Gardening – too much of a consuming passion?

My thanks to John Walker for his response to Fairy Front Doors: Kitsch or Cute? As ever, he got powerfully to the point: “Surely,” wrote John, “anyone buying this kind of tat is truly away with the fairies.”

And I rather liked them… But the ornaments are part of a stream of “useless stuff” which he feels is encouraging excess consumption. Gardeners, says John, are the one group who have “real potential to hit the brake of consumption and help slow its symptoms, one of which is climate change.”

Gardeners, indubitably, enjoy a personal relationship with nature. We delve into the soil, we sow, plant and harvest. Our carbon footprint is probably, by very reason of our occupation, smaller than that of many other people.

But gardening has always been about imposing ourselves on nature. Coincidentally, Robin Lane Fox touched on this in last Saturday’s Financial Times. “Gardening,” he wrote, “is not about sustainable ‘solutions’. If it was, we would all grow nettles and bindweed. Much of it is short-lived and transitory, loved for its brief beauty or for the challenge of persuading something rare and useless to grow in a state outside nature, often far from home. It is not about saving the planet.”

Given that gardeners already grow and cherish plants, giving succour to insects and birds, are we all the more wicked when we don’t put our ecological impact at the head of our priorities?

Do click on Comment below to give us your view.

John Walker is a garden writer with a special interest in ecologically sustainable gardening and a past winner of the Environmental Award from the Garden Media Guild. View his articles at Landscape Juice.

Comments

[John Walker]

I agree with Robin Lane-Fox that gardening isn't about 'saving the planet' - the planet will be here long after we've put out the light. It doesn't need 'saving', but we do need to act urgently to try and curtail human activities that are already unsettling the fine balance of our biosphere.

That said, I do believe that mainstream gardening in its current guise is not viable within ever-shrinking ecological limits, and I also think more earth-friendly gardening is going to become a serious part of all our lives as we move toward living on a planet with finite natural resources.

The fairies have really got a hold of this hugely important topic in the last week with the news that Garden Organic is in advanced discussions with Webbs Garden Centres about a new commercial venture.

I've done a blogpost on the gardens section of the Guardian web site, explaining why I think the proposed move is sending out all the wrong signals about the very essence of what it means to garden organically.

If you’re interested in reading the blogpost (you can leave comments too), it can be found here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gardening-blog/2009/nov/27/gardens-ethical-living