As the years have passed my attention has increasingly been drawn to the wilder places. The garden has, it turns out, been a stepping stone, and beyond its boundaries a world of beauty, mystery and meaning await.
The original concept for a garden (from the old German word ‘garten’) was one of enclosure. It suggests a time when protection and safety was needed, and order and control desired. Those motivations might still linger beneath the surface, but the landscape around us is no longer roamed by wild animals and bandits.
Nowadays other concerns preoccupy us and it seems appropriate to see our gardens now not as places closed off from the wider landscape but as part of it. And to see not only our gardens as a place where nature is welcome but the countryside beyond as an extension to our garden, to be engaged with and explored - a wilder garden.
On the one hand, the more we familiarise ourselves with the wilder things, the more we will see the beauty there and be captured by its calming wonder. With knowledge and understanding we begin to relax, and redefine our relationship both with nature and our garden. We can learn to live with some ‘weeds’, see their value to pollinators, recognise them and know how they behave, reclassify a few as wildflowers, or at least as tenacious opportunists to be admired. ‘Pests’ like aphids and slugs become less a nuisance to eradicate and more an indication that we need to attract more birds, hedgehogs and amphibians to consume them - to build up our garden ecosystem, not reduce it.
And on the other, the more we inhabit and familiarise ourselves with the wider landscape, the more we see that it is full of interest, stories, character…. and relevance to our lives.. In particular, it is a chance to rekindle our relationship with trees and wild plants - a connection that goes back forever and has waned only relatively recently. To be with plants in their natural habitat, to forage for food or medicine, or simply to observe and admire them - that can nourish us.
