I have said before that I consider Time the most important aspect of gardening. And it one that does not receive enough attention.
I’m not talking about the short-term here; weeks, months, seasons. I am talking about a kind of Deep Time. Scientists have this idea. It’s a way of thinking about Time that changes your point of view. It encourages a look to the long-term effects of actions taken by you or me and how the results of those actions impact on the future. Of course, they apply this view in terms of centuries and millenia. A Ten-Thousand Year Clock. I’m only considering decades and centuries.
The natural world follows a rhythm. Predictable, certainly enough so that we can look forward by years to plan growing strategies and maintain the viability of the earth through successive harvests. Enough to conserve resources, like water, for those times when we may want for them otherwise.
Small scale growing is the true Art of gardening. To be successful, your point of view must change.
I do not want one perfect specimen of a single plant. I have no interest in a single season of beauty. My gardens are governed by the ebb and flow of life itself. Each year produces a single building wave of life and colour that crests, breaks, ebbs and starts to build once more. Year by decade by eventual century, an ocean of vital colour and shape threatens to overwhelm me before falling away. I dredge its course, shifting and shaping the channel for the next tide, which rises inevitably.
To garden is to sculpt Life in Time.