Property News · July 25, 2021

What defines a proper garden?


How about living walls or terrariums? It’s complicatedOne of the most common put-downs I hear in horticulture is that something isn’t a “proper garden”. As a botanist who studies our cultural relationship with plants, and a designer who has created gardens for the Chelsea Flower Show, I have yet to pinpoint what this term actually means. In the interests of getting it right, lets take a closer look.In some definitions, a garden is a piece of land that adjoins a house in which plants may be grown. But this view would exclude anything that isn’t a domestic dwelling – from every allotment in the country, to some of the world’s most famous botanical gardens. Even if we gloss over the “house” part, as other definitions do, we are still left with the stipulation of a garden as “piece of land”. Does that mean that roof gardens – such as the spectacular sky parks of Singapore, where palm-filled rainforests are lifted towards the clouds – don’t count? If they aren’t gardens, then the living walls clinging to the sides of buildings that are cropping up in cities all over the world aren’t either. What about miniature gardens, where entire landscapes are shrunk down in trays, glass terrariums and even enclosed tanks? Absolutely no land – often not even soil – is involved in these, so perhaps they are not “gardens” in the true sense of the word? Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
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