25th August 2007

The (metaphorical) garden

England is often described as one big garden. There is certainly no wilderness and as for wildness, well that depends on your outlook. Take a train anywhere in the country and look out of the window and you will see wildness. It can appear as nondescript, overgrown sidings, untended back gardens, field margins and derelict ex-industrial yards, all of which have ‘stories’ to tell, certainly a history and even their own ‘archaeology’. These places and their accompanying adjacent areas of manicured environments – domestic gardens, town centres, modern commercial building surrounds and certainly those areas of intensively farmed land, together provide at least one characteristic that can work as a metaphor for our relationship with ourselves and the environment in which we live; and that is, through human consciousness - control.

We have in this country a number of agencies and organisations, government funded and non-government, set up to conserve those parts of the country that comprise the nearest we have to a natural environment. These include Natural England, The Woodland Trust, Wildlife Trusts and many others. The principle is conservation and that means management. Now, on the face of it this appears to be a contradiction in terms – what is natural about management? Management most definitely requires choices to be made – about what the land is managed for, what animals and plants should be protected by managing the land in a particular way which may mean that some plants and animals prosper at the expense of others in given designated areas, such as nature reserves and areas of outstanding natural beauty.

Particular sites or green spaces as some of them are now being called have particular landscape, geological, plant and animal attributes, which when taken together characterise that particular place as unique and worth conserving, what I would term, though I am by no means knowledgeable in these matters, as an almost self-contained ecological unit. I say almost because most if not all of these green places rely on ‘corridors ‘ of access for re-sourcing its plant and animal requirements. These include the movement, through flight, wind and water (rivers, streams, hedges etc) of birds, insects and animals as carriers of seeds and themselves as food sources for resident animals and plants.

I see this merging of those particular attributes as fundamental to the ‘spirit of place’ that has informed the work of many artists, writers, poets and musicians through time. However, for me that is only part of the story. In as much as nature in England has a natural history, its social history is equally significant. In fact, in my view the two are inseparable. Together they provide the context in which the spirit of mankind is developed and nurtured and where this development is recorded, the record, in history, myth and legend, is contemporaneously and through time the means by which we humans articulate our place in the world and by extension the Universe.

In my view, this spirit of place provides the locus for all our cosmologies and a resource for all our religions.

I have for some time, in my own mind, characterised the garden as a metaphor for the relationship we have with our environment and in particular the natural environment.

I have described in pictures some aspects of the intervention of humans and the effect this has had on the environment and us, as a ‘garden’ in operation. This garden is a place where human psychology and its resultant behaviour can be explained and described in visual terms using narrative and symbols to portray the myths and legends of humanity through time and place.

I have to say immediately and without equivocation that my attempts to do this are meagre and partial. The subject is enormous, however what is important for me is the garden as metaphor and as context, the place where life happens and from which I can exemplify, through images how I and others relate to the environment in which we find ourselves and which we control in a variety of ways and with varied success.

The painting above is entitled - Ornamental landscape.