Decorating Your Garden [antikvár]

. ,. I-':,'!ntroductionNature is so full of purposes that her ü wild landscapes confuse us. There's much more information in the wilderness than we can comprehend. The closer we look, the more we see, until it all shimmers out into visual white noise, beyond our sensory grasp or our intellectual capacity to understand.In the grand ecology of the wild, nature has plenty of uses for the dead tree limbs that litter the forest floor in a tangled jumble. But when we garden, we simplify. We clear away the detritus of life. Like a sculptor revealing the statue hidden in the stone, we remove things until the picture freshens for us, and becomes more comprehensible. Through simplification we make a defined bit of nature the gardenunderstandable, and through decoration we make it appealing to our senses.Our gardens begin with simple ideas: making a woodland path through the property, or a bed of perennials for color all season long. Nature, on the other hand, embroiders a million ideas into every bit of her natural scenery: A root exudes a substance on which a fungus will feed; the fungus takes phosphorus from the surrounding soil and feeds it back to the plant; the plant provides food for the larvae of the armyworm; and adult armyworms feed the wrens. The cycle spirals onward through the web of life, until we come, by a commodious and nearly infinite recirculation, back to the root we started with.In the garden, we arrange plants in ways that reflect our human essence, whereas nature provides for the needs of all the creatures present. We repeat groups of the same plant at regular intervalsaform of regularity seldom, if ever, found in the wild. We place plants in sites where they wouldn't naturally occur. And we import plants from around the world to grow side by side with natives. Modern gardens are very much like modem citiesmelting pots of individuals from just about everywhere.Although we may design our gardens and place plants as we will, we cannot exclude wild nature. All the energies, tendencies, and habits that characterize a plant in its native home are still part of its genetic code. As every gardener soon discovers, plants react to nature's imperatives before they do our bidding.A garden, then, is a mixture of human intention and the plants' obedience to their innate drives, whose purposes are hidden from human view. We may believe