What Is Eco-Gardening?

Eco-Gardening is gardening with Nature, not against it. What is usually understood as organic gardening is a form of eco-gardening, and so is permaculture. These forms of gardening tend to be focused on obtaining a yield that is useful for human comfort and survival, such as food, timber, fibre and medicines. This is extremely important, and a good place to start gardening, but there are many other good reasons to garden without using synthetic and toxic chemicals, and expensive machines which use oil that is in dwindling supply.

The two most important ones are

(1) to make our immediate environment more attractive and healthy for ourselves, and

(2) to make our immediate environment more attractive and healthy for others.

Those others include not just human others, but also the many non-human beings who are sustained by a good garden, and help sustain it in their turn. (Yes, even the cabbage caterpillars.) These beings may be literally microscopic (the billions of miniscule organisms that live in healthy soil, and contribute to plant growth) or they may be much larger, like the kereru (wood pigeons) who live in and around my garden.

Kereru in the cherry plum tree, January 2010

I garden in Aotearoa New Zealand, a country where much of the original native vegetation has been destroyed, and along with it some of the original native bird species. Introduced species have taken their place, and some of those species are harmful to native species. Gardening in New Zealand could easily be characterised as a war against plant and animal pests, that requires vicious chemical bombing campaigns and ruthless exterminations of living things - and to hell with the collateral damage.

Yet whenever I walk in an intact native forest in New Zealand, I marvel at how Nature arranges things so perfectly, with every plant and bird and invertebrate contributing to a beautiful and functional whole. This is what a healthy ecosystem looks like, and this is what I try to emulate in my Eco-Garden. I use a lot of native plants, for their beauty and for their role in attracting native birds and beneficial insects. I chose exotic plants on this basis, and for their ability to fit easily into a low-maintenance, ecosystem style garden.

In the vegetable garden and orchard I grow a lot of non-edible plants, for all sorts of reasons, from improving the soil to attracting predator insects. This is all part of making the productive garden as much like a diverse and self-balancing ecosystem, and as little like an 'efficient' factory, as possible. Nature abhors a monoculture. Humans build factories to produce one thing in one way; Nature always produces many things at once, in many ways, with each contributing to the other. (This is beautifully explained by Piglet the Great, in her treatise on urban sustainability as transcribed by Tony Watkins, which is well worth studying.)

I am not yet as advanced in my use of ecosystem services as Masanobu Fukuoka (whose many clever work-with-Nature farming activities include engaging radishes to do the ploughing), but then I am working in the challenging conditions of a land where the original ecology has been radically disrupted, rather than in the more stable conditions that prevail in Japan. Thus my eco-gardening is still experimental. Yet it is generally successful. The basic principle I try to follow is 'go with the flow', and a lot of my garden observation and cogitation is directed at working out exactly where the flow is going, and how I can gently channel it to my purposes.

You get the picture. From now on, in this blog, I will try to colour it in.