The Gentle Rebellion at the Heart of Natural Gardens

How “orderly frames” help us engage with the landscape and “messy middles” make it truly beautiful.

When I was a child, I played the violin in an orchestra. We sounded like cats – and not the Andrew Lloyd Webber version.

The conductor would say the following: people remember the beginning and the end. It doesn’t matter what happens in the middle.

I was thinking about this as I tended the garden at Lucas House in Haliburton. It was time to replace the mulch around the edges of the landscape. I ripped out the landscape fabric I mistakenly used to keep weeds at bay close to the sidewalk. It wasn’t working and it’s nasty stuff anyway. Then I topped up the area with fresh forest mulch. It looks much neater now.

Yes, it’s meant to be like this

In my world, there is a concept called messy middles, orderly frames. There is a related concept called “cues to care.” In other words, it’s wise to do something to make your landscape look like it is intentional rather than just gone wild. It’s the gardening equivalent of my conductor’s advice to the scratchy violins.
At Lucas House, you not only find the neat edges, but there is also a winding mulch path, a bench, and a couple of sculptures. The sculptures are the work of Corner Gallery and the Downtown Sculpture Exhibition rather than of Grounded.

However, the real action happens in the messy middle. While the beginning and end are important, it’s the chords in the body of the music that this work is all about.

I guess what I am pondering is if it’s really messy at all.

The buzz of Mountain Mint

July sees the bloom of Narrowleaf Mountain Mint at Lucas House. This is one of my favourite species: deer hate it, its leaves are faintly minty, and it fills space quickly. But more importantly, insects love its haze of tiny white flowers.

I often walk right into the landscape. When the Mountain Mint is blooming, the garden is buzzing. Stand still and you notice the flowers are full of insects – grasshoppers, beetles, butterflies. It’s like the landscape comes alive, visually and audibly.

This is what natural gardening is all about.

Nature is messy. It’s complex and layered. It changes from day to day. It grows and it dies. And all the time – even in death – it is host to a rich diversity of life, a mutually supportive community that makes the planet function.

When I create a messy middle, I’m leading a gentle rebellion. I’m challenging the very concept of beauty. What is more beautiful, the neat cues to care or the messy buzz of insect life?

The rich dance of life

While traditional landscaping is a beauty of control and stasis, where plants are placed neatly, one by one, surrounded by mulch, and then kept tamed year to year, the beauty of natural landscaping is formed of abundance, richness and the ever-changing dance of life.

For us, beauty isn’t just how something looks, it’s how something functions. A diverse soil of roots and microorganisms supports a rich texture of stems and leaves growing in a mutually supportive pattern. And all this underpins a thriving community of insects, birds and mammals able to live their lives and give back to the world.

Beauty isn’t about showing our dominance over nature, keeping it in its place as a backdrop to our lives. Instead, it’s about being part of the web of life, helping it thrive and allowing life to help us thrive, too.
The orderly frames and cues to care help us engage with the landscape. But it’s the messy middle where the landscape lives.

Maybe it’s time to follow the winding mulch path and come back to life.