Why Gardens Matter
Some of you may be wondering why I’m so concerned about what gets planted in gardens. Why is the South Peninsula Nature Alliance, a conservation project, putting a good amount of its time, creativity and energy towards gardening?
Why did I just publish over 2,000 words on pseudigenous landscaping in a country where huge numbers of people live in outrageous poverty, where crime and corruption are out of control and where major infrastructure — roads, sewage systems, etc. — is failing? Where the rich are getting obscenely richer and middle class families are struggling to deal with the latest fuel price increase triggered by the stupid wars of faraway lunatics?
Why should ignorant landscaping and the malformed gardening industry be a priority for us?
It’s simple: There are SO many gardens. They cover a massive area.
Look at a map of the Cape Town metro area. Look at a map of the world. Private yards and public parks cover millions and millions of hectares. The gardens of Cape Town alone are collectively larger than many of South Africa's national parks.
Most of the vast area occupied by gardens is currently planted and managed without considering wild species, climate resilience or, frankly, the health and wellbeing of most of the people who live in it. Most gardens are either neglected or managed primarily for their visual appearance — not for their far more important ecological and social roles.
Gardens are the matrix within which so many of us live so much of our lives. For most of us, the immediate outdoors that we see, stand it, walk in, work in and play in is not wilderness or formally-proclaimed conservation area. The immediate outdoors is the backyard, the road verge, unbuilt lots, parking lots, play parks and so on, which are all to some extent gardened and are therefore gardens.
Even though they’re so important, the vast majority of our gardens are planted and managed carelessly, fecklessly, ignorantly. They’re bad for wild species and ecosystems and they could be way, way better for people.
Moving beyond the performative, generic greening that too often passes for ecologically-aware gardening requires thought and creativity. It requires straight-talking, the willingness to offend vested interests (including [advance warning] some conservation institutions) as well as delving into politics, history and economics.
Because good theory is an integral part of good practice, I’ll not be skipping over theoretical and conceptual issues in this newsletter and as I develop the SPNA.
But, you say, shouldn’t we as nature conservationists and as people concerned with the trivial matter of our kids’ and grandkids’ futures, care and talk about natural areas and national parks? Yes, of course! And the SPNA does care about them. But we must also care about gardens — those spaces that are under direct human control and are not wildernesses with their full complement of wild species.
There are big wins to be had if we figure out new and better ways to think about gardens and to make them. My garden is currently crap or, as my kids would say, very mid. It’s not well laid-out, it has too many pseudigenous and alien plants, a few ecological traps, and a horrible infestation of Kikiyu Grass — did I mention how much I hate Kikiyu Grass? — which makes it an excellent place to experiment with methods of turning our yards into climate-resilient, ecologically-sound havens for locally-indigenous and threatened species.
Please use the Subscribe buttons on this page to sign up to the South Peninsula Nature Alliance newsletter and stay in touch as the project evolves. You can simultaneously sign up to my personal newsletter, through which you'll get much less regular updates about my articles, books and public talks.
Cheers!
Adam Welz
P.S. I welcome your ideas and comments, which you can send through the contact form on this site.
©Adam Welz / www.adamwelz.com
Follow the SPNA on Instagram at www.instagram.com/komfynbos/
Check out Adam Welz's nature photography at www.instagram.com/adamwelz.wild
None of the writing or photography on this site was produced with or by generative AI. All the typos, grammaticals & inelegant sentences are mine.