In the world of folks who approach gardening from a protective place, there are myriad terms used to describe our practices and ideologies. The roots of these terms are as varied as the backgrounds of the people and institutions who use them. Restorative Land Management, Conservation Landscaping, Food Forest, Permaculture, Organic Gardening, Eco-scaping, Restoration Agriculture, Residential Low Impact Landscaping, Bayscaping, are just a few of the monikers used to describe different philosophies and applications of a more wholistic and healthy way to approach human interaction with land, water, flora and fauna.
There is nothing wrong with the abundance of terms, really. It is important to understand the more widely used, their roots, their implications. There are important distinctions within them, many of them do describe very different things for very different reasons. And, there are of course redundancies as well. It’s where we’re at.
An instructor in my Chesapeake Bay Landscape Professional Certification course made a joke the other day that in order to obtain certification we would all need to come up with our own new term for these practices. Her joke got me thinking about how I describe what it is that I do.
Land management is constantly on my mind. How can we care for the ground beneath our feet? What is the appropriate role for a white girl gardening on stolen land? How can we drop the dogma and self-righteousness within all of environmentalism that seems only to divide us further and repels folks who may be curious about making small changes?
These questions are big. I presume they are questions that accompany a lifetime. I’m sure the answers to these questions are as multifaceted and ever evolving as nature herself.
We will always be studying, philosophizing, creating, deconstructing and naming ways to be good stewards. We will do this imperfectly, as is the only way a human can do anything. And I plan to participate. I plan to grow, I plan to listen and unlearn, I plan to put my hands on soil and ask what she needs.
One day, maybe we will just call it being. ‘Being a human on Earth’ is what we will call living in a harmonious balance of use and protection with our planet.
Today, I feel the need to simplify and express plainly what it is that I do.
I have spent years reading, thinking, doing, questioning. I am a certified designer of Permaculture, I use native plants heavily but not exclusively, I believe in doing our best to minimize our personal use cycles. I look to science to inform decisions. I hug trees, I talk to land, I listen and I hear.
I design, manage, and coach ecological gardens.
To me this means that I address the wellbeing of the relationships present on the site from the micro level of soil biology to the macro level of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.
Integral to my approach is balance; one of the most obvious lessons to gain from observing Earth in all her seasons and rotations.
Also integral to my approach is the simple fact that we are mammals, however clever and well-tooled we are. We cannot extricate ourselves from our environment. We too are part of our eco-system.
We are nature. My hope for my work is to garden like it.
Clara
