Why We Should All Cultivate a Love for Gardening

An impressively sized Diego Harris sculpture draws the eye and captures the spirit of this garden (photo by Kier Holmes)

My love of gardening — and my creativity and resourcefulness —started as a child of hippie parents living in Marin County during the funky 1970s. My craftsman father truly enjoyed bucking the system, and my mother, a home gardener, enjoyed nurturing the ecosystem. We lived in a house my father built almost exclusively from reclaimed, salvaged finds. Featured in Life magazine, this ahead-of-its-time house would go on to win Sunset’s Western Home of the Year award. At our next house, my mother cared for a petite garden where I learned about tending fruit trees, the power of perennials, and how to garden organically.

Many years later, my parents built another home, incorporating a much larger garden that once again was guided by ecological responsibility, embracing recycled materials and creative salvaged treasures. With them, I helped grow, maintain, and edit their inventive and resourceful garden, which won Garden Design’s Golden Trowel in 1998. In this aesthetically adventurous garden, I learned the importance of reusing lumber and stone, dividing plants, pampering pollinators, building healthy compost, and (literally) turning gardening on its side.

I consciously and unconsciously absorbed my parents’ sentiment, practices, and ethos like leaves absorbing sunlight. In my 20-plus years of designing and maintaining landscapes, I carry these imaginative ways of creating and caring for a garden, always wondering how to create a beautiful, productive, and healthy garden, or refresh and update a tired one, without spending crazy amounts of cash or using an excess of our earth’s valuable natural resources.

The effects of climate change and our recent global pandemic (which has not only restricted our movements but limited our physical contact with others) are creating a mandate for us to take action. We have a growing awareness of the need to change things up, turn things upside down, and pivot and morph in ways we never imagined. Now is the time to start buying less and enjoying more, spending less but having more. I’m reminded every day of the reasons why we need to connect with nature and the earth. One way to regain that crucial connection is through gardening, which gives us a sense of belonging to a special place while we experience the physicality of digging in soil, the instinctual nurturing of plants, the scientific approach to observing life, and a childlike sense of awe.

Historically, we have turned to our gardens in troubling times. Something about soil makes anxiety more manageable and helps us imagine better, happier, even prettier times. For a great example, see the victory gardens of World War II, in which Americans patriotically grew food at home, even in abandoned lots, to feed their families and support the troops. Today, the thing that drives people to garden isn’t so much fear of hunger but hunger for tangible physical work that gives us hope for nature’s (and our own) resilience.

As I write this, shelter-in-place orders are beginning to lift, but I continue to witness the ways our gardens have become and continue to provide necessary shelter — today’s gardens are valuable and well-used living spaces, sanctuaries where we can escape from strange stresses and uncertain times. Don’t get me wrong: taking care of a garden can be utterly stressful too, even exhausting, frustrating, and completely baffling. Yet, when we get it right, it is deeply satisfying. This is the nature of gardening and why we love it. Gardens are ever-changing experiments full of surprises.

Because the nature of gardening is a bit lawless and “it takes a village,” it’s undeniably useful for beginners and veterans alike to get help and learn tips and insider info. This book is that collection of inspiration and helpful tips. Some of the featured gardens were designed by me and some were created by other talented designers. Peppered throughout you’ll find pro tips, top plant lists, creative suggestions, easy homemade recipes, and reasons why certain actions in the garden save money and make the earth a healthier place to live.

This book is a gift for my fellow creative gardeners who conscientiously attempt to work with nature, not against it. We study the environment, look out early for weeds, bugs, disease, flooding, drought, cold, heat, and soil changes, and quickly react to these situations with an inventive approach and natural solutions and ingredients that we already have at home. We also look to resources we have on hand or in place and think of ways to reuse them instead of tossing them out. Cultivating this awareness and responding to the nuances and changes and little dances that our gardens perform saves us money, heartache, back pain, and time, so we can sit back and enjoy the fruits of our labor.

For me, smart gardening isn’t about rushing or being cheap or cutting corners. Instead, it’s about achieving a rewarding and personalized garden no matter the size of the space or budget. It’s about making informed choices and spending money where it counts without sacrificing design or style.

I encourage you to start your wise and aware garden practice wherever you can, maybe even adopt a little buck-the-system attitude, add in some creativity, and see where the gardening journey takes you.

Let’s dig in.  

Excerpted from The Garden Refresh: How to Give Your Yard Big Impact on a Small Budget (Timber Press) by Kier Holmes

The Garden Refresh: How to Give Your Yard Big Impact on a Small Budget (Timber Press) © 2022 by Kier Holmes. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. (photo by Kier Holmes)