Showing posts with label exotics vs natives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label exotics vs natives. Show all posts

Saturday, May 5, 2018

What's "Trophy" Gardening?

April 29th was Camas Day at Uplands Park, an event offering a splendid day of music, food, bird walks and information. The carpets of blue camas were stunning under the oaks and spreading among the rocks. Afterwards, traveling up into the stylish curving streets of residential Uplands we enjoyed the striking colour of non-native garden plantings -- lilacs, rhododendrons and azalias, mounds of heather, flowering fruit trees, Japanese shrubbery ... over bright vibrant lawns.
Recently a gardening columnist in the Washington Post criticized "trophy gardens". It's an odd choice of adjective, since a trophy is a prize gained in a contest, especially prey that you can eat. That's not what a garden is, neither a prize nor a contest. A garden exists to give pleasure,is  a living art form designed to create beauty.
The Washington Post writer recommended "natural" gardening rather than the formal type (using exotics) which he associates with Gertrude Jekyll, although Jekyll in her own time represented the informal -- the colourful, boisterous and painterly cottage garden style contrasting with the formality of geometric beds and gravel walkways.
The Uplands neighbourhood gardens are a stunning blend of the native and exotic, the controlled and vigorous. The camas fields preserved in Uplands Park are beautiful at this time of year (before everything there turns brown), but the moral of the story is that we need both - the natural landscape and aesthetic artistry with imports alike. We can enjoy the unpaved landscape most by not being critical toward those who don't choose the "right" (i.e. our own) style of gardening.



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