My garden wants to grow brambles and bindweed, to surprise me with sapling ash. What it really wants to grow are damsons. A forest of the things; relics of the rootstock of my neighbour’s long-dead ‘Victoria’ plum. Needless to say, nature and I are not always of one mind.
Humans are part of the natural world, set apart by a belief that we’re somehow both outside and above it. Since our ancestors made the shift from foraging to agriculture, we’ve been saying no to nature with every plant we can persuade from the ground.
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Given our wildlife-friendly protestations, it’s uncomfortable to think we could be gardening ‘against nature’. The discomfort doesn’t make it less true. Despite nature’s intentions regarding what should be growing in our soil, these plans rarely coincide entirely with our own.
However enthusiastically we might embrace the wildflowers of No Mow May and insist upon peat-free compost, it’s unlikely we’ve renounced weeding altogether. Every dandelion root winkled out, every lily beetle squished, each separate act of resistance to what goes on in the borders without our permission is a ‘no’ we offer up against what’s naturally occurring.
We’re right to be wary. Our environmental legacy is testimony to our species’ inability to act with impunity; habitat loss, rising extinction rates and a climate in crisis are the consequences of unsustainable models of growth.
The conservation charity Plantlife records the loss of 97 per cent of species-rich grasslands in the UK over the past century; the Living Planet Index charts a decline in global wildlife populations of 73 per cent in half that time. We’ve long been saying no to nature in the supermarket, and the cost of the brush-off can be measured in plummeting biodiversity.
And yet there is something in the act of nurturing a plant, or tending a garden, where saying no to nature can be considered a force for good. Partly, it’s the sense of agency. While consensus exists on the benefits of gardening for our mental and physical wellbeing, there’s more going on than fresh-air exercise and immersing ourselves in green – more even than wafting through clouds of revivifying soil bacteria and terpene-laden plant aerosols.
Psychologists identify a strong sense of agency as critical in improving levels of life satisfaction, in reducing anxiety and depression while increasing both emotional resilience and the ability to employ coping strategies. It’s a therapeutic magic that helped animate Jo Thompson’s recent Chelsea garden for the women of The Glasshouse Project, the prisoner rehabilitation programme where horticultural training fosters a greater sense of self-worth through the process of garden making. Our agency lies in willing into being something that wasn’t there before.
But part of it, too, comes with the realisation that saying no can be the beginning of a conversation, not the end. As the first response in any dialogue, this needs to be nuanced: according to a key report from Harvard Law School’s Program On Negotiation, a ‘positive no’ can be a powerful tool in attaining a ‘healthy yes’.
Every dandelion root winkled out, every lily beetle squished, each separate act of resistance to what goes on in the borders without our permission is a ‘no’ we offer up against what’s naturally occurring
So we modulate the nature of our ‘no’ until, together, we come upon a workable and fruitful compromise, moving from “I’m doing what I want, whether you like it or not,” to something more like “We won’t quite do that, but how about we try this?” In the process, our ‘no to nature’ might look like deciding what goes where and what grows where, asserting this vision against what the soil clearly wants to do.
But it also manifests as pruning, deadheading, watering, feeding and training – all actions to which plant life responds positively. This creative engagement between human and nature creates something not only greater than the sum of its parts, but more meaningful than anything either of its makers would have produced on their own.
At some point, as stewards of gardens rather than custodians of wilderness, we have to work out what our version of ‘no’ really means, and whether we can wield that tiny word with respect, causing neither insult nor injury to the natural world. Once comfortable with that, we can set about making our mark on the ground without the hindrance of second guessing our choices, or querying our motives. Because saying a measured no to nature is what making a garden is all about.
Andrew Timothy O’Brien is a gardening coach and writer, and host of the podcast Gardens, Weeds & Words.
Illustration: ©Rosanna Morris