The cow parsley was just beginning to go over when Polly and I moved into our new house: one moment in the subtle change between spring and summer. It was also not long after Rogation Day, listed in the liturgical calendar as a festival to bless the crops and relearn parish and field boundaries. And looking out over our unfamiliar acres, I was tickled by the fancy that we might Beat the Bounds. This was an ancient custom on this particular day. Parishioners processed round the fields, stopping at important trees and river crossings for readings of the gospel. The leaders carried willow switches to mark the spots, and if necessary add a little physical persuasion to the young people learning their place.
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The perambulation round Gilbert White’s Selborne took three whole days. I felt we might do a more modest and secular version in the garden, to acknowledge what was there and make resolutions about the future. So we cut hazel wands from a bush in the hedge and set off, waving them at most objects in our path. The garden was slung between two arboreal poles. A large oak tree, about a 120 years old to judge from its girth, stood in the northern boundary. Its canopy was more than twenty-five meters across and I was impressed by the bell jar it created.
To the south-east was a sizeable pond, dug we guessed to provide clay for the house walls, and the home of some busy moorhens. It was surrounded by yellow flags and dense bushes, and on the north bank an immense multi-stemmed ash tree erupted like a woody fountain. The base of the trunks suggested they’d once been cut at a level some way below the normal surface of the pond. They looked like mangroves in the still water. We pointed our wands towards them and I had a fantasy of floating little rafts on to the pond, planted up with sedges, like the floating reed islands on the Broads called “hovers.”
Both of us wanted to loosen control, make a more equitable balance between the natural world and ourselves—grant a degree of self-determination to the plot and its inhabitants.
Strung between and south of these two landmarks was a medley of trees and grass and cultivated beds, on which we quickly began delivering capital sentences. The dozen or so tall Leylandii would have to go. So would the hedge of dwarfed and jaundiced beech that surrounded the vegetables, and an island bed plumped with azaleas and hebes that would have been more appropriate in Cornwall. Things moved very fast at the beginning.
Within weeks the offending conifers had been cleared. At the same time we renamed the house with a more appropriate arboreal tag. The title given by the previous owners (“Cringle Cottage”) was embarrassingly twee, and suited the stilted character of the garden design. We chose instead Mazzard, a vernacular term for the wild cherry trees that dotted our plot. It feels disrespectful now how casually we treated our predecessors’ accoutrements, given we assumed without question that whatever we planned would last for ever.
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A couple of months later I learned a little more about the history of the place. The farm (not named) figured in the 1836 Tithe Commutation survey, and was lived in by two bachelors. The accompanying map showed two rows of fruit trees in the front of the house and a pond at the back, exactly where it is now. Most of the rest of the back garden was part of an area labeled “Hempland.” The pair were farming cannabis on what was now our back garden—the non-narcotic variety, used for making ropes and linen. South Norfolk was a center of the hemp growing and weaving trade, much of it as a cooperatively organized cottage industry. Its high quality linen was sent to classy addresses, including the Russian Embassy and Eton College. Our neighboring village had a royal warrant. This partly explained the survival of the pond, which was used in the processing of the hemp. The stalks were bundled and submerged in the water for a week, to be “retted” so that the outer coating could be beaten free of the inner fibers.
We gazed over this melee and wondered what, in the long term, we wanted to do. Both of us wanted to loosen control, make a more equitable balance between the natural world and ourselves—grant a degree of self-determination to the plot and its inhabitants. And hope that the spirit of this philosophy might also permeate portions of the garden where vegetables or winter shrubs, say, were the important citizens. The idea of the garden as “the outdoor room” was popular at the time, but the disciplines of exterior design, with its motifs and color palettes and sightlines, didn’t appeal to us. It seemed to bypass the fact that plants were living, often argumentative beings, with their own ambitions in life.
So being as realistic as we could, we decided to divide our responsibilities, though it was hardly a fair apportionment. Polly, the energetic one, wise in the cultivation of things, would attend to the more organized parts of the garden, raising vegetables and making the best of the herbaceous border we’d inherited. I’d take on the wood and the pond and the rough grassland between. A soft touch, I admit, but philosophical pondering takes it out of you, too. I’ve always been foxed by vegetable gardening, bewildered by the refusal of these pampered plants to follow any botanical rules.
Polly set to work almost immediately in what became her very personalized style. She created strange-shaped beds, edged with stones or transplanted wildflowers—poppies, cornflowers, feverfew. She hung up switches of thyme as insect deterrents using bindweed as string. Soon a galaxy of other wildings made a bid to be the vegetables’ ornaments: tutsan, thornapple (whose seeds must have been dormant in the soil), foxgloves and felt-leaved mulleins. It was about as wild and Wicca as it could be within the discipline of raising a crop.
Not long afterwards our builders, Roy and Lee, turned this vegetable corner into a walled garden. Because our house is a listed building, and this was within its “curtilege,” we had to use locally appropriate materials. So handmade bricks from a Suffolk yard and limestone mortar were trundled in. Before work started, we followed an old local good-luck custom and buried some of our hair in a bottle under the foundations. I loved watching Roy and Lee at their craft, laying bricks in Flemish bond, one pair along, one single across. It was as hypnotic as gazing at the tide coming in, and I had pangs of envy, wishing I could write with that easy rhythm. During the process they resorted to what I suspect was a piece of magic too—leaving a thin gap in the walls “for the frost to flow out.”
Meanwhile I reflected on the possible futures of the Wild End, whether to look forward, or look back, or both. I hoped Polly and I could both stick by the principles we’d committed to with our hazel wands, and she graciously agreed to accept a kind of tithe in the vegetable garden, 20 per cent to the wild creatures that scrumped and scavenged there. But there was one issue that would always separate our respective plots: fertility. The cultivated world thrives by energy being turbocharged into selected crops; the wild by spreading nutrients among as many species as possible, a redistributive model of resource use. The compost would have to stay within bounds.
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Gardens are often likened to theatres, with the gardener as writer, director and set designer rolled into one. But can’t they also be open stages, frameworks in which natural forces—uninvited organisms, echoes from the past, vital processes of succession and decay—are welcomed to improvise their own landscapes? Maybe this isn’t permissible within the strict definition of a garden. But all manner of ground plans and philosophies have been embraced over the centuries. There are cropping gardens, conceptual gardens, rose gardens, indoor gardens, gardens with no plants at all. Japanese and Italian gardens celebrate pattern, while the English landscape garden pretended to a kind of studied nonchalance.
I have a sneaking admiration for the grand confections of the polymathic seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn. He was a lover of plants but also of human inventiveness. He wrote a vegetarian cookbook, a treatise against air pollution in London (in 1661!), and less happily, the famous tract Sylva, that helped form the practice of growing trees like arable crops. His garden at Sayes Court on the River Thames was full of jokes, scientific conceits and wonderful plants. He shaded his favorites with miniature parasols and created a hygroscope made out of water-sensitive wild oat seeds. The whole plot embodied a belief that what went wrong in Eden could be put right in the border. “It is the common Terme and the pit from whence we were dug,” he wrote. “We all came out of this parsley bed.”
At the other extreme there are virtual plots not even owned or worked by the “gardener’; patches of countryside that are seen as personal retreats by those who know them intimately. The common feature of all these estates and refuges and parsley beds is that they are possessed spaces—not always in the sense of literal ownership or actual “gardening,” but from the net of meaning and purpose that someone has thrown over them. Making a decision to allow serendipity and natural processes as drivers fits comfortably into this definition. Of course they are also the possessed spaces and territories of other organisms, which are happy to accept the invitation to create their own pleasure grounds.
An early broadside against the presumptions of intense gardening was Andrew Marvell’s poem “The Mower Against Gardens,” written while he was a tutor at Appleton Hall in Yorkshire in 1688. There are bigger themes lying behind the surface details: The Mower himself represents an earlier pastoral world of simple, direct experience—mowing perhaps a more fundamental relationship with the natural world than sowing. Marvell lambasts enclosure, over-bred plants, grafting, and has a precocious insight into the ambivalent character of fertility.
And from the fields the flowers and plants allure,
Where Nature was most plain and pure.
He first enclosed within the garden’s square
A dead and standing pool of air,
And a more luscious earth for them did knead,
Which stupefied them while it fed.
Jon Cook has pointed out to me the weirdness of the idea of enclosing air, and the ambiguity of that word “standing.” Does Marvell simply mean stagnant, thus repeating himself? Or is he suggesting that the air is both “dead” and somehow still alive? Zombified? I think he is conjuring the idea of a cell, an imprisoned space.
Two centuries later the idea that vegetal autonomy might not be incompatible with gardening was set out more explicitly. In 1881 the Victorian garden designer William Robinson published a book with the seemingly contradictory title of The Wild Garden, and subtitled “The Naturalisation and Natural Grouping of Hardy Exotic Plants with a Chapter on the Garden of British Wild Flowers.” His better-known classic The English Flower Garden, came out thirteen years later, and both titles share a hostility towards the regimentation of living things, be it in formalities of the Victorian garden, or the rigors of the increasingly organized countryside beyond.
Robinson learned his trade on an estate in Northern Ireland, where the dominant vegetation was carpet bedding. Tender and often garish plants were raised in greenhouses, planted out in straight lines and symmetrical formations (with exact spaces between each plant, left bare for contrast), allowed their brief season of brilliance and then dug out again. It was as if, as Robinson put it, they were carrying “the dead lines of the building into the garden.” He hated his time at Ballykilcavan, and left when he was only twenty-two, under rumors of an early act of eco-terrorism: marching out of the greenhouses, leaving the windows open, the fires out and carnage in the beds. He began to travel widely, visiting wild places and progressive gardens, and developing his guiding philosophy that gardens were places for celebrating the vitality of plants, and the ways that, given a chance, they would naturally mingle and spread in impromptu mosaics. His language of description was fastidious and original. He loved the sense of “rightness” of plants allowed their natural settings: the unprompted hedginess of a wild rose scrambling over a fence, the glow of lemon globe-flowers in a dark, damp hollow; the way that flower and shrub and fern “relieved” each other.
He was captivated by a fernery in an artificial ravine in Yorkshire: “To myself, coming from a region where monotony holds an almost unprecedented sway, where ‘decided’ colours take too decided a lead, the relief offered by this exquisite touch of nature, of the sudden collapse of pot, bench and regulation, could only be equalled by a sudden transfer from a Bedfordshire Cucumber field to a Gentian-covered Alp.” Visiting John Veitch’s famous nursery in Chelsea he admired “the mystery and indefiniteness [my italics] which constitute beauty of vegetation in its highest sense.”
Robinson wasn’t strictly an ecologist, nor a propagandist for vegetable rights. He never argued for complete laissez-faire in the garden. The wildness he loved was an aesthetic quality, and he was happy to intervene with subtle planting and ideas copied from the wild. But where is the line between aesthetics and ethics? Does a dissolving boundary between two plant colonies, say, suggest some sort of vegetal freedom as well as a satisfying design motif ? Robinson also wrote that “the true garden differs from all other arts in this, that it gives us the living things themselves and not merely representations of them,” a step perhaps towards recognizing plants’ agency.
We shuffle back and forth, trying to find our role in the world, and still regarding it as ridiculous to use the pronoun “we” for anything beyond our own species.
Robinson’s use of descriptions like “wild” and “natural” would be contested in some quarters today. His mission, after all, was just a different regime for the growing of cultivated plants, many of them heavily manipulated and originating far from the home patch. A century and a half on, the idea of what is “natural” is even more confused. I confess a certain weariness comes over me whenever I’m lectured on the virtues of “reconnecting with nature.” I’ve never entirely understood this, given that it would be impossible for us to live dis-connected from nature. The oxygen we take in with each breath is exhaled from the Earth’s green vegetation. Our digestive systems contain self-organizing communities of bacteria, which regulate even our mental health. We are cousins, at roughly calculable (if huge) degrees of removal, to every organism that has ever lived.
But I can hear my old philosophy tutor, John Simopolous, reprimanding me. “Richard, you know very well what people mean when they say ‘reconnecting with nature.’” Oxford philosophy in the 1960s had a strong interest in “ordinary language use.” John once set me an essay on “is a broken promise a lie?,” and he would have urged me to respect this usage as signifying a conscious engagement with the natural world, and more ordinarily of a time spent outdoors with forms and systems of life that aren’t entirely determined by humans.
Yet such a casual attitude towards the language we use to describe our relations with the rest of creation is now counterproductive. It’s creating gross generalizations, false chains of cause and effect and dangerous hierarchies of organisms. The “tree” trumps all other plants; “pests” include any organism that someone, somewhere finds irritating. As for “nature,” I’ve collected a few of the more extreme uses of the idea over the years. Pride of place must go to the Tree Council’s declaration during the great storm of 1987 that “Trees are at great danger from nature”—thus placing the republic of trees entirely within the kingdom of man. During the COVID pandemic Boris Johnson, in a rare moment of wisdom, remarked that “we must be humble in the face of nature”—thus including the virus as part of the natural order, against the common view that it was an alien force.
A year or so later, after devastating natural disasters in Greece, Pakistan and elsewhere, various presidents announced that “we are at war with nature.” Volcanic eruptions, summer breezes, kitchen mould, tigers, pots of geraniums and cocktails made from herbs steeped in liquid nitrogen and touted as a remedy for our “detachment from nature”—all are designated members of this ubiquitous pot-pourri. It seems that nature has come to mean “anything that is not us” or made or caused by us. Bill McKibben’s seminal book The End of Nature (1988) argues that our idea of nature as “the other,” a universe different from and unsullied by our human one, has been destroyed by wholesale environmental destruction and climate change, whose tendrils now reach to the top of Everest and the depths of the Antarctic ice sheet.
Nothing is now immune from malign pressures that are our fault: the subtleties of spring weather, the migration of cuckoos, the summer evening moth storm—all things that we could once look to as independent registers of the world’s proper turning. But now, just to complicate matters, we aspire to be included in this throng, not just reconnected but recognizing, belatedly, that we are part of nature ourselves. Re-connection is redundant; it is implicit in the human condition.
The cultural historian Raymond Williams called nature “perhaps the most complex word in the language.” Its original meaning was the essence or character of something. Then it became a collective term for the material world, or some parts of it. The meanings extended and overlapped, and have been repeatedly given a moralistic spin to justify almost any ethical or political opinion. Nature as hostile, innocent, divine. The state of nature, nature red in tooth and claw, the natural order. Pestilence and birds of paradise. Williams talks of “this reduction of a multiplicity to a singularity.”
It’s hard to know where to turn here. When a word becomes so inclusive, so all-embracing, it loses meaning. I often think we would do well to abandon it in all its abstractions and contradictions, and talk instead about the actual organisms and processes that comprise it. And we are hamstrung in modern usage by the very structure of our grammar, orientated as it is around subject–object relationships. A pertinent verb here is “to grow.” Gardeners use it as a transitive verb: we cause growth. For plants it is intransitive, active: they simply grow. Between these two meanings, and the two seats of power they represent, we shuffle back and forth, trying to find our role in the world, and still regarding it as ridiculous to use the pronoun “we” for anything beyond our own species.
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Excerpted from The Accidental Garden: Gardens, Wilderness, and the Space In Between by Richard Mabey. Copyright © 2025. Available from New York Review Books.
