Maackia 037: I’m just a gardener

I’m Nathan Langley and this is Maackia, a monthly newsletter reframing what it means to be a gardener.

When I first started working, the positions I had were titled “horticulturist.” A gardener was something below that. Think of a gardener as a hobbyist vs. the horticulturist who was a professional. A horticulturist had standards to uphold and guarded its knowledge like any other profession. A gardener would do whatever they thought was best with the tools and knowledge they had available.

I didn’t understand it at the time, but working at the UBC Botanical Garden was very strict with little room for growth. Standards were upheld, but it felt like there was no agency for us at the bottom of the organizational ladder even though we were all called horticulturists. We did what we were told, and only what we were told.

It felt so bad at the time that a number of us would often say “we were just gardeners” when a visitor would ask an uncommon question. Instead of giving an answer, we would direct them to the curators and directors of the garden. A small, silly act of rebellion from labourers who wanted to learn and become something more.

These days, I hear the opposite. “I’m not a gardener.” It feels like a dirty word when people say it. Gardener. What do they think being a gardener means? Popular culture makes me think it is an unskilled trade (something anyone can do easily), while also, simultaneously, a chore where you look after overly manicured gardens and fussy plants with strange names that will die immediately if you don’t know exactly what you are doing.

I would like to take the word gardener back. It is a far more meaningful calling than people (or the media) give it credit.

The first component of a gardener: observation.

I don’t think the root of a gardener has anything to do with plants or gardens. Instead, one needs to develop an eye first. Learn how to see.

For me, this came from my love of photography and watching movies. I took the time to study how to set up a proper image. I learned what it meant to lead the eye through a composition. What should be present, or absent. What makes an image interesting or confusing. I learned the core principles of photography and how to deploy them.

This foundation lead to adjacent skills like upholding standards through inspections, monitoring the health of plants, and being curious about my surroundings. We are visual creatures, but shockingly observational skills seem to be lacking.

Without a keen eye, how can anyone truly judge what they are doing?

The second component of a gardener: craft.

This is where I think professions like landscape architecture ultimately fail. They are, by and large, removed from the physical act of creating and maintaining the living system they imagined.

A gardener is not.

Education is important here, but only as a shortcut to better observational skills. You still have to do the work. Ideally, this is where a traditional apprenticeship would come into play as you would gain experience in both. But you can teach yourself to become a better observer, too. It just takes longer.

As an aside, one of the main reasons I left the garden was that they were not interested in offering apprenticeships anymore. I was essentially stuck in the same position forever, as the unionized hierarchy required a completed apprenticeship for advancement. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the garden was developing its own horticulture school. They weren’t going to need the same number of “labourers” anymore as they were going to have paying students to do that kind of work for them.

I think the hard part of becoming a craftsperson is the time, energy, and difficulty involved. It isn’t something that you ever master. Perfection doesn’t exist. Failure is assured in some form or another.

But you keep going. You observe, act, and then observe again. Maybe you learn something new along the way if your observation skills are good enough. If you have the ears to listen to the feedback being sent your way.

For the home gardener, this might seem impossible. An apprenticeship, really? But the key here is to do the work despite the adversity and mountain you, theoretically, have to climb. Reframe the problem. Drop the expectations. Find someone whose work you admire (either online or in your neighbourhood) and learn from what they do. Ask questions if you can.

But never stop from engaging in the craft of gardening.

The third component of a gardener: design.

Design in this context, to borrow from AI lingo, is the hallucination. It’s dreaming. Composing. Emergence. It isn't separate from craft or observation, but utilizes those components and connects them in new ways. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as they say.

You need to have a vision of where you are going, so that you can work towards a goal, observe your progress, and make adjustments based on the feedback you receive from the system.

Unlike other types of design, the goal in gardening isn’t to have a rigid plan of what you intend to impose on your surroundings. A planting plan is just one part. Plants are living. The system is complex. The design will have to change once you start engaging with the craft and observing what the plants do. They will let you know if the plan you created will actually succeed.

But you need some kind of idea of where you want to go. How you want the space to feel. You have to simultaneously see the forest in your mind while you are walking amongst the trees.

Together, the three components — observation, craft, and design — create feedback loops that build to something greater with time. You have to have patience though. And you have to have all three components working together in some form.

Without design you will likely end up with a poor, imposed copy of someone else’s garden that does not suite your space. Without craft the garden will descend into a complete mess and will become yet another costly chore you don't want to engage with. And without observation the garden will have no spirit as its underlying character and charm will remain hidden and unexplored.

Again, try not to get discouraged. The foundation of gardening is to act in some form. Over intellectualizing gardening or one of the components above will lead to paralysis.

When in doubt, just get your hands dirty.

The outcome: place.

And now we arrive to the destination. What are we actually doing by being a gardener?

Picture a typical home on a suburban street. There is a front yard full of grass. Maybe a tree in front of a large window or near the street. Every property looks like this as you move further along the road. These are spaces. They feel empty. Almost lifeless. Undifferentiated.

By being a gardener, your actions transform a space into a place over time. A place has character, identity, and meaning to those who live there. It has spirit. A gardener sees the inherent qualities within a space, has a vision of what it could become, and has the skills (or stubbornness) and patience to help bring it into reality.

Every season is a chance to engage, to develop your skills, and to learn something new. And the reward for this hard work is an unwavering relationship with the dirt under your feet. You change it, and it changes you.

So what is a gardener?

A gardener is someone with an observant eye who, through craft and design, transforms a generic space into a meaningful place through the seasons.

What a wonderful calling and way to spend one’s time.

n