Out With the Old - In With the New - Thoughts on Garden Design

        It's New Years, and typical of Texas in Winter, in different parts of this Great State, you don't know whether to pull out the row cover or buy some watermelon at the grocery store. But this is New Year's, a time for new beginnings, new resolutions and new promises, or at least a chance to review last year's garden resolutions.

        New Year's Day is a quiet time in the garden. The soil is cold and it's not a day to begin turning compost. It's a day to kick back and relax. The garden may be calling you from outside your window, but stay inside. Pull out your yellow legal pad and "pencil-garden" this year's new design. Find your design books and seed catalogs. Pile them on your lap, lean back deeply into your favorite chair and just take a nap. Plans for great things always begin with dreams. If anyone asks you what you are doing, tell them "I'm dreaming up my garden."

        "Dreaming up the garden" is as old as the first intentionally planted seeds, thousands of years ago, when the only imperative was to feed all the members of the family, when tribes of nomads settled as hunter-gatherers to form communities. We plowed up pastures and planted crops. We watched the seasons come and go, read the clouds for rain, the sun for warmth, the moon and stars for predictions of seasons for planting, harvesting, storing and knowing when to begin the cycle all over again. Life was continuously reborn in the garden.

Jim Nollman, author of "WHY WE GARDEN" says that gardening is sacred work, a way of "cultivating a sense of place". He says it is a way to "recreated a bit of paradise within an imperfect world."

        Hal Borland, the naturalist, wrote about observing the differences between natural time and industrial time. In his book "SUNDIAL OF THE SEASONS", for New Year's Day he writes, "The old year is gone, the new year begun, and those who set store by the calendar draw a line...count the minutes and days. Nature, of course, has her own map of time, and (we) miss the mark repeatedly."

        So dream your garden, and keep in mind a few other words on design. Pogo, that wonderful cartoon character, back in 1959 said "Nature abhors a vacuum." James Arscott, an art instructor at Stephen F. Austin State University, circa 1965 said, "In nature, there are no straight lines." Monte Python said, "Surprises...always let your garden have surprises." And Gertrude Jekyll, the master garden designer in the late 1890s in England said, "The main purpose of a garden is to give its owner the best and highest kind of earthly pleasure."

        Part of design of gardening came from "intention", whether to feed the family, enhance the flavors of that food or to place a bouquet of flowers on the table. We assumed dominion over animals, birds and fish and the land around us. We sought better grains, greater yields of healthier crops, and more practical farming practices. We studied, imitated, replicated, taught and prescribed, developed special tools, implemented more successful methods, changed varieties in crops, formulated more effective land use, and eventually western agriculture was born.

        Lines of property were drawn and we moved as a culture from battle fields to public parks. The English built ruined castle keeps on their estate grounds, stubbed in forests where none existed before, created water features in their landscapes with brooks, ponds, rivers and waterfalls.

        Plants became the palette of a new art expression. Poppies filled Flanders' fields. Roses defined the English thrown. Leeks became the symbol of Wales. The Shamrock represented Ireland, and the Thistle was celebrated in Scotland. The Dutch hybridized the Turkish and Iranian tulip. Tea came from China and coffee from Ethiopia. New food came from the New World. The height of formal design was seen in the gardens of Versailles in France. And those who did not own gardens painted them. From them, "Impressionism" was born with its intense interest in capturing the natural light of the garden.

        In the 1890s "West" met "East" in trade with China and Japan. Western eyes saw that art could imitate life, as art, and small urban gardens began to appear. The formal garden border that once separated crops and properties soon softened to flowing walkways and soft intrusions of herbaceous florals. These led back to simple pastures of wild grasses and meadow flowers. The full circle of gardens and gardening was completed.

        Now it is the time to dream, and in dreaming, to design. Your garden can be planted anywhere and everywhere. It can be in gallon tomato sauce cans or in window boxes on balconies and porches. It can be in back yards, front yards and on the sides of houses. It can be a community project in a school garden, in church parking lots, hospital green spaces, restaurants and office buildings, circled around mail boxes, and in old abandoned tractor tires that guard the entrances to rural driveways across the land.

        Whether you move from one home to another, move fence posts or garden shapes, or just carry seeds with you from a good friend's garden to your own, you are carrying the whole history of gardening with you. So take it easy today. Spend New Year's Day with your yellow legal pad, your seed catalogs and pencils, napping in your favorite chair, and "dreaming up your garden."

Michael Bettler

LUCIA'S GARDEN

2216 Portsmouth

Houston, Texas 77098