NATURAL BEAUTY | GARDENING

Two classics from a gardener’s library

(Lessons in gardening with Walter Wright and Christopher Lloyd)

It’s the two top ones this post is about :) — photo: flaleman, 2019

I have been a gardener for as long as I can remember. This doesn’t mean that I am anywhere near being a skilled gardener. The thing with gardening is that one is forever a student and an apprentice. The main gardener is not the gardener. The main gardener is nature.

Lessons in gardening

So much said, I have designed and returned to the powers of nature many gardens in the course of my nomadic life. These are not random words. My current view is that a gardener applies no more than a small and temporary intervention, but in the end nature takes over. In this, I am with Sensei Masanobu Fukuoka, author of “The Do-Nothing Method,” Shizen Nōhō: Midori no Tetsugaku no Riron to Jissen, 自然農法 緑の哲学の理論と実践, 1975, and the seminal One-Straw Revolution, aka “Zen and The Art of Farming,” 1978. By all means, Fukuoka, who passed in 2008, was the greatest gardener of all times, and I have no hesitation in calling myself his most unworthy, Ekalavya kind of disciple.

But to finally get to where I am now, I’ve come a long way, along winding paths and forest clearings clothed in blankets of wild grasses and herbs. And jungles. And…