elsewhere, and there’s a tidy border (don’t we just LOVE tidy borders?) that keeps it from inconveniencing our daily lives.
There has been so much good work in the last 15 years around raising consciousness about organic methods, pollinator decline, habitat loss, and the benefits of planting natives. What I hope to do here is launch from that groundwork of data and awareness and work on a new language that shines a light on the threads that connect us to the natural world, and natural systems of entropy and regeneration that can make the beginning and ending of seasons, and even birth and death that much more meaningful.
Now, let’s see what skeletons and landmines we dig up as we attempt to Decolonize the Garden! Join me, won’t you?
A little Backstory
When I lived in Chester County, PA with it’s beautiful, sprawling countryside, I used to drive around (and walk around, of course, but for car culture) looking at the green riot of life tumbling along the edges of the roads and ditches bordering the farms and creeks, and occasional golf course, and think how healthy and bucolic it all was. And it is. But then came my protracted education about invasive species. Over the years I had no formal training, but started to recognize the shapes, growth habits, and leaf arrangements that shout I AM AN INVASIVE WEED. Oh well, at least they are sequestering carbon and it’s better than asphalt. But then came more information about what defines noxious, what elevates noxious to invasive in a political application of the terms. I was walking, actually walking, down a relatively secret path by the Brandywine Creek, on the other side of popular dog run and there wild ginger, ramps, native orchids, and Dicentra that (knowing what I know now, I did not fully appreciate) and then, come fall, a million tiny ovate fuchsia flags flapping in the breeze strewn throughout the understory. What is that beautiful plant? Its so bright pink! Flap flap flap. It was everywhere. Delicate dark branches held up small leaves at heights up to 4 feet. I cracked open my “Native Plants of PA” book to find out what it was. Burning bush! The entire creekside was completely blanketed in burning bush. That’s invasive. But it was pretty. Other plants seemed to be growing along with it fine. So what’s the problem?
This was an actual question I had to respond to from someone whose botanical knowledge was stuck in the 80s who filled their yard with crepe myrtles and skip laurels. Other than retreating to my office to compose a powerpoint, I had to come up with a punch-in-the-face, magical sentence that would blow their mind and turn their entire life view on its head. But something actually ended up punching me in the face. I realized that when you are battling long held belief structures with a radicle idea that you know is a difficult but scientific truth, you must have a tight elevator speech packed with data that you can whip out like a business card. “Well,” I said, “because they are not native, they crowd out native plants which would have a longer root system to keep the hillside from eroding into the creek which is going to happen very soon especially with all these extreme weather events caused by global warming!
Hmm…
Well, it’s very pretty.
Mission, not accomplished. In the future, I vowed to be prepared to defend what to me is so obviously correct.
And from that moment on, all I saw was bindweed, wild carrot, Japanese hops, and tree of heaven tumbling over the landscape, choking out the native plants that had been supporting the microbial life and insect populations for millennia before these invasive species were introduced. And it’s unbearably distracting.
It’s not so much about native versus invasive, there is a much bigger issue embedded here that points to a deep rupture in our relationship to nature. When you begin to wake up to to understanding the plants around you, understanding that you don’t just manage a patch of dirt to make it pretty for one season or to force tomatoes out of it, you realize that you are the caretaker of a vast microbial ecosystem in the soil, the millions of insects and pollinators, and pollinated plants that could be miles away. This matrix suddenly becomes visible to you and you can’t un-see it. It’s a big responsibility! And it’s unbearably distracting.
Once you see all of this, every small patch of green starts to reveal a million stories.
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Heart of the Garden 