CRITERION IN GARDENING

One of the most attractive features in any garden: Maine, Scotland, Spain is a dry wall.  It is visually captivating and as
that tv gardening weirdo P. J. Allen,  may say, perfect for the right enclosure.

If you have not noticed, my gardening practice tilts toward the hot, drought, salty, average shade, little humidity, surrounded by concrete (if you look at the pictures carefully) on the ground and around.

It is a pure urban concrete/asphalt context, environment surrounded in general, by not so bright people, living in absolute obscurity regarding what the environment is/should be in a healthy, with minimal or no quality of life values and/or possibilities.

If you are reading this and practicing  the rain forest gardening mode along a  panhandle girl,  thou shall not take this personally, or do, if you prefer.

Exposed to this uglier by day, noisy and heavy panorama, I go back home, searching for quiet and visual relief in the world wild web.  Sometimes I go blogging.  I start with excellent, regular, and shitty ones.  Hoping for  some refreshing, stimulating or challenging gardens, not pretty pictures without the garden as a whole, at least one or two botanical inventories or new ideas.  Instead, too often I  find the most common place, evident lack of imagination plant selection and/or composition,  not different from what I see here, concrete/asphalt reality, over there, I have to write and paint with my eyes.

Your garden stinks.  Mine also. As long as there are eyes and beholders anything 
may do. However, criterion wise mine may not, since it is not composed based on dull nurseries, or aesthetics only,  its beauty becomes less transcendental.  

What am I writing? It is time to call the spade a spade. Stop dreaming. Get some research done. Planting whatever suits your need is meaningless.  Is it hardy? Is it not? Who cares, what the people wants is something soothing to the spirit, to the eyes. Not that bunch of plants on top of the others without much thought, as in a dump.


Going to Home Depot and buying ten bromeliads in season, does not make a collection. What is a collection? Is it something one can throw away? And buying again next fall or spring?


Vertical gardening is not necessarily placing in a milk like crate some plants/weeds like specimens, nailing it to the wall, except in one's imagination.


If by vertical one means some vegetation hanging from a tree, a rock or wall, there is a Babilonian biblical one.  Looking at the pictures at right the seven vines are hanging, does that makes it a vertical gardening?


Every juan justifies his/her actions as individuals, as a society.  Smokers, the boxing, bull fighting industry, American football, TURFERS*, automobile/yatch freaks,
morbid obese, bulimics/anorexics and pornographers to name a few. Is the customer always right? * Turfers: people with lawns/palms/hedges, any of the tree or all. 

In brief.  Wise gardening should be a matter of wholes not parts.  Flora and Fauna, not us.  It is cool to identify the parts of the flower, you know, pistil, sepal and so on but insects/birds do not care about that, they go for the color, scent or both, that is that.  Same goes with exotic, native or endemic fads, at least feeding wise.


If your garden stinks (palms, turf, hedges, bromeliads, heliconias, gingers, Ravenala madascariensis, Strelitzia reginae) according to historical criterion, or in my subjective humble servant vocation with references, do not feel alluded. Keep trucking, pondering.


After all, a blog is just a blog. The  garden is not.  


Apaga i vamonoh.



 


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