Gardens, Lawns, And Growing Things

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Any frequent readers probably know that I have a love/hate relationship with my garden. I love the idea of having a huge garden, and hate the fact that every plant I touch dies before my very eyes. I won’t even count the failed garden attempts so far this year, just know that there were many mornings that found me crying and ripping my hair out out in the dirt.

I shared before the video about the family who converted their entire yard into a garden. And of course I got even more inspired when I got comments from peeps doing the same or similar. So I’ve been digging through sites looking for more ideas. Sustainable Oklahoma, though old and not updated, has a lot of good links that I’ve been digging through. I’ve also been trying to find a cheap, used copy of Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community that I can read through for more ideas.

Even though Dearest is not a fan of my gardening idea, I’m pretty sure that anything that saves him from mowing will score fairly highly for him.

The New Yorker, yes evil, has an article about the history of lawns in America. And I have to admit that I was more than a bit curious about how we decided that having huge expanses of grass was a good idea. It seems more practical to have land for food rather than looks, though the mom in me does see the benefit of a flat, clean area for playing in.

In 1841, Andrew Jackson Downing published the first landscape-gardening book aimed at an American audience. At the time, Downing was twenty-five years old and living in Newburgh, New York. He owned a nursery, which he had inherited from his father, and for several years had been publishing loftily titled articles, such as “Remarks on the Duration of the Improved Varieties of New York Fruit Trees,” in horticultural magazines. Downing was dismayed by what he saw as the general slovenliness of rural America, where pigs and poultry were allowed to roam free, “bare and bald” houses were thrown up, and trees were planted haphazardly, if at all. (The first practice, he complained, contributed to the generally “brutal aspect of the streets.”) His “Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening” urged readers to improve themselves by improving their front yards. “In the landscape garden we appeal to that sense of the Beautiful and the Perfect, which is one of the highest attributes of our nature,” it declared.

So that’s what started it. Some snooty guy who spent so much time thinking about plants of decorations that he forgot that plants were also food too. It must have been the precursor to the modern day “Where does steak come from? The store.” A disassociation from food and it’s sources.

Not that I think I’m above it all when it comes to eating, I’ve more than my share of processed crap in the kitchen. But I’ve had the privilege of growing up rural, of knowing exactly where my food was coming from. Your chicken sandwich takes on a new layer of meaning when you were chasing that same chicken around your grandmother’s yard only the day before. And veggies taste much better while sitting in the dirt picking them off and popping them in your mouth.

It’s not that I see anything wrong with beauty or enjoying plants just for how they look. I just don’t think having a perfect yard makes you somehow better than those who don’t. I don’t think having a huge yard just for spending hundreds of dollars to pay people to come mow it for you is a step up on the social ladder if you know what I mean.

Of course this is probably why, despite repeated failures, I will keep on trying to grow a garden. I want the boys to know what it’s like to eat peas straight out of the pods, to distinguish between weeds and plants that should be there, and to understand where their food comes from. I’m an idealist like that.

Image source - Andrejs Pidjass