Gardening or editing?

Starting Garden Revolution, by Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher, has me reflecting on what counts as a garden. Weaner is an influential designer of ecologically driven landscapes who enlisted Christopher, a garden writer and editor, to help tell his story. The book's subtitle is, “How our landscapes can be a source of environmental change."

    It’s unfair to react before finishing the book, but as I read the first few chapters, I found myself resisting not so much the text as the pictures of Weaner’s projects. He has attained so much success that he’s now working on a large scale, designing for properties of multiple acres, not small yards like mine. The photos show drifts of wildflower in what look like naturally occurring meadows and woodland edges.

Here's a link to photos of Weaner's projects. This is generally similar-photo Marathon

    Weaner often describes his role as editing. He was trained to design gardens the traditional way, installing plants for pleasing visual effects. He came to reject this approach in favor of studying what’s growing on a site and nudging it through judicious weeding and planting. For example, by removing invasives, he gives native wildflowers a chance to flourish and show sometimes unrecognized beauty. He insists on creating landscapes that can fend for themselves without fertilizer or irrigation, and he expects them to evolve over time into different but still beautiful vistas through plant succession.

By editing out invasive weeds or tree saplings, Weaner directs landscape succession-photo  Lasse Enevoldsen

    I can definitely get behind this statement: “When you begin to think of your garden as an ecosystem, you have moved beyond the traditional concept of a garden as a collection of plants selected solely on the basis of flower color and foliage texture. You have recognized that your garden’s vitality is based on the interactions of the plants with each other as well as the soil, topography, and local wildlife.” 

    My question is whether a meadow of wildflowers that sprout from the soil’s seed bank is a garden. In the book’s photos, these landscapes are definitely pretty, like pleasing natural landscapes. But they don’t have the design features I expect in a garden: placement of forms for aesthetic effect, contrasting textures, intentionally limited color schemes, or focal points.

To me, a beautiful natural landscape is different from a garden, although it may show human influence

    Weaner’s deep knowledge of the growing conditions and native plants of his sites’ ecoregions inspires him to enhance plant communities and emphasize their most pleasing qualities. But he’s confining his role to tweaking what’s likely to grow without human intervention. Maybe we should have a different name for this activity. Interestingly, he points out that Native Americans did something similar to manage North American lands to produce more of what they needed before European settlement.

Native Americans managed landscapes such as Yosemite's before Europeans arrived-photo NPS/Joyce

    I still want to create something stamped with my design taste. But I have to admit that I seem to be evolving toward less focus on individual beautiful plants and more interest in creating a healthy ecosystem in my yard, as those piles of last fall’s leaves on all the beds can testify. Perhaps I’m heading toward the kind of landscape management Weaner describes. Time will tell.

If leaves on the ground equal ecological savvy, I've got plenty