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The Philosophy of Gardening
A book for philosophizing gardeners, now available in English.
Kitchen gardens, moss gardens, botanical gardens, landscape gardens: there are as many varieties of gardens as there are gardeners, and the way we tend to our gardens is just as vast. Every gardener discovers a new world every year—regardless of whether they cultivate heirloom vegetables, specialize in wild herbs, create a small permaculture garden on the city balcony, or maintain a garden designed for self-sufficiency.
In these informative personal essays, writers, designers and master gardeners explore the philosophical dimension of gardening and tend to the aesthetic, cultural, political and sociological implications of gardens and the people who keep them.
Why garden at all? Is it better to leave nature to its own devices? Can cities reclaim nature through urban gardening? Which garden design, which plants and seeds? In addressing gardening's most deep-rooted questions, this delightful volume highlights the magic of gardens that makes us, year after year, pick up a shovel and a rake and get back to gardening.
Kitchen gardens, moss gardens, botanical gardens, landscape gardens: there are as many varieties of gardens as there are gardeners, and the way we tend to our gardens is just as vast. Every gardener discovers a new world every year—regardless of whether they cultivate heirloom vegetables, specialize in wild herbs, create a small permaculture garden on the city balcony, or maintain a garden designed for self-sufficiency.
In these informative personal essays, writers, designers and master gardeners explore the philosophical dimension of gardening and tend to the aesthetic, cultural, political and sociological implications of gardens and the people who keep them.
Why garden at all? Is it better to leave nature to its own devices? Can cities reclaim nature through urban gardening? Which garden design, which plants and seeds? In addressing gardening's most deep-rooted questions, this delightful volume highlights the magic of gardens that makes us, year after year, pick up a shovel and a rake and get back to gardening.
184 pages, ebook
Published May 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 17, 2023
With some books, it’s learning about new facts or new theories. With others, it’s the chance to think about something. The book gives you an environment — some prompts, some thoughts — to spur your own thinking. That’s what this book was for me.
I’ll say upfront that I’m a very specific (make that, limited) type of gardener — urban vegetable gardening, and I’m pretty relaxed about it. It’s a pastime, nothing more. But I enjoy growing vegetables from seeds, harvesting them, eating them, giving away the extras.
I found my attitude fit with some if not all of the contributors to this collection of 14 essays on gardening, the culture of gardening, the experience of urban gardening, and the place of gardening in the larger community.
I especially identified with Brunhild Bross-Burkhardt’s dismissal of “anal-retentive gardeners,” gardeners who cannot allow a weed to stand. In fact, several of the essays discuss weeds. Why are they weeds? It’s not as if they are a special class of plants in and of themselves. They are weeds because we don’t like them growing where they are growing. Growing someplace else, they might be wildflowers or ground cover . . . Is “man” really “the measure of all things?”
With that thought, I especially resonated with Sarah Thelen’s essay, invoking Kant’s categorical imperative, of all things! Kant claims the grounding principle of morality to be respect for others as “ends in themselves” and “never solely as means.” Kant meant to extend the principle only to our behavior towards other “rational beings,” but gardening calls our tended plants (and nature altogether) into the picture. Providing for the garden’s growth while not controlling it respects the garden’s autonomy, its status as an “end in itself” with something akin to a will of its own. You plant and tend, but the plant does the growing.
You could think of this as the difference between “agriculture” (in the industrialized sense) and gardening — in the one we control growth and maximize yield, while in the other we plant and care for what we’ve planted as it grows in its own time and own way. Heidegger is also in on this one, with his distinction between technology and “letting Being be.”
You never thought we would be talking Kant and Heidegger together with gardening, did you?
There’s more. Many of the essays discuss community gardens, especially in the context of Germany (the book was originally written and published in German). The Allmende-Kontor, a Berlin-based citizen-participation organization that addresses urban/nature concerns, climate protection, and others, as well as gardening, produces the quote, “We have to professionalize unprofessionalism.”
Gardening in this way of thinking is not to be treated like other “industries,” left to those who have jobs in that industry. It’s something anyone can be involved in, via anything from large home gardens where lot sizes permit it to balcony gardens and even window boxes. Doing so brings us closer to our food, closer to that experience of the autonomy of living, growing things — an experience of “the tension between nature and design” (Deter Wandschneider) and an antidote to alienation and industrialization.
Farther on the advocacy side, Annette Holländer raises concerns about modern agricultural methods in which seed diversity is not just diminished but actively opposed through the dominance of seed licensing and the desire to reproduce the same varieties of plants, especially fruits and vegetables, with the same characteristics year over year over year. Where change takes place, it is intentional breeding or hybridization rather than natural adaptation. A full-on challenge to natural autonomy.
Also on the advocacy side, Judith Henning gives a brief on “permaculture” — gardening as a cultural and political movement. The spirit of her essay provoked reflections on the community project in my own hometown in Santa Cruz, California, where the Homeless Garden Project has used gardening for more than thirty years as a way not only to employ the homeless and volunteers in growing food, but also to provide job training and a greater sense of involvement and integration between the homeless community and the rest of the city.
So, lots of viewpoints, all taking the “unprofessional” gardener as a distinctive and fertile (sorry) perspective. Like I said, it’s a chance to reflect on your own experience of gardening and its place in your life, and maybe in your community as well.
I’ll say upfront that I’m a very specific (make that, limited) type of gardener — urban vegetable gardening, and I’m pretty relaxed about it. It’s a pastime, nothing more. But I enjoy growing vegetables from seeds, harvesting them, eating them, giving away the extras.
I found my attitude fit with some if not all of the contributors to this collection of 14 essays on gardening, the culture of gardening, the experience of urban gardening, and the place of gardening in the larger community.
I especially identified with Brunhild Bross-Burkhardt’s dismissal of “anal-retentive gardeners,” gardeners who cannot allow a weed to stand. In fact, several of the essays discuss weeds. Why are they weeds? It’s not as if they are a special class of plants in and of themselves. They are weeds because we don’t like them growing where they are growing. Growing someplace else, they might be wildflowers or ground cover . . . Is “man” really “the measure of all things?”
With that thought, I especially resonated with Sarah Thelen’s essay, invoking Kant’s categorical imperative, of all things! Kant claims the grounding principle of morality to be respect for others as “ends in themselves” and “never solely as means.” Kant meant to extend the principle only to our behavior towards other “rational beings,” but gardening calls our tended plants (and nature altogether) into the picture. Providing for the garden’s growth while not controlling it respects the garden’s autonomy, its status as an “end in itself” with something akin to a will of its own. You plant and tend, but the plant does the growing.
You could think of this as the difference between “agriculture” (in the industrialized sense) and gardening — in the one we control growth and maximize yield, while in the other we plant and care for what we’ve planted as it grows in its own time and own way. Heidegger is also in on this one, with his distinction between technology and “letting Being be.”
You never thought we would be talking Kant and Heidegger together with gardening, did you?
There’s more. Many of the essays discuss community gardens, especially in the context of Germany (the book was originally written and published in German). The Allmende-Kontor, a Berlin-based citizen-participation organization that addresses urban/nature concerns, climate protection, and others, as well as gardening, produces the quote, “We have to professionalize unprofessionalism.”
Gardening in this way of thinking is not to be treated like other “industries,” left to those who have jobs in that industry. It’s something anyone can be involved in, via anything from large home gardens where lot sizes permit it to balcony gardens and even window boxes. Doing so brings us closer to our food, closer to that experience of the autonomy of living, growing things — an experience of “the tension between nature and design” (Deter Wandschneider) and an antidote to alienation and industrialization.
Farther on the advocacy side, Annette Holländer raises concerns about modern agricultural methods in which seed diversity is not just diminished but actively opposed through the dominance of seed licensing and the desire to reproduce the same varieties of plants, especially fruits and vegetables, with the same characteristics year over year over year. Where change takes place, it is intentional breeding or hybridization rather than natural adaptation. A full-on challenge to natural autonomy.
Also on the advocacy side, Judith Henning gives a brief on “permaculture” — gardening as a cultural and political movement. The spirit of her essay provoked reflections on the community project in my own hometown in Santa Cruz, California, where the Homeless Garden Project has used gardening for more than thirty years as a way not only to employ the homeless and volunteers in growing food, but also to provide job training and a greater sense of involvement and integration between the homeless community and the rest of the city.
So, lots of viewpoints, all taking the “unprofessional” gardener as a distinctive and fertile (sorry) perspective. Like I said, it’s a chance to reflect on your own experience of gardening and its place in your life, and maybe in your community as well.
July 27, 2022
I bought this book off the cover and title alone. So weirdly I was actually surprised that it WAS philosophizing on the purpose and methods of gardening. I was ok with this! I took some philosophy courses in university and enjoyed them. I like the big questions. Like gardening, there’s something indulgent in having the time and desire to even contemplate them. It feeds a different part of you.
This is a book of translated essays. There were quite a few I found interesting and engaging, the ones discussing the purpose and our engagement with “weeds,” thoughts on guerrilla and community gardens and especially one on gender and gardening. But there were just as many that I found a real slog. For such a short book it felt long, and that’s not for me.
But I spend a lot of time in my garden. I’m thinking differently about it now, so that’s definitely something.
This is a book of translated essays. There were quite a few I found interesting and engaging, the ones discussing the purpose and our engagement with “weeds,” thoughts on guerrilla and community gardens and especially one on gender and gardening. But there were just as many that I found a real slog. For such a short book it felt long, and that’s not for me.
But I spend a lot of time in my garden. I’m thinking differently about it now, so that’s definitely something.
July 27, 2023
It's a book that philosophizes gardening. Made up of 13 essays, the authors connect how and why we garden with grander ideas of life and the world. Whether it's the techniques we use, the types of plants we grow, or the community we create, these essays remind us that gardening creates life and with that there are all sorts of decisions to be made and those choices reflect who we are, in some respects.
I enjoyed these essays. This is a book I'd recommend for leisurely reading rather than to have a go at it all in one sitting. The philosophy is sound and interesting, and it was a lot of fun learning about how they garden in the EU versus how we garden here in Canada. At the end of the day though, books like this feel like school and they're not entirely my jam, but I enjoyed it overall.
I enjoyed these essays. This is a book I'd recommend for leisurely reading rather than to have a go at it all in one sitting. The philosophy is sound and interesting, and it was a lot of fun learning about how they garden in the EU versus how we garden here in Canada. At the end of the day though, books like this feel like school and they're not entirely my jam, but I enjoyed it overall.
May 7, 2023
Nice collection of different stories and views on the importance of hobby gardening.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews