The Entangled Garden

The poet R.S. Thomas once described gardens as a “gesture against the wild,” a rebuke to the “ungovernable sea of grass.” It sounds like a metaphor for the whole human project on planet Earth.

I’m standing in an oxymoron: a garden that has itself become a wild sea of grass. It’s summertime and as the increasingly unstable weather swings between heatwave and inundation, growth has become luxuriant. In our patch of meadowland the mallows and wild carrot are up to my ears. Self-sown oaklings shoot through the borders. The grass is threaded by an intimate path structure created by the footfall of voles and water birds.

This is how I want it to be: capricious, innovative, ungoverned — or at least ungoverned by me. But every year I know I have to intervene or face the next decade living in an impenetrable scrubland. And I still don’t know how to reconcile these two desires. Living alongside nature is as problematic in a garden as in the world outside.

We moved into this 16th-century house in Norfolk with two acres of land 20 years ago. One of the acres was a fairly conventional garden with herbaceous borders and vegetable plots. The other half — not exactly wild, but enticingly informal — comprised rough lawn studded with a dozen 40-year-old deciduous trees. Early on, unsure of the place, Polly and I were seized by the notion of doing a tongue-in-cheek “beating of the bounds,” an ancient spring ritual for relearning boundaries and blessing crops. We set off with hazel wands swiping any feature that looked significant. A scatter of gangly Leylandii, given summary terminal sentences. A deep pond, probably first dug to provide clay for the house walls and containing some lively moorhens that eventually became the garden’s familiar spirits. A century-old Turkey oak; a medieval boundary bank and ditch; a newly arrived Russian vine already scrambling over the sheds. And a turtle dove, singing in the cherry trees, that drowsy, hypnotic purr that has enchanted our species as far back as the Song of Solomon. The wild side looked ripe for the kind of experiment in natural empowerment that I’d always wanted the space to try.

Gardens aren’t quite like other human spaces. They’re hybrids: possessed, designed and managed by one species but occupied by myriads more. Some have been introduced by the notional gardener, some arrived as gatecrashers, many settled in as freeholders before the house was built — all with their own lives to lead. We like to think we are in harmonious communion with these organisms — “reconnecting with nature” — but in reality, we are controlling them. A garden is a piece of personal territory, a finite patch of a finite planet for us to do whatever we like with, free of the kinds of restrictions that apply beyond its boundaries. Cover it with AstroTurf or concrete, turn it into an impressionist masterpiece, a workaday food lot or a children’s playground. Even gardens organized for wildlife interest aren’t an exception, being largely exercises in directing what should live where. Our dominion over a garden’s other citizens is implicit in the very idea of a garden as a possessed space. If this community of organisms were human we might be tempted to call it colonialism.

Of course, we don’t, and can’t. We are all, irrevocably, human supremacists. We evolved to be this kind of creature, defined by our intelligence and ubiquity and power and by an instinctive drive to plan and sort and shape. But it is possible to take a conscious, ethical step back, to allow a garden’s native citizens a chance to make their own choices about where and how to live. To even up the power balance a little. Gardens are often presented metaphorically as theaters where the gardener acts as a combined writer, director and set designer. Couldn’t they also be open, improvisational stages, where wild and transitory inhabitants become part of the production team?

But where does that leave us, the gardeners? We have the right to a niche in the garden, and to assert that we too are part of the biosphere. The practice of restoration, of using knowledge and ingenuity to repair degraded spaces, is one way to achieve a kind of cooperative balance between gardener and garden. But restoration implies a return to some earlier, richer environment, which brings up the question of timeframes. On 19th-century maps, what is now our garden is labeled “hempland.” The two bachelors who owned the farm then were growing cannabis for the linen trade. A thousand years before that it would have been part of the medieval open-field system. There had probably not been woodland or wild vegetation on the site since the early Stone Age, so there was no easy model to work toward.

Stone Age peoples introduced deliberate planting and farming practices, marking a fundamental change in our relationship with the natural world. Before, say, 5000 B.C.E., hunter-gatherer societies worked largely by cutting and harvesting what was there, not planning and introducing entirely new species. A garden that hoped to have a measure of self-determination for nature would need to lean toward the earlier model. The best current expression of this is in surviving common land, mixtures of natural grassland, scrub and trees, none of it planted, which have evolved under a mixture of grazing and human garnering.

How could we translate this regime for our relatively small garden? We weren’t in a position to keep livestock. Nor did we fancy the extreme measure of stripping all existing vegetation away and starting from scratch. Besides, we wanted to see what the seed bank might throw up if left to its own devices. Might ancient primulas be lying dormant in the soil? Could the featherweight seeds of orchids blow in on the wind? But if some open grassland was the goal, one intervention was unavoidable. There had to be a way to keep the wildwood at bay. In the absence of grazing animals, we’d have to stand in for them, become proxy herbivores ourselves. We would, periodically, have to put the vegetation to the blade. Cutting, the primal act of human control, loomed before us like the agricultural toil that was Adam’s punishment after the Fall.

The first time we cut the grass in summer we cadged the help of a local farmer who came in with a haymaker so big I quaked at the thought of it negotiating a way past the house. But he completed the mow in half a dozen passes without a single bump. We were left with a half acre of cut hay drying in the July sun and the task of ferrying it to a trailer parked on the front lawn. They were baking days, and in the southerly breeze the hay was as hypnotic as the sea, a shape-shifting color-changing surf, a spindrift of grass ears and clover bobs. It blew into our eyes and scented our clothes as if they’d been freshly laundered. And it was alive. Our spell as proxy herbivores had stirred the grassland ecosystem into a feeding frenzy. The meadow teemed with spiders, mites, ants, centipedes and beetles, followed promptly by foraging voles, frogs and juvenile woodpeckers, whose barely feathered necks and long ant-seeking tongues gave them the look of predatory lizards. I rode about on our garden tractor with a parasitic ichneumon wasp hitching a lift on my bare arm. It lays its eggs inside promisingly plump caterpillars and I wondered what it saw in me.

It had been a tricky compromise between keeping the grassland open, risking mayhem in the insect nation, and gratifying our pastoral fantasies. But it paid off. The following spring, it was clear that a number of meadow species had already been there and were now being stimulated by the increase in light. Cowslips and violets appeared, followed, in what has become an annual procession, by vetches and buttercups and ox-eye daisies, and then the tall plants of high summer: musk mallow, wild carrot, scabious. And yes, some bee orchids under the washing line. But then I made the first compromise with my non-intervention principle. Impatient to speed up the colonization process, I purchased some seeds of pioneer species, gathered more from local commons and roadsides, and scattered and trampled and poked them into patches of bare earth. There was no shortage of this: scalpings by the haycutter blade, squashed molehills, deer scuffings. I salved my conscience by imagining I was simply joining the cast list of animals and birds that broke the ground and ferried seeds.

I should introduce my stick here. It’s an elegant wand of hazel and yew. It was made for me to prop up my aging hips, but I also use it to negotiate with the garden vegetation. Sticks are life’s oldest tool, used by all manner of species as connectors, fetchers, pokers and lifters. Mine has evolved into a kind of prosthesis. It brings closer things I can no longer reach. I swipe upstart brambles, push stray seeds into the ground, turn over leaves so that I can see what’s underneath. I regard it as my Instrument of Minimum Intervention.

Over the years, the grassland has settled into something resembling a constantly changing and evolving quilt, in which the boundaries of each species and colony flex and shift but not so much that its neighbors are ever overwhelmed. I know that for all my interventions, this is partly down to self-organization. The residents are doing it for themselves. Birds excrete seeds, insects browse, pollinate, distribute plant material. Plus so much more activity underground and out of sight. Parasitic plants control the growth of grasses. Networks of fungal mycorrhiza share nutrients and information among myriad species. Ants sow seeds.

Twenty years on, the grassland has a group of impressive anthills arranged rather like a living henge. The insects have a symbiotic relationship with many plants — especially, here, with cowslips and primroses whose seeds have a tiny globule of fat and protein called an elaiosome attached. The ants gather the seeds and take them back to their nests, where they detach the parcel and feed it to their grubs. The seed itself is ferried off to one of the ants’ refuse dumps, where organic matter gives it a good chance of germinating.

This symbiotic relationship between ant and seed occurs across the globe, involving thousands of different plant families. It’s one of the most remarkable examples of convergent evolution: Over hundreds of millions of years, multiple species of ants and plants have independently arrived at the same mutually beneficial arrangement. On our meadow, it means that, in cowslip time, the grass looks as if it has been slavered with lemon curd.

By August, the meadow’s also carrying the offspring of our scatter of established trees, and I have to make the annual decision about how to keep the balance between grassland and woodland. To go for the latter would be perfectly in keeping with the garden’s laissez-faire philosophy and a bonus when we’re too old to wield the strimmer. I’m troubled always by the mortal consequences of the cut: the butterflies robbed of nectar, the squashed pupae, the trampled crickets, the abrupt vanishing of the tremulous carpet of color. But I do it anyway to keep the meadow open in what I hope is a savanna-like mosaic of trees and grassland. It’s my et in Arcadia ego moment. (Even in Arcadia, I, death, am present.) But I leave a fringe of young trees and brush to advance a little bit more into the open ground.

I walk the path into our patch of treeland most days in spring. I pass a bank of washday-white stitchwort and turn north into the trees. Ahead is a stretch of track that seems to vanish seductively into an ash grove. It’s lined with primrose and wild garlic. Sprays of new leaves hang over the path, layers of different greens catching flecks of sunlight and moments of shade: oak, maple, the felted foliage of whitebeam.

I brush the leaves as I pass. They’re moist, gel-like, newly hatched. It’s a vision of an English wood in April — except that, for the most part, it’s an illusion, or at least a contrivance. I planted the maple and the wild garlic. The track, which seems to disappear into the depths, goes no more than 30 yards before it comes up against the hedgebank that marks our boundary with the bleak arable fields beyond. I say to visitors, “Come up and see our bit of woodland,” but it’s tongue in cheek and I’m embarrassed to flatter the plot as “woodland.” This may sound like pedantry, but woods aren’t just generic collections of trees — they have individual origins, histories, evolving structures, internal landscapes, unique identities.

When I was a boy, the woods I knew seemed like caves, places of mystery and retreat. I wriggled into the hearts of hollies, hung out in the latticed branchwork of cedars and hugged beeches. Not out of some spiritual longing but because I relished their solid, maybe erotic physicality. I loved above all the sense they gave me that nobody knew where I was. I think this was part of my dim early understanding of what “wild” meant.

Several decades later, I bought a wood of my own in the Chiltern Hills. Or, as I preferred to think of it, I took custody of a natural feature so old that ownership was a ridiculous concept. I ran it as an experiment with the local village, hoping to restore its community value and biological richness. With friends and local volunteers, we had informal working parties on weekends. We cleared out commercially planted poplars, created tracks along desire-lines trodden by badgers and deer, roasted mushrooms and had discussions round the fire about what we felt the wood’s future should be.

I spent time by myself there too, just pottering and watching its intricate flora evolve. But that ancient human instinct to insert myself wouldn’t go away, and I often took a pair of heavy-duty loppers with me. I clipped the brambles around my favorite primrose patches so they would make a better show, pruned low-slung cherry branches to make arches over the tracks. I lopped sycamores that were shading ashes and ashes that were shading young beeches as if I had certain knowledge of the proper hierarchy of trees. The excuse I made to myself was that I was doing much the same as the wood’s badgers and bark beetles, making a few corners of the place commodious for myself. I took to heart William Wordsworth’s chiding of a famous landscaper for this kind of tinkering, this gardening, his warning that “a man little by little becomes so delicate and fastidious with respect to forms in scenery [that] where he has the power to exercise control over them and if they do not exactly please him … his power becomes his law.” 

The lessons of this 20-year experiment in the Chilterns guided me in our Norfolk garden. Our modest collection of planted trees originally grew in an area of grass that was repeatedly mown and tidied by the previous owner, so leaf litter and fallen branches and seedling trees regularly vanished. In the years since, moments of real woodiness have started to occur. A couple of trees have come down in the wind and the ground is strewn with dead brushwood. Bramble and blackthorn have spread, plus a whole new generation of self-seeded trees, especially oak and cherry. I planted a few saplings of species I thought might not make it here on their own (they did, eventually) but they’ve been outshone by the natural regeneration. I gave none of the saplings, planted or self-sprung, supportive stakes, tree-guards, pruning, mulching, watering or any of the intensive care now thought to be essential for the survival of young trees. I wanted them to grow as freely as possible and build up their resistance to wind and drought as a bonus. They have all thrived, bar some minor deer browsing. I’ve never understood those who believe that trees cannot prosper without human midwifery and supervision, and how they imagine forests established themselves before the invention of forestry.

What I haven’t done is plant a full suite of the tree species that might have grown here historically, or the ancient ground flora that might have prospered under them: bluebells, daphne, herb paris. I wanted those species to arrive of their own accord. But this is where my puritanical principles about self-determination begin to look a little shaky. I know full well that sources of seed are a long way off and that it could be a very long process. So why not help them on the way? It would be perfectly possible to create a kind of vegetational zoo, to plant up every one of the species that might be present in such a site, even meticulously mimic their spatial structure. But it would be a fake, a pastiche devoid of provenance and authenticity.

The philosopher Walter Benjamin addressed the issues surrounding facsimile artifacts in his seminal 1940s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: “Even the most perfect reproduction,” he wrote, “is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence in the place where it happens to be. This includes the changes it may have suffered in physical condition over the years.” A natural woodland is not a work of art, but it differs from a plantation in precisely the ways Benjamin outlines. It has something analogous to a tree’s grain, time and history embedded in its structure and weathering. Time is folded into natural communities by way of natural processes, and these don’t get much attention if you are fixated on restoring a set of organisms. Yet these processes — colonization, regeneration, succession, connection, patination — need to be enabled too. They are a natural community’s way of life.

At the heart of all this is the ambiguity of the verb “to grow.” Gardeners use it as a transitive verb: We cause growth. For plants, it is intransitive, active: They simply grow. We’re in danger of forgetting this second meaning, especially for trees. Tree planting has become a panacea for environmental ills, an act of atonement for the damage we have caused to the natural world. That trees have the ability to reproduce themselves seems to be passing out of our cultural memory. And the rituals surrounding the business of planting suggest that a lot more is going on than sequestering carbon and making reparation.

There is something paternalistic in the embedding of a sapling, the cosseting and watering and weeding, the privileging over competitors. A young tree is treated as if it were a dependent child. Maybe this is a productive relationship, generating a sense of responsibility, or what is often called “stewardship.” But it can shade all too easily into a belief that trees are intrinsically feeble and rely on us for their very existence. This is part of that ancient arrogance, stretching back through the 18th-century doctrine of “improvement” to “dominion over” in the Book of Genesis that has so warped our relationship with the natural world.

But again, I’m being too dogmatic. Now that we’re beginning to accept that, as biological beings, we are as much a part of nature as grass and gorillas, can it really be argued that a wood planted by humans is of a different conceptual order to one sprung without our help? “Nature” has long been a complex, contested word, first meaning the essence of things, then during the Enlightenment shifting to describe those forces and lives not entirely under human control — a meaning it retains in popular usage today. To insist humans are part of the natural order is ecologically correct, but it robs the term of any useful differential meaning. And, philosophical niceties apart, self-sprung woods are qualitatively different from those created by humans. Compared to the rigid pruned rows of a plantation they are intricate, structurally complex, full of creative disorder.

Fortunately, “natural” growth and inventiveness begin the moment after planting, unless they are deliberately suppressed. Twenty years on, our planted trees are already beginning to look encouragingly unkempt. They’re shedding branches, developing insect-friendly rot holes and colonizing lichens, growing multiple trunks, forming a closed canopy. The boundaries between programmed and natural growth are blurring. Yet I feel more emotional attachment to the self-sprung upstarts than I do to the specimens I planted. I admire their resilience and am grateful to be a witness to their autonomous lives.

At a fundamental level, all gardens are about boundaries, both literal and metaphorical: boundaries between wildness and cultivation, between private and common territory, between the humanly useful and the “weedy” intruder. These borders are, needless to say, porous and contested. Organisms and definitions move across in both directions. An aspirational tree becomes a neighbor’s symbol of light-hogging unneighborliness. A wildflower, borne on the wind, transforms into a weed in a matter of inches.

Polly and I inherited one particular kind of boundary. The house itself is surrounded by a continuous strip of gravel, intended I guess to be a stone moat, a clear cordon sanitaire between brick and growing ground from which squatters and intruders could be easily hoicked. But the loose stones make the most seductive of seedbeds. I’ve watched seeds of all kinds floating past on summer breezes, parachuting down in the shelter of the house and alighting on this inland beach. The gravel is spangled at most times of the year with wildflowers from four continents, often in gorgeous unscripted combinations. All arrived here of their own accord. Marzipan-scented winter heliotropes are out for Christmas. By March, grape hyacinths are studding the leaf rosettes of rampantly hybridizing geraniums. Scarlet pimpernel creeps among the marigolds. In high summer, Cretan euphorbias shine like lemon-yellow beacons and African niger blooms from feeder seed scattered by goldfinches. And one year, there appeared a single flower of the little wild pansy known as love-in-idleness, the agent of so much magical mayhem in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Its manifestation had a touch of magic too. It doesn’t usually grow anywhere nearby, and I have no idea how it got here.

But the star of the gravel is the sheaf of red valerian that basks in the warm gusts from the boiler outlet. This exuberant species, with its blowsy bushels of deep pink flowers, was introduced to English gardens from the Mediterranean in the 16th century. In its home range, it haunts cliffs and rocky places, and it rapidly escaped and became naturalized on old walls and stony banks, acquiring in the process a range of local tags that sounded as if they’d been lifted from seaside postcards: drunken sailor, kiss-me-quick, saucy bet. When it reached the austere stonework of Portland Prison in Dorset, it was dubbed convict grass.

Our patch leans against the house in what is essentially a sauna of boiler steam. It’s a favorite haunt of butterflies and, in hot weather, of hummingbird hawkmoths, also migrants from southern Europe. If we have guests for lunch, we turn our chairs around to watch their prodigious aerobatics. Their inch-long probosces probing deep into the valerian flowers for nectar are visible yards away, and as they hover, wings just a blur, they seem to be performing elaborate arabesques around this frontal appendage. Then they suddenly bounce away, maybe five feet into the air, as if the flower had ejected them. They hover, dart this way and that, drop back to sip nectar again. What tickles me about the hawkmoths is the profligacy of their flying. Half their showy to-ing and fro-ing seems pointless, a waste of energy when they could just slip from flower to flower. I like to think that at some level they enjoy their workouts in the sun.

Their brio suits the exuberance of our gravel patch. A tidier gardener would regard its anarchic luxuriance as an outrage, a shameful surrender of horticultural values. Yet there are moments when its color and patterning, its autonomous warp and weft, match that of any elaborately tended herbaceous border. I love it for its spontaneity, its defiance, its inclusivity. That steady inflow of organisms from warmer, more southerly locations isn’t entirely random. Climate change is making our weather increasingly unpredictable, but the trend is for ever-warmer summers, and plants, insects and birds will want to drift north in response. It will be good if they can find places where they can settle and boost biodiversity where it is already showing signs of severe depletion. Ecosystems are dynamic and can’t be preserved in nostalgic aspic, especially at times of extreme environmental turbulence.

Looking back over 20 years, I think what we have encouraged to develop might be called a fusion garden. Native plants and animals form new communities with benign immigrant species. The Turkey oak thrives alongside the English cherry. The red admiral pollinates the drunken sailor. The human gardener potters along beside the seed-ferrying, soil-making, network-creating wildings.

This model is unlikely to have much relevance to the overwhelming problems of the larger world. But maybe its mindset could. The great biologist and essayist Lewis Thomas once described homo sapiens’ proper role as “handyman to the Earth” — not owner or manager or green savior, but collaborator, first-aider, repairer, a being who can help the more-than-human through difficult times and, especially, put right the damage our species has caused.

This is not to deny our unique creative abilities but to suggest there are other roles beyond the planning and planting that are also special to our identity. Be witnesses, interpreters, good neighbors — the welcomers at the gate.