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Gardens - Call Them Like You See Them

© Carol Wallace

Years ago when I was teaching a fiction writing course I hit upon a terrific exercise for demonstrating how to create realistic characters. I turned the students loose in my house, asking them to describe it as a variety of different people might - their mother, a cleaning lady, a prospective buyer, the plumber, the new neighbor - all kinds of different people. And I was amazed at how very different the descriptions were.

I find the same thing holds true for a garden. How it is perceived depends a lot of the kind of person who is viewing it. And so on occasion I spend some time amusing myself by describing it as my neighbors, the local nursery owner, a telephone repairman etc. might. And they all see a different garden than I do.

Of course we are all describing the same place. But we are approaching it differently and bringing to it our own value systems and preconceived notions of what a garden should be, as well as interpreting it in terms of how useful, pleasing, disturbing or obstructionist it may be for us.

An obstruction is exactly how the people in the apartment complex behind our house see our gardens. Until we moved in the owner of our house was the owner of that apartment complex and the tenants pretty much treated the yard as their own green space. Not so after I planted a border of very thorny old garden roses across the back.

Useful is how most of my husband's buddies see it - with a large blank green lawn space for horse shoes, badminton and volleyball, plus sitting spaces in the walled garden and gazebo it's the absolute perfect party place and they never consider using any place else.

To the local utility companies it's a nightmare, as they have to wrestle with a many-tentacled wisteria to get up the utility pole to do any work that needs doing.

And I've heard others label it everything from pastoral to pretty to eccentric to grotesque.

How you name it has a lot to do with how you see it.

Vulgar? Or Exotic?
In the Garden Forum this week Garden Design editor Kirk Johnson made a comment that got me to thinking about how labels affect what we see in our yards. He was referring to cannas, which he said many people consider vulgar. In his area they are thought of as exotic. I also think of them as exotic and use them wherever I want a more tropical effect. But I also use them anywhere where an infusion of interesting foliage will add life and drama to a planting scheme.