A Guide to Gardening

Today, gardening is a bit of an anachronism, like natural breasts and idealism. But retro never goes out of style, and what could be more retro than good ol’ agriculture? It’s what separates us from the reptiles. Gardening is really just agriculture, but without the ambition. So get gardening!

Step 1: Make up a theme

The best gardens follow a theme, like “Japanese” or “Soviet Gulag”. To illustrate, we will examine my recent visit to the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire International Garden Festival, in the Loire Valley. The oh-so-important theme for the festival was “Gardens of the Deadly Sins”, of which there are seven, apparently.

Oh, I forgot to mention that, generally speaking, the theme of a garden might not be obvious to the naked eye. Thus, it is important to accompany your garden with a descriptive plaque in order to get the message across. For example, this paragraph served as the description for the abovementioned Festival:

What if, entirely naturally, the garden led to unbridled hedonism - temptation born from a lost Eden, a thirst for knowledge and expense? A magical place which, to blossom, relies on the rule that subversion is possible and which, to thrive, knows where its limits lie…The gardens will celebrate an alchemy which, while far from flawless – ie free from sin – will nonetheless be, as Valery put it, “the perfection of the righteous.”

It is best if your plaque conveys very little except that you own a thesaurus.

As mentioned, the theme of this Festival was “sin”, and some of the garden exhibits approached this theme more literally than others. This garden represents “purgatory”, which I believe is the Catholic equivalent of café jazz:

This garden highlights an important concept: the hardest part about gardening is getting things to grow. To get around this, the gardener here just built all the hard bits out of wood. Simple! Then, to really nail the theme, [non-gender-specific pronoun, because it’s 2014] added some fun little “confessions”. Voila, la theme!

Apparently, we spend all our lives balancing sin. At least, I think that’s what was written on the plaque for this one:

See, those are all seesaws! That’s quite a feat of engineering, I’d say. Maybe not the best at getting the flowers to grow, but the carpentry is nice.

Step 2: Once you have a theme, pretend that your garden matches it

It doesn’t really matter whether you have the garden or the theme first, because whether you are a good gardener really depends on whether you’re a good carpenter. Just build something, plant some flowers around it, then act like you planned it all along.

In fact, if I had one tip for becoming a great gardener, it’d be doing a carpenter’s apprenticeship. That’ll sort it!

Step 3: Be a patriot!

They had a garden themed for the Volcanic Plateau. Our Volcanic Plateau. It was Mt Ruapehu, Mt Tongariro and Mt Taranaki, but in France! It even had its own obtuse write-up:

There was indeed smoke (steam, I reckon) rising from the volcanoes, especially Taranaki. As with many of the garden exhibits, if I’d never read the plaque, I would never have guessed that this was a venomous love triangle. I probably would have just thought that someone cleverly put together a few mountains and added some NZ-native bush. [See Step 2, above].

Strictly speaking, the mountains (as represented here) do not exactly accurately match their namesakes. But who cares? They had them, and they were glorious.

Step 4: Things you can walk through are good things

You’re already a whiz at carpentry, so why not carpent yourself up a pseudo-tunnel thing to walk through? Make your tunnel a spiral shape, to really show off:

Is that a young Liam Neeson?

Step 5: Accessorise!

As Seth from The OC once said, “if you were to put a mirror on that opposing wall, I really think that would open up the energy flow in this room.” Mirrors can be outdoor things too:

This is a great way to confuse any animals you might own, and is perfect for narcissistic nudists. If every garden had a mirror, can you imagine the improvement in everyone’s parents’ gardening attire?

You might like to put a table in your backyard. I would applaud that decision. I would double-applaud it if the table was enormous and had flowers growing in the middle of it:

This has dual benefits. First, your table can take up the entire backyard, but there is still room for all the pretty flowers that you will forget to plant. Second, you can conduct UN negotiations from the garden:

Step 6: Forget the flowers, a pool is better

Flowers die, but a pool won’t. Sure it might get all green and scummy, and if you get fish, the fish might die. So you get a cat, and train the cat to eat the dead fish, thereby saving you from flushing them down the toilet, and thus saving water (clean, green alternatives).
What if the cat drowns in the pool? The fish are piranhas. They’ll sort it out.
What if the cat dies in another fashion? I’ve got this cousin…never mind.

Don’t bother with the fish. What’s more important is that you have a pool. In fact, get a pool like the one above. It’s not even deep enough to swim in. There are no fish; no ducks. This pool is entirely aesthetic. What a display of needless excess. You had potentially useful land which could have grown crops or housed animals, but you put in a functionless pool because, eff it, you can. This is why the terrorists hate us.

Conclusion

If I were to critique my friends at the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire International Garden Festival (if!) I would say that a garden festival is best suited to happy, colourful themes. A Lion King-themed garden would work, as would a Roses theme (the chocolates, but you could use roses – the flowers – to represent Roses – the chocolates). The gardens were very well designed (and carpented), but the theme was a bit of a non sequitur.

If I could leave you with one bit of advice, it’d be this: get a big field, and fill it with sunflowers. Sunflowers are the people’s flower.