On the care and nurturing of things that last
I am ashamed to say that I’d been living in the Netherlands for a full nine years before I discovered the Dutch tradition of the tuinhuis.
It traces its origins back to the 17th century. Back then, they were known as moestuinen (vegetable gardens), or kooltuinen (cabbage gardens), places where the working class could produce enough vegetables for themselves and sell off the surplus. Good for both their material and moral well-being, it was thought.
It wasn’t until the 1950s that became they gardens for recreational use. The typical tuinhuis today consists of a plot of land leased from an association and a small house/shed - usually purchased separately from the previous owners. Or built from scratch if it’s delapidated. No you can’t treat it as your main residence, and yes you can sleep there during the ‘season’.
The waiting lists are long (sometimes decade-long) but three years ago the opportunity presented itself and we took the reckless, uninformed, naive plunge. We are still learning, still winging it, and still making mistakes. God knows what our far wiser, more experienced, and vastly more green-fingered neighbours make of the two buitenlander in their midst. But I can say with confidence that there’s nothing like reclaiming a decades-long neglected garden to teach one about the creation and nurturing of things that last.
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Our collective knowledge about gardening amounted to somewhere between zero and fuck all. But what we did do was walk around the park and peered over hedges and fences and around corners to see what others were growing and what was thriving.
LESSON: Know the environment before you start. The first question the planners of the UK’s Royal Marines ask in any situation is: “What is the situation on the ground, and how does it affect me?” Recognise that tilting the odds in your favour (i.e. avoiding failure) before you commit to action will take time and investment.
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In designing our garden we planned, we researched, we collected inspiration and we Pinned the shit out of the internet. We were clear that we wanted something informal and cottage-y that would attract butterflies and bees. We talked with my fiancee’s cousin - a professional landscape designer and gardener - and she helped us draw a plan of what to plant and where. But then kindly neighbours started popping over with cuttings. Lots of them. Some even invited us over to their garden to dig out a wheelbarrow’s worth of plants they had too much of. And so now our garden is a hodgepodge of the planned and the unplanned. And yet somehow it works.
LESSON: Have a vision but be adaptable. The wisdom of von Moltke, chief of staff of the Prussian Army - “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces” - holds for more activities than just the waging of war.
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It wasn’t a ‘garden’ when we got it. Not in any recognisable sense of the word. It was a bleak, sorry overgrown piece of land that had been neglected and unloved for decades. A tired, grim, solid square of thatch that might have called itself a lawn, was bordered on four sides by a lack of imagination.
So we dug the lot out, levelled the ground, dug in twenty tons of fresh, nutritious topsoil, ripped up the cack-handed paving job, redesigned the whole structure of the garden, repaved… and only then started creating something new.
LESSON: Tedious and laborious though it might be, prepare the ground. In the words of basketball coach Bobby Knight “The key is not the will to win…everybody has that. It is the will to prepare to win that’s important”.
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Now we ever so briefly thought we could do this and simply dig out the lawn with nothing more than enthusiasm, a fork and shovel. A clearer-eyed (i.e. saner) view of the task ahead snapped us back to reality. We needed some serious mechanical assistance. We asked around and Rob Blom and his crew came to the rescue.
LESSON: Know the limits of your capabilities and when to bring in the experts. Ensure they understand your vision, but be open to their suggestions, additions and even the occasional push back. Don’t keep a dog and bark yourself, as the old wisdom goes.
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The lawn needs cutting once a week. The encroachments of Horsetail must be continually repulsed. Moles and slugs will not kindly leave of their own accord. Hedges will not cut themselves. The newly planted and sun-battered will not avail themselves of the watering can or hose without human assistance.
LESSON: It won’t nurture itself. Without maintenance and upkeep all things revert to a state of what the scientists call high entropy and you and I call disorder.
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"When will it be done?” my fiancee asked me early on in the process. “Never”, I answered. “That’s the point”. Bullshitter to the last, I failed to acknowledge that this wisdom was born not of experience but listening to the real gardeners in my family (one keen, one professional). Still, in the three years we’ve had the garden not once have we gone there and not had something that needed to be done.
LESSON: If you want something to last and grow the work is never done. Accept that the task is always longer than the tenure.
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The biological advance party of a forthcoming alien invasion known as Japanese Knotweed stalks the gardens around us. Newly planted treasures present an all-you-can-eat buffet to slugs. There are two corners that favour ferns. The old cherry tree will need pruning soon… The big things (both welcome and unwelcome) are easy to spot. Small things less so. Though they have a habit of accumulating in the words of Hemingway “Gradually and then suddenly.” Grieving and planting a garden situated between an old lighthouse and a nuclear power plant in Dungeness, the artist and film maker Derek Jarman wrote: “The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end”. Gardening we are learning, is an exercise in attentiveness. It asks and demands a simple question - “what is happening?” We’re learning the price of not paying attention. And the rewards of embracing it.
LESSON: Be attentive and notice things.
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Moles, mice, weeds, slugs, rabbits, hares, rain (both absence and oversupply), storms, snow, sun (both absence and slightly less regular oversupply)…. Neither of us would describe ourselves as carefree, lackadaisical types who are happy just going with the flow and yet we’ve had to accommodate ourselves to the inescapable truth that there are bigger and stronger forces beyond our control. All we can do is respond, adapt, mitigate. C’est la vie.
LESSON: Control is largely an illusion.
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Last year a neighbour gifted us a mystery plant. We feigned knowledge, expressed sincere thanks, and in our glorious naivety planted it in random spot. Ripple dissolve to this week. An Orange Daylily that will give us a spectacular display of blooms for weeks.
LESSON: Stay open. The unexpected can be wonderful.
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The novelist and cultural observer Douglas Rushkoff has argued, that immediacy is more and more the central defining characteristic of our culture. He writes: “Our society has reorientated itself to the present moment. Everything is live, real time, and always-on. It’s not a mere speeding up… It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now. So much so that we are beginning to dismiss anything that is not happening right now – and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.”
Gardening by contrast, compels us to live and work in both the Present and the Future. Neither of us are patient beings by nature. And Nature doesn’t care. The Wisteria we bought will take time to make a home of the new pergola. Puny tendrils reach out hopefully for purchase. The apple tree sapling (another neighbourly gift) will not bear fruit for another ten years.
Weeds we’ve learnt however, seem to bypass spacetime altogether and preventing their conquest and triumph demands immediate and ruthless action. Giving the hedge a haircut is laborious and yet when the hours are done the gratification is immense (besides, an unkempt hedge will earn us stern email from the tuincommissie).
Lesson: Invest in the short- and the long-term.
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It’s been hard work, but it’s also been (and continues to be) an education and a revelation. Like I said, there’s nothing like reclaiming a decades-long neglected garden to teach one about the creation and nurturing of things that last.
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CODA
What I didn't write about was that the experience has also made me reflect that until we stop thinking of ourselves as somehow separate from nature (or worse, superior to it) and start to understand ourselves as being part of it, we’ll continue to treat our environment as something to dominate and to exploit. And that until this moral revolution happens, ‘sustainability’ will be just another meaningless word, fracked to exhaustion by marketers, a cynical Get Out of Jail Free card, and capitalism’s most empty, most nihilistic gesture of performative virtue.