When I was a child, on visits to my grandmother’s house in the south-west of Western Australia, I made gardens. Miniature gardens, in the forks of trees. I would collect bark and twigs and native flowers from the surrounding bush – yellow and brown egg-and-bacon-plant flowers, white fairy orchids, emerald green moss.
It’s no accident, then, that humans have embedded gardens into our most important social and cultural belief systems. Adam and Eve dwelt “in a garden in the east, in Eden” before their spectacular Fall; Allah promised “to the believing men and the believing women gardens, beneath which rivers flow, to abide in”. Hindu gods love a pleasure garden; and let’s not forget that the Buddha attained enlightenment while sitting under a fig tree.
Even without the barn owl, the point is clear. Not only do most of us have a place where we can garden ; we also have all the history, the experts and the science to tell us that we should. We know that gardening can give us something – improved physical health; connection with the natural world; lessons in stress-free living – that we need, and which a billion-dollar self-care industry and a million wellbeing products often fail to provide.
In Australia, according to Geelong-based academic and landscape architect Ross Wissing, who ran the Macquarie/NatureFix survey, average block sizes in Australia have decreased by more than 50 per cent since the 1950s – from about 1000 square metres to just over 400 square metres. But whereas only 30 to 50 per cent of a block used to be covered by a house, with the rest usually cultivated as a garden, now between 80 and 90 per cent of the block is taken up by the house alone.
Landscape designer Paul Bangay says that general knowledge about gardening has been lost or diminished since he started his career 40 years ago.This is true – gardens have always been important symbols of economic and social power. In Europe, thanks to various gardening Medicis , a sequence of French kings , and various members of the English aristocracy , having the right kind of garden became the ultimate mark of refinement, wealth and status.
Tony Matthews agrees. “You could say that what’s happened is that, in every generation, there’s more young people who are unfamiliar with the look, feel, touch, sensation, reality of nature and natural things. And that unfamiliarity has been replaced with an over-familiarity with the digital world. And so in many houses, we’ve inverted the outdoor space of the backyard into an indoor space – some kind of media room or something. That’s the new backyard for a lot of people.
Source: Healthcare Press (healthcarepress.net)
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