What is gardening?

I have been reflecting recently on what we are about when we garden.

Once upon a time in England a garden was the space between the house and the countryside – an intermediary stage between the great outdoors and the world of the antimacassar; at once a tribute to nature, and evidence of human control over it. Whole generations of landscape gardeners built their careers around different ideas of mankind’s place in the natural world, and the transition from wilderness to civilisation.

George Bernard Shaw once said that the only unquestionably useful activity was gardening. Doubtless his point of view was colored by the fact that he was a vegetarian who loved his food. (In his latter years, he took two and a half-hours over breakfast, and used to sit in his chair in the evenings with a sugar bowl on his lap, eating spoonfuls.)

In Australia, the most urban of nations, the history of gardening is different and paradoxical. A garden is more often a buffer between our homes and the urban jungle than between the natural world and us. Most of us live so far away from the bush and the great inland that we feel no need to make statements about our relationship to wilderness.

I don’t suppose anyone who knows the history of the introduction of the blackberry and the rabbit and a thousand other weeds and pests could say with Shaw’s confidence that gardening in Australia has been unquestionably useful.

And the idea of wilderness doesn’t work the same way either. To many indigenous people, the coming of the Europeans was the coming of the wilderness. Before then, the native people lived in an environment they understood. Wilderness was to them like our gardens are to us, and our gardens were their wilderness.