Life is complicated enough as it is, don’t you think? From the moment we wake up to the moment we rest our weary heads on the pillow at night, we’re assaulted by stimulus coming at us from all sides. I’m not sure I want more of that from my garden.
I’m sure you’re familiar with a noisy kind of garden, which has nothing to do with what your ears might be picking up. Rather, it comes from the chatter and cross-talk generated by an oddly inharmonious collection of plants. A profusion of small leaves and flowers can contribute to the cacophony, as can single instances of many different plants, which makes it difficult for your brain, with its habit of constantly scanning the world for patterns through which it can create some internal sense of order, to resolve into a coherent message. It’s just – well, noise – and it’s a style of gardening often thrown together by people who love plants. People like me, who fall in love with the comportment of a petal, or the shape of a leaf, find it impossible to visit a garden or nursery without taking the enchanting specimen home and then, once there, finding a space to bung it into a border. Any space where it has a chance of flourishing. It’s easy to fall into building up a plant collection this way, but all the best collections have an element of curation, and curation is a fastidious and necessarily obsessive activity, all too readily overlooked. Especially when the habit of acquisition is so much more immediately appealing.
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