Le Jardin Punk

Since everything is still so terrifying, I started seeds. I’m a little early this year. Usually I wait until the vernal equinox, which is about eight weeks before I can reliably plant out a tomato in our climate. Who knows? Maybe this year I’ll bust out the wall-o-waters and put them in before Memorial Day. There’s a whole bucket of them in the shed, and they’re the best way here to keep tender hot-weather plants safe from frost, and from hail which is the biggest danger in our early summer. Or maybe I’ll just let them hang out in the cold frame and get leggy. We’ll see. I’m kind of a lazy gardener so they’ll go in when they go in.

It’s been several years since I’ve had the headspace to properly start seeds, and so it was a relief to find my cheap “greenhouse” only slightly worse for wear after I’d apparently tossed it in a corner of the backyard shed, then piled things on top of it. My shed is a sedimentary space, but a little clear packing tape over the holes in the plastic, and we’re good to go. I resisted buying one of these little units for years because they’re kind of junky, and I don’t like single-use objects, but it’s proven to be surprisingly useful. The vinyl cover keeps the humidity levels high, which baby seedlings like, and which is something that in our dry climate can be a real challenge.

The seedling heat mats I bought 23 years ago, the spring after Patrick died, when I beat back despair by setting up a set of shelves in the basement, with cheap florescent shop lights. They were rolled up and stored on a shelf in the mud room. They needed a good scrub, because it looks like the last time I used them was to keep baby chicks alive, but cleaned up they fit, one little mat for each of the flimsy shelves. The tall LED grow lights, I bought a few years back for the outdoor cold frame, and while sidelights like these aren’t the ideal, they’re better than no lights. Use what you have.

So for the past couple of weeks I’ve been watching life come back into the world. The tomatoes germinated first, along with the basil, then there was about a week of holding my breath over the peppers. Peppers are finicky. I soaked the seeds overnight this time, and all but the very ancient Aci Sivri seeds eventually popped up. Last weekend, I pricked them out into the larger pots (my trusty, saved-and-reused solo cups. Just cut a cross in the bottom for drainage. They’re terrific for starting seeds).

Jardin Punk: antidote to garden gentrification

A few weeks back I heard a podcast interview on my drive into town from the cabin. The interviewee was Eric Lenoir, a French landscape designer who has been building a practice around a concept he calls Punk Gardening. Lenoir grew up in one of the public housing projects outside of Paris, a cluster of concrete towers with concrete areas between them broken up by an occasional tree, stranded in an area stripped of its grass by boys playing soccer. However, the housing project was built on former farm fields, the kind of place where a kid could still find green wastelands — a stream with some trees, an overgrown place behind the highway overpass. He was fascinated by green spaces, and the lack of them, so when it was time to go to university, he attended the Ecole du Breuil-Arts et Techniques du Paysage , the French horticulture school located in the Bois de Bolougne in Paris. He was hoping to learn how “to do my bit to repair or improve our conditions for hosting living creatures—including humans…” Of course, this is not what was taught in the French horticulture school. Think of all those historic gardens across France, from Versailles to the country houses of the rich. Formal gardens, laid out to demonstrate with rigid precision that humans have dominance over the natural world, that the natural world exists as pretty backdrop, as another “material” for human aesthetic manipulation. Lenoir was dismayed on a number of levels by this methodology, starting with the way it defines a garden as something stripped of ecology. Over the years, Lenoir has built a practice, and his own 1.5 hectare garden, based on an aesthetic of leaving things alone, appreciating native plants, especially those people usually consider weeds, and leaning toward the DIY and the provisional. To a public accustomed to the same chemical interventions we see in the US (though I think the EU has sensibly banned glycosphate) Lenoir is working to convince French gardeners that insects, even the ones humans don’t want like mosquitos and wasps are a good thing, as is the presence of snakes. Snakes, as an indicator of biodiversity, are a grand success — which seems, from the interviews I’ve read, to be a pretty radical notion to much of the French public (probably to Americans also, if the poisons aisle in our big box stores are any indication). He believes in taking a long time to watch a space before intervening, and is averse to the kind of grand garden design that starts with a bulldozer then brings in thousands of plants in plastic pots.

When asked what constitutes a Jardin Punk, Lenoir replies:

If I’m asked to do something I think is absurd, I just don’t do it. If I’m told something can’t be done and there’s no money, I’ll do it anyway, but differently and without money. The punk approach for me is about putting yourself on the fringes of mainstream thinking. It’s about stopping doing things just because “that’s the way it is” and about saying “no, I’m not doing it” because it doesn’t make me happy, because it’s harmful to nature and I don’t want to contribute to this way of life.

He’s written two very joyful books about this concept, which are only available in French at this point — Le petit traité du jardin punk, his original manifesto, a charmingly DIY paperback, almost a zine, that was then followed by a larger volume, with lots of pictures, a more traditional “garden book” called Le grand traité du jardin punk (apologies for the Amazon links, but it was the only way I could find to order them in the US).

Lenoir’s three tips to get started as a punk gardener include:
Tip #1: Observe.

• “A punk conserves his energy; he doesn’t have many resources, he’s already tired. He has other battles to fight. Do as a punk does: don’t act hastily, start by observing. In any season, the garden can sometimes hold nice surprises for you. The little grass that looks pathetic in March will be very different in August. And think about the beautiful foliage it could have in the fall…”

Tip #2: Leave the lawnmower in the garage

• “It’s simple, but when you leave the lawnmower in the garage, you see exactly which path you always take to get from point A to point B. You really see if it’s necessary to mow 2,000 square meters or if it’s enough to mow 200 square meters around the table where you eat.”

Tip #3: Determine what you want from your garden

• “What are our behaviors in the garden? What do we expect from it? I met a woman one day at my nursery. She absolutely wanted a white lotus. I took the liberty of asking her why. She explained that she worked a lot, came home late at night, and wanted a plant that would be visible in the moonlight. An “enlightening” answer, no pun intended.”

The Garden as Subversion

We live in the kind of consumer society that makes it hard not to be, despite your best intentions, a little ashamed of the makeshift nature of things like my cheap-ass greenhouse shelving unit, or the solo cups I’ve now reused, if the labels I’ve written in sharpie over the years are any indication, for an average of 3-5 years. For decades I gardened in nooks and crannies. There was the tomato garden I grew in discarded recycling bins in the alley behind my apartment building in Salt Lake City (a big old house cut into apartments). There was my first garden, up in a stony patch behind the converted garage I rented in Telluride, and the wall of green beans I trellised against the fence in our East Bay townhouse. One desperately lonely summer in Seattle I grew herbs and flowers in a window box overlooking the 5th Avenue offramp, I-5 roaring below. I didn’t think of any of these as punk, though I suppose in retrospect they were. I just wanted growing things, and I was always broke, so I made do.

You’d have thought that when I bought a house I’d have gone all in on building a fancier garden, but the thing is, I still didn’t have any money. Patrick and Bill built me my first set of raised beds, on top of the existing very large vegetable patch in the backyard which was one of the reasons I wanted this house (that and the claw foot bathtub, and the non-renovated kitchen). Well-meaning people would suggest things like getting a sprinkler system, but it was both expensive and would have required me to commit to a garden design that couldn’t be changed. Both felt too much. I had a bathroom to re-do, and a roof to replace. I could drag hoses around in the meantime.

I love for things to be beautiful, but the whole project of buying this little house, a house I could afford, then fixing it up bit by bit whenever I had some money, a project that took decades has been, at root, a project of seeing what I could make with the tiny money I have. I’ve never borrowed money to put into the house. I know that’s a thing people do, and I’ve heard all the arguments for it, but when your father lost the farm to bankruptcy when you were a kid, well, I never wanted the kind of debt that could cost me my tiny toehold, my safe cranny, my house that fits me like a snail’s shell.

And for me, the garden always been a project of subversion. I wanted a garden that was beautiful, and could sustain us in hard times. I wanted a garden like the ones I used to see taking the train into Chicago when I was in high school, when we had to live with our father and went downtown for weekends with our mother. Those were immigrant gardens, in the backyards of Evanston and the far north side, gardens filled with tomatoes and peppers and herbs, gardens meant to feed families on very tight budgets, gardens that popped with with orange marigolds and yellow sunflowers flying past the train windows. I may have dreamed those gardens, but I swear I remember them, watching out the greasy windows of the train cars where the dads smoked all the way into work, and all the way home again.

We didn’t have gardens like that in any of the many houses I lived in growing up. We had the kinds of suburban landscaping that isn’t a garden, it’s like outdoor decoration. My father was a landscape architect, who did a lot of residential work early in his career and hated it. He hated the formulaic nature of the work, that everyone wanted the same foundation plantings and curved beds around the house and a crabapple tree in one corner of the yard. Maybe a Japanese maple if they were artistic, or more evergreens if they never wanted to think about their yards at all. Nonetheless, he spent most of his career doing equally formulaic work for corporate headquarters and condo complexes, so formulaic that when Chuck and I were driving around Chicago a couple of years back, I kept pointing out landscape jobs he’d done. I can spot one of his fake waterfall installations a mile away, or an artificially bermed set of rolling hills, with odd numbers of ornamental trees planted in clumps in the swales.

Those yards are not the yards I wanted. Suburbia was not the life I wanted, with its homogeneity and antipathy toward creative expression. To me, it felt like suburbia spit us out when I was just a kid, our family too fractured and sad, the dead baby, the divorced parents, being broke and moving from house to house to rental to smaller rental, and I was certainly not going to beg to be let back in. I didn’t move to Livingston to be suburban. Livingston wasn’t suburban when I moved here. Even now, with a little money in the bank, the last thing I’d want is a suburban garden.

Is Preppy kin to Punk?

One thing about growing up in a family that had money, but two full generations back, is that you are taught early to reuse what you have. In our case, it was years of looking out into the back barn, the one that eventually got torn down and burned by the Leland fire department as a training exercise, looking out there for a dresser, or a headboard, or an old set of riding tack that could be brought back with saddle soap and neatsfoot oil. I use my great-grandmother’s silver set because it is beautiful, but also because it was there. The true preppy ethos isn’t wearing your grandfather’s jacket as an affectation, it’s wearing your grandfather’s jacket because it was so expensive and well made in the first place that it’s still there, hanging on a hook by the back door. The true preppy ethos is understated because a lot of those fortunes, like ours, are gone. There’s an old tweed jacket, a few needlepoint pillows, some good case furniture, and old silver or diamonds that despite what people might think, have almost no resale value. And so you wear them and use them and get on with it. You make the most of what you have. As we used to say when I was a ski bum in my 20s: at either end of the economic scale lies a leisure class, and like the political horseshoe theory people yammer on about so much right now, there’s an economic horseshoe effect where one winds up having a lot more in common with your working class neighbors than you do with the shiny suburbanites gentrifying the block.

In general, my approach to my garden has been to do a little at a time, to build it myself, and usually with what’s on sale. There’s no sprinkler system, I drag hoses around and set kitchen timers to remember. I do have a nice raised bed vegetable garden that I built myself, and that my neighbor with a truck helped with by getting gravel from the local quarry and wheelbarrowing it in for me. The roses are usually ones I bought bare root, or on sale, and of course it’s always the ones I don’t totally love, like those insipid baby pink roses, that thrive. But what are you going to do? I can’t rip them out just because they’re insipid — I planted them, which means I have a responsibility to them, and so they live here.

While the closest I got to punk in my 20s was being shoved into a crowd at a Pogues concert in Dublin in the 80s, then panicking as I clawed my way back out (I’m very short, and Do Not Like crowds), I loved Eric Lenoir’s books because they go even further than the Naturalistic Garden designers like Piet Oudolf (The High Line, Lurie Garden in Chicago) or Dan Pearson (Tokachi Millennium Forest) or even James Hitchmough (University of Sheffield horticulture program). Lenoir is advocating letting nature take the lead, rather than imitating “the natural” with plant design. Its a subtle but crucial difference, and one that puts another crack in the wall that is the idea that “the natural world” is mute material that exists for human beings, that exists as “raw material” for us to manipulate for human pleasure and use. Lenoir is asking us to take a breath. To stop. To see what the natural world of our gardens want to do for itself, and then to interrupt that as little as possible. To embrace mess, and serendipity and the nonhuman world.

I’m going to return to these books a lot, especially as I wait to see what my front yard “meadow” is going to do this year. There’s wildflowers and perennials out there. There are gooseberry bushes and cherry trees. There’s a couple of roses I’ll have to move, because it turns out they don’t get enough sun where I put them. But mostly, I let it all grow long and shaggy, and the cat has a nest in the long grass under the cherry tree, and I sometimes trim it a little with the weed wacker, but mostly, I let it go and see what it wants to do.