Earlier last year I made a change to my small back garden, a few intuitive steps towards a new direction that got me thinking about the role of the garden more broadly.

All too often the garden is treated as an extension of our interior lives and in turn, comes with the same social norms and expectations, particularly around organisation and maintenance. But I can’t help feel that the garden could be a much more radical counterpoint.

The garden is one of the few places where we have an opportunity to ditch the rules based order. To provide a sense of otherness from our domestic, work and social lives.

Since having my first garden, 15 years ago, I’ve never liked the idea that it’s an extension of my house. Gardens are often expressed this way. Designers talk about the ‘conversation between the outside and in’, or as ‘a series of rooms’. I never wanted it to be just another domestic, living space. If anything, I wanted to widen the gap between the inside and out, not close it. If a garden is just another living space, it denies its potential to be something other. This is what I’ve been interested in, searching for, the idea that a garden could play a different role in my life somehow.

For a time, I wanted to avoid using the word garden, preferring words less laden and conditioned, like the ‘outdoors’, or the ‘land’. Stripped of all these associates, the garden becomes just a space, belonging to us no more than the sky or the birds.

I had this sense that I wanted the garden to exist in opposition to my life, by that I mean the anxiety, pressure and sense of never being good enough. I wanted it to be a life-offsetter. Not just an escape, but as something more instructive. In this context, the garden can be a place to explore other, marginalised parts of ourselves. To be unmanned and untethered. Many gardens offer a form of escape and take us in to nature, the best are wildlife friendly, but almost all gardens are wrapped in a framework of expectations and obligations.

As I work through the question of, what is the role of the garden in my life?, I increasingly feel more distanced from the gardens on Instagram and in magazines. These highly designed spaces are often created around tangible needs. It’s easier to focus on things like social and play spaces, than how a gardens can enrich us more deeply. Maybe we do this because we lack the vocabulary or confidence to talk about intangibles. How we want to feel in a garden is a more searching question, than what we want to do in it.

Most of the designed gardens we see, that get photographed and inspire trends, are essentially assets. They are investments that add value. The system, whereby garden designers win work and grow their practice is based on asset growth more than any other type of growth. Therefore the designer as thought-leader (as an inquisitor for what a garden could be more profoundly) is undermined by the demands of the market. It often results in a productised aesthetic to deliver a return on investment. In this sense, the highly designed garden is the antithesis of what I’m describing here. When an entity is valued this way, the tangible needs (eg. a designed Miscanthus border around a pickleball court), always outways the intangible values (eg. who are you?).

Even normal, everyday gardens are assets that need maintaining, but perhaps more comparable to a safe, low risk, pension fund. We see tight, narrow borders that edge the lawn, like a rug edged with sofas.

It would be cynical to say that the underlying motivation of gardening is to maintain an asset, but it would be equally naive to say it isn’t. When something is an asset it needs protecting and maintaining. Unthinkingly, the lawn is mowed and the shrubs are cut back. Although many of these jobs are pleasurable, the garden is yet another entity that needs to be managed. This approach has been unchallenged for centuries, even though nature consistently says, “don’t worry, I’ve got this, this doesn’t have to be about you”, but as usually, we’re not listening.

I wanted a different relationship with my garden, as I’ve said, a counterpoint to my life. I wanted my garden to be free of obligations and the task-based system we live in. The broader context is that we’re more task orientated than ever. Our lives are overly administered. Especially since the pandemic. I find myself compulsively making mental notes and ‘tasking’ everything from loading the dishwasher to making a coffee. Our society rewards list makers. It’s seen as a good thing, to be an organised, functioning person who gets stuff done, arrives on time, wears clean underwear, but the down side is that it leads towards anxiety and perfectionism, and a sense that we’re always behind.

We tell ourselves that gardening is a haven of mindful activity, but in my experience it’s as much about doubt, risk, regret, frustration, failure, stress and feelings of inadequacy. We romanticise the garden as an antidote to modern life, I wear nostalgic workwear and Blundstone boots, but in gardening we carry forth the same set of rules that govern the rest of our lives. Mindful hoeing is still hoeing. It’s still about jobs, tasks, lists. Being natural taskers, we’ve come to accept the role unthinkingly. The previous owner laid the lawn and planted the shrubs and we’re programmed to maintain them.

But gardens don’t have to be maintained assets. I’ve never thought about my garden this way. If anything, I wanted my garden to be more like an attic. I don’t have an attic, but I’m relying on childhood memories. This is the only domestic space I can think of that is uniquely private, that nobody will judge. Garages and sheds are similar. There’s something freeing about these spaces, especially compared to the more public kitchen or social parts of the home. An attic demands little from us and says little about us (besides the boxes in it). An attic is an anthology of our lives, not a projection of it. This is what a garden should be.

This is not a text for how to garden. It’s about the role of the garden in my life, and the desire for it to be a counterpoint, an offset. I continue to explore this idea, not to recede from my life, but to enrich and expand it. To calm the need for perfectionism and have a place of no judgement or obligation. This is something I need, to remain inquisitive about the deeper role of the garden beyond those pictured on Instagram. To see the garden as a new type of asset that is as regenerative for us as it is for nature.

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Email: nick@nickinthegarden.com