Postmodern Gardening
If you happen to garden much on your property, probably the most frequent question you get asked is “What kind of gardener are you?” It’s an honest enough question, and most askers are genuinely interested in getting to know your habits and interests. But it also follows a pattern of inquiry borrowed from the rest of the world we now live in: the need to classify people and practices and put them on one side or the other of a binary. Judging soon follows.
In the gardening world—defined broadly as anything from property-scale landscaping or native restoration to a small potager outside the kitchen door, this classifying takes many forms, with many binaries. There’s the distinction between gardening with natives vs. non-natives. If you use fertilizers, there’s the organic/non-organic divide. Do you grow from seed, or do you buy commercially grown starts? Do you till or are you no-till?
The topics can get positively metaphysical. Borrowing terms from a popular garden writer, are you more into the “how-to” of growing or the “woo-woo” of plant’s mysterious powers? (Plant science is turning the mystical into the empirically proven at a rapid clip, so valuing these powers may not be so woo-woo after all.) What kind of life-purpose, if any, do you hope to gain by gardening? Maybe you garden to center yourself, or you garden for wholly unselfish purposes, such as providing habitat for pollinators and nesting animals. Are you pursuing esthetics or ecosystem services? Is gardening your hobby or your way of life?
Neighbors may look for opposing psychological traits revealed by your garden habits. What does it say about you that you push the limits of the Island hardiness zones by trying to grow exotics? If, instead, you stick to the tried and true in your plantings, are you too bougie for an eclectic Island like ours? All that weeding? A sign of obsessiveness, for sure. A falling-down trellis? Insufficient work ethic!
Please, everyone needs to stop. Hundreds of thousands of evolutionary years living as tribes taught us the now-pernicious habit of seeing us vs. them everywhere we look. Western philosophy gave us the love of binaries: body/spirit, natural/unnatural, and so on. Modernism taught us, above all else, the power of categorization. How beneficial have these mental legacies proven to be? Not very, at least when it comes to gardening.
A postmodern way of thinking can help us refrain from all the judging. No phenomenon is purely one unitary thing, goes this line of thought. As a result, neat categories and binaries are inaccurate; everything is already a hybrid of many things, intersecting in myriad ways and rarely in simple oppositions. Chaos theory has made science respect non-linear determinacy, even celebrate it.
And so should we, at least when it comes to gardening.
