Why do we garden?

In 1946, Robert Haig-Brown wrote, "I don't know why I fish, or why others fish, except that it makes us think and feel."

Now if fishing is your thing, I suggest you check out "Tight Lines: Ten Years of the 'Yale Anglers' Journal'", coming this October from Yale University Press (the quote is from their catalogue of upcoming titles).

If not...consider a slight amendment to Haig-Brown's quote--"I don't know why I garden, or why others garden, except that it makes us think and feel."

For some reason his quote struck me. In an amazingly succinct way, this simple statement sums up all the multifarious platitudes that have been spouted about the "whys" of gardening--including those you will read when you revisit this web site and blog in the future.

...[I]t makes us think and feel.

For some it is a conscious choice to think about their gardening in advance of, and while they "do" it. Their feeling is a product of thinking.

Others "do" without thinking (with pretty predictable results). This appears to happen most often with new construction and new homeowners. These "new" gardeners need to catch up with the neighborhood standards (written or unwritten) and slam plantings in the ground to get "something" started. The ironic thing is that they generally wind up thinking about what they've DONE. And then...they feel.

It's inescapable. We are hard-wired for gardening...and the interplay of thought and feeling that goes along with it. Charles A. Lewis writes in "Green Nature Human Nature" that:

"When considering gardens and gardening we recognize two images. The first is the physical garden, the familiar flowers, trees, and shrubs of a three-dimensional world. The second is the mental garden that is found "through the looking-glass"--nonphysical, seldom perceived and occurring in the infinite dimensions of the mind. The two are joined by an experience that results from their interaction."

My theory is that the second exists independent of the first, that a physical garden is not necessary for the actuality of a mental one, BUT...that the physical garden cannot exist without its mental counterpart.

It's ironic that the "seldom perceived" mental garden is the required element of the two. The physical garden, by virtue of its palpable and earthly presence is certainly easier to grasp and understand, but it is the mental one where Haig-Brown's "thinking and feeling" occur. Put the two together...and you are a gardener.

To bastardize another quote:

There is nothing-absolutely nothing-half so much worth doing as simply messing about in gardens.

(originally spoken of boats by Ratty to Mole in "The Wind in the Willows")

Why do we garden?

Why eat? Why love?

I garden because life would be immeasurably diminished if I didn't.

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