Nature is not a place to visit, it is home.
—Gary Snyder
THE YARD SURROUNDING Karen Harwell’s home is only six hundred square feet, yet it harbors ducks, a beehive, eighteen semi-dwarf fruit trees, an organic vegetable garden, calming places to sit and read and think, and neighborhood teenagers. The teens visit Summer, the dog, and sit in the rabbit hutch, hold the baby rabbits, and conduct that archaic form of social networking: talk.
“I wake up in the morning and I throw on my vest over my nightgown, and then Summer and I head out the front door and we just walk around the garden noticing things. It’s just a wonderful way to start the day,” Harwell said, as she escorted me around her minifarm. Somehow, she has arranged all this so there is a feeling of openness.
Harwell, who is in her sixties, is well-known in the San Francisco Bay Area for her leadership of Exploring a Sense of Place, the now-international organization that takes groups of people on treks deep into their local ecosystem, thereby enriching their lives. But, she reminds me, you can also experience nature at home. “Come around here and I’ll introduce you to the ducks,” she said. She named her garden the Dana Meadows Organic Children’s Garden after a hero of hers, the late Donella (Dana) Meadows, who wrote the book Limits to Growth, founded the Sustainability Institute, and helped build an ecovillage and farm in Vermont.
Three ducks waddled along in front of us. Harwell originally intended to buy chickens, but ducks lay eggs, too—and she believes they have more personality. In the evening, she leads them like a Pied Piper around the side of the house to a wire shelter where they spend the night, safe from raccoon raids.
Here and there, I stepped over yellow duck poop. “We call it gold fertilizer. Why do you think we have such great fruit trees?” At the base of one tree, I saw a basket filled with colorful plastic clogs. “Duck shoes. When kids come over, they put these on. We don’t want kids going home and getting poop on the carpet.”
The richness of vegetation and the variety of food produced on such a small piece of property is impressive: Bartlett pears, black mission figs, nectarines, three kinds of corn, cucumbers, eggplant, lima beans, melons, squash, radishes, carrots, sunflowers, raspberries, blueberries, oranges, avocados, herbs, lettuces, spinach, potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and strawberries. In what she calls the forest garden, there are native plants, including wood roses, California poppies, and Pacific dogwood. The single beehive produced an impressive 440 pounds of honey this year. The garden pretty much sustains her; supplements come from a nearby farmer’s market. “I’m mostly eating food in season,” she said.
Harwell believes in raising as much of her own food as possible, in conserving energy at home, and in using recycled material. “All the benches, and the patio, are made out of salvaged wood from Wholehouse Lumber.”
We were sitting in the California sun on a recycled redwood bench. A solar shingle roof and two solar panels provide electricity and heat her water. “Wouldn’t have any electric bill at all, except for the pond pump, which means my bill is horrible. About nine dollars a month.”
Energy efficiency is part of what constitutes a restorative home, but here’s what Harwell is really proud of: the impact on her neighborhood, especially the kids, starting with Margot, who is now fourteen. “She and her brother Bowen were the first kids to start coming here. They taught the ducks to swim. When I built the pond, I’d put the ducks in and they’d go, ‘Help, help, what do you think we are, ducks?’ And so Bowen took Webbers, the little male, and he’d hold him gently so his feet could start to feel the water and then eventually he started swimming, and the other ducks were on the ledge thinking, ‘Webber seems to like that.’”
When seedlings are started for the winter crop, Harwell explains to the neighborhood kids, “seedlings are like babies, you’ve got to take care of them.” In the mornings, she wheels a seedling cart out in front of her garage door for the sunlight and sets out watering cans. On the way to school and on the way home, the kids stop and water the seedlings.
The neighborhood children know that the Dana Meadows Organic Children’s Garden is their garden. When Harwell puts out a call for help with the spinach harvest, they come, sometimes with their parents. “If you want to come around the side here,” Harwell said, “I’ll show you what my neighbors are doing. See up their walkway? They’ve got lemons. Over here they planted tomatoes.” Harwell’s philosophy is spreading through the neighborhood, just like those squash vines in her not-so-secret garden. As you can see, the restorative home isn’t just another pretty edifice. The real gift here is human/nature social capital.
Harwell also brings the outside in. Inside her house, she surrounds herself with biophilic low-hanging fruit: a collection of stuffed ducks, bird posters, potted plants. The practitioners of biophilic or restorative design suggest that such touches, though small, do create a sense of psychological comfort.
She could get a bit fancier. In Connecticut, one interior designer moved eight dead birch trees into the high-ceiling living room of his ranch-style house.1 Tom Mansell, a thirty-one-year-old video editor and producer in Ann Arbor, Michigan, fills his house with nature sounds that he has recorded.
Current interest in the re-natured home can be linked, in part, to the popularization of feng shui, an ancient Chinese discipline, rooted in Taoism, that some designers refer to as they rearrange a living (or burial) space for good qi, the circulating life energy considered present in all things, according to Chinese philosophy. A “perfect spot” is a location and an axis in time, in which the orientation of a structure and its interior maximizes the good energy emanating from the surrounding environment, including the slope of the land, vegetation, soil quality, and microclimate.
Now comes a resurgence of a similar early discipline, an Indian philosophy called Vastu Shastra or simply Vastu, a Sanskrit word that translates roughly as “energy,” with its own rules of design. (Don’t place your bedroom in the southwest corner of your home; that’s where the agitating fire element resides. You’ll have trouble sleeping.)
Like a lot of folks, I’m skeptical of any proposition that sounds like it requires a sacred decoder ring. But devotion to Vastu is not required for the restorative home. Nor is the purchase of hi-def wall panels depicting the mountains of Tibet.
The home nature-restoration market is growing. Sales of ecosensitive “natural” decorations are flourishing. A catalog company called Viva Terra, for example, offers twig furniture, a “vintage fir dresser” made of reclaimed wood, robes made of sustainable bamboo fabric, rustic stools individually carved from Chinese fir root balls. One of the most intriguing and increasingly popular techniques for home nature restoration is the indoor or outdoor vertical garden, with automatic drip-irrigation systems and grids and panels for planting. A Canadian company called Nedlaw Living Walls, produces indoor “living walls” of ficus, hibiscus, orchids, and other plants. The method, first developed to sustain human life and improve air quality during long space missions, is said to remove up to 80 percent of formaldehyde, as well as other toxic substances, from indoor air. At first, the company specialized in building living walls in commercial buildings, but now the residential market is booming. One reason may be increased public awareness of the poor quality of most indoor air. The living walls have their downside, including bugs that must be controlled by organic means, as well as increased indoor humidity and corresponding mold growth. Not every air-quality scientist believes that indoor plants are effective air filters. Still, many people are saying that the positive impact on mood and the sense of well-being overrides the negatives, which can be controlled.
For individuals and a few developers, an emerging high-tech/high-nature housing design philosophy includes conserving energy, using earth-friendly materials, and also applying biophilic design principles to promote health, human energy, and beauty.
A hybrid house may have pond rainwater collectors, a superinsulated green roof that can last eighty years, perhaps straw-bale walls that will stand for a century. Add to that list of possibilities recycled beams, cordwood masonry (lumber set in earthen mortar), cement mixed with recycled-paper pulp, and aerated concrete. These homes are so energy efficient that they typically need no air-conditioning. At the same time, high-tech features of a hybrid home can include a geothermal heating system that takes advantage of constant temperatures deep beneath the home, solar panels that produce electricity for lighting and computing, fluorescent lights that adjust throughout the day via light sensors at the windows, bird-warning elements built into the glass, motion-sensitive light switches, sensor-regulated water taps and soap dispensers, waterless urinals and water-saving toilets, and solar panels incorporated into skylights or mounted over water features, perhaps a natural wastewater treatment system, including a water garden. The Bonner Springs, Kansas, company, Total Habitat, is one of many firms that create chlorine-free “natural swimming ponds,” as Europeans started calling them two decades ago. The swimming ponds, which can be lined with rubber or polyethylene, are cleaned by regeneration zones: aquatic plants, rocks, loose gravel, and friendly bacteria that act as water filters. Natural swimming ponds can look modern or rustic, but when boulders and native plants surround the pools, in addition to using nonchlorinated water, you get the added health benefit of human restoratioin.
In some cities, zoning laws prohibit skylights larger than two feet square, so Sky Factory, a company in Fairfield, Iowa, sells sky-simulating ceiling panels that replicate full-spectrum natural light; computer programming changes luminosity, creating the illusion of a sky changing from sunrise to sunset. The company offers a line of virtual views designed to promote health and well-being in homes, hospitals, casinos—you name it. Sky Factory describes its trademarked SkyCeilings as “authentic illusions of real skies,” including displays of changing cloud patterns and seasons, the light and color of sunrises and sunsets, even the activity of birds flying overhead. Such virtual Vastu does raise a few questions.
Researcher Peter Kahn and his colleagues at the University of Washington compared how people responded to working in three different indoor settings: a workspace with a real window offering a view of real nature; a workspace with an HDTV screen showing a “live” nature scene; and a workspace with blank walls. People with the real view reported the highest rate of physiological restoration, but the rooms with the HDTV view proved to be more restorative than the room with the blank walls. In Kahn’s book Technological Nature, one participant commented about the HDTV “nature” experience: “This window will take me anywhere in the world, but it won’t let me smell anywhere in the world So the image is still an image. It’s not actually being there, but it is very close.”2 Another participant pined for the HDTV “window” when it was removed. “I miss having the ability to take time to just look at what’s going on outside . . . to just watch the world outside and kind of shift your thinking a little bit. That to me was probably the greatest asset.”
Kahn’s real-time, high-def window did not, however, “solve the parallax problem, meaning that the view did not shift as one moved around the screen.” Decades may pass before the parallax bug is eliminated. But even without that design leap, such windows could become standard issue in homes and offices in the future. Creating such “windows” into nature isn’t exactly efficient or practical—yet. Some European countries have laws prohibiting offices with no windows. Virtual windows could be a work-around. And as the supply of real nature diminishes (to think of this in business terms), the demand for technological nature will increase. Not long after the publication of Last Child in the Woods, a company began selling what it claimed was “the cure for nature-deficit disorder”—computer screen-saver images of nature. If humans continue to destroy nature, designers of the built environment will “increasingly shunt out what remains of nature from our urban lives,” according to Kahn, and the advantages of real nature will “drift from our purview. We should not let that happen.”
The main goal should be to erase the wall between the inside and the outside. Environmental psychologist Judith Heerwagen advises: “Most landscapes are designed to look good from the curb, but what you really want to do is create good views from inside.”3 The view can be of woods or other natural landscape: a creek, a lake, a river. Chinese and Japanese garden-makers mastered this design principle long ago. For space-restricted urban dwellers, miniature bonsai trees or dwarf varieties can transform small balconies and windowsills. Even there, roof gardens, or a green roof, can create a living zone to link indoors and outdoors.
When the well-known biophilic-oriented architect Gail Lindsey and her husband designed and built their own home, they were concerned about energy efficiency, but their primary goal was to create a place that rested their hearts and offered health, happiness, and beauty. I asked Lindsey what she suggested to people building a new home or remodeling their current residence, and she offered this inventory: Place the house in sync with the sun’s movements, so that sleeping and waking are in accord with available light. Use local materials, wherever possible, to bring the nature of the region inside. Place large windows on the south-facing wall for passive solar heating, but also for a view of nature. Use natural ventilation, with appropriately placed windows and high ceiling fans. “In our house, the windows usually stay open; my husband can enjoy the wall of sounds that the frogs and insects by the stream make at night,” she said. “As spring approaches, he’s out on the deck at dusk, listening. When it warms up, our indoor plants explode out onto the decks, which serve as our outdoor ‘rooms,’ shared with birds and other wild neighbors.”
As much as I admired Karen Harwell’s yard, I missed a sense of wildness. How might suburban or urban yards (paradoxically) contain more of that?
The Morrison-Knudsen Nature Center, located in an urban neighborhood of Boise, Idaho, suggests some imaginative possibilities. Boise is one of those cities where nature is extraordinarily accessible. There are major trout streams and elk herds within a twenty-minute drive of downtown. The nature center was built on a 4.6-acre site along the Boise River Greenbelt near downtown that includes a stream walk and a minipark adjacent to the river. A visitors’ building has a special room with a glass wall through which you can look out at a slice of Idaho nature.
Standing there one day, I was transported into another world. I watched native trout through an underwater viewing window. Above and below were muskrats and local birds, and I was told that deer and even an occasional elk wander into the viewing area. I was struck by a thought and a question: first, this room and its living view beats TV; and second, what if a neighborhood were structured around a rehabilitated wildlife habitat? Developers of middle-class neighborhoods might orient homes in a sensitive way near nature corridors, with the natural theater visible from windows, glass walls, and porches. Was there a way to do this, I wondered, in new or existing neighborhoods, without adversely affecting wildlife?
In Seattle, my friends Karen Landen and Dean Stahl enjoy a miniature version of that. Karen first became truly conscious of birds in the 1970 s, while visiting her grandparents in the Florida Keys, where brown pelicans swam in the canal right behind the house and a Wurdemann’s heron came to the door begging for fish. On a visit to the Everglades, she was photographing a great egret, and the transformation became complete. “I had a feeling I can only describe as falling in love. In that instant, I became a birder. Years later, walking in our garden one night in Seattle, in the dark mist, I suddenly felt a presence. Then it hit me. Birds were sleeping in the hedges and trees, unseen. It occurred to me that they live all around us, yet not really with us —almost in a parallel universe—unless you look. Birds are so beautifully made, so mysterious and so full of life, I can’t help but look.”
Their backyard is like many other suburban parcels, except that Dean has planted bird-attracting plants, and the trees and bushes are left mostly natural, untrimmed.
For decades, this neighborhood with its vacant lots of blackberry patches and scrubby native salal supported twenty or so California quail in a single covey. They would roam, breed, produce chicks, and occasionally fall prey to cats and hawks, but their numbers remained stable. Then, one March, the covey was reduced to two hens. “One called for two months from the rooftops, in search of a mate, then disappeared,” Karen said. “In May, just when we had given up, a hen arrived with a cock, walking up the road from the north, and they had a brood nearby. The cock was soon killed. The hen raised her chicks alone. Several of us knew this was the last chance for quail and tried to figure out what to do.” Karen and a friend appealed to 144 of their human neighbors with a letter that began: “For many of us, quail are the symbol of this neighborhood.” The campaign led to a neighborhood “quail watch,” which helped protect the covey for two more years. The birds are gone now, but their presence gave a number of neighbors a reason to learn more about the wildlife that lives on the other side of the glass, and to receive their company.
Some will dismiss such thinking as misplaced compassion or romanticizing nature. But we live on common earth. In his book About Looking, the art critic John Berger writes, “Animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises.” Until the nineteenth century, “anthropomorphism was integral to the relation between man and animal and was an expression of their proximity.” Today, separating ourselves so starkly from other animals empties them, in our eyes, of “experience and secrets.”4 And empties us, as well.
Doug Tallamy would never be accused of engaging in anthropomorphism, but sees messages from a natural environment in trouble. Habitat fragmentation and degradation are disrupting bird and butterfly migration routes and diminishing biodiversity, but Tallamy believes that we can do something about these trends, from our backyards. Tallamy, a professor and chair of the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, is a self-effacing man who offers this radical idea: the promise of North America’s resurgent biodiversity is in your home garden. “My central message is that unless we restore native plants to our suburban ecosystems, the future of biodiversity in the United States is dim.” He tempers this gloomy prediction with two points of optimism: “First and foremost, it is not yet too late to save most of the plants and animals that sustain the ecosystems on which we ourselves depend. Second, restoring native plants to most human-dominated landscapes is relatively easy to do.” For the first time in history, he argues, “Gardening has taken on a role that transcends the needs of the gardener. Like it or not, gardeners have become important layers in the management of our nation’s wildlife. It is now in the power of individual gardeners to do something that we all dream of doing: to ‘make a difference.’ In this case, the ‘difference’ will be to the future of biodiversity, to the native plants and animals of North America and the ecosystems that sustain them.”
Tallamy’s efforts bring to mind the work of Michael L. Rosenzweig, an ecologist who founded and developed the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of Arizona, Tucson. In his book Win-Win Ecology, he popularized the term reconciliation ecology, which he defines as “the science of inventing, establishing, and maintaining new habitats to conserve species diversity in places where people live, work, or play.” Analyzing data from all over the world, Rosenzweig found a one-to-one relationship between species loss and loss of native habitat.5
Usually, when landscapers recommend the use of native plant species, the goal is either to conserve water, to save native plants, or to replace the ordinary with the novel. Tallamy suggests a new motivation: to save insects and, in doing so, the wildlife that depends upon them as a food source. His urgings follow a personal story of discovery.
In 2000, Tallamy and his wife moved from the city to ten acres in southeastern Pennsylvania, an area that had been farmed for centuries before being subdivided. “We got our rural setting, sort of, but it was anything but the slice of nature we were seeking,” he recalls. “Like many ‘open spaces’ in this country, at least 35 percent of the vegetation on our property (yes, I measured it) consisted of aggressive plant species from other continents that were rapidly replacing what native plants we did have.” He and his family decided to make it their goal to remove alien plants and replace them with the species of the eastern deciduous forests, the ones that had evolved there over millions of years. As they began to remove the autumn olives, Japanese honeysuckles, and “the mile-a-minute weeds,” he noticed something peculiar. All had little or no leaf damage from insects, while the native flora—the red maples, pin oaks, black cherries, and others—had obviously been a food supply for many insects.
One might think that translates into a minus for the natives. But Tallamy saw a different reality. “This was alarming because it suggested a consequence of the alien invasion occurring all over North America that neither I —nor anyone else, I discovered, after checking the scientific literature—had considered. If our native insect fauna cannot, or will not, use alien plants for food, then insect populations in areas with many alien plants will be smaller than insect populations in areas with all natives.” Because so many animals depend on insect protein, “a land without insects is a land without most forms of higher life.” In other words, eventual sterility. Tallamy points out that “the terrestrial ecosystems on which we humans all depend for our own continued existence would cease to function without our six-legged friends.”
E. O. Wilson calls insects “the little things that run the world.”
Unless we change the places where we live, work, and play “to meet not only our own needs but the needs of other species as well,” says Tallamy, “nearly all species of wildlife native to the United States will disappear forever.” This is not speculation, he insists, but a prediction backed by decades of ecological research on the necessity of biodiversity. What the predictions do not take into account, however, is the potential for increased multispecies cohabitation with human beings. Countless species, he says, “could live sustainably with us if we would just design our living spaces to accommodate them.” Tallamy and his colleagues have begun the large, controlled research projects required to nail down his case, and preliminary data are beginning to accumulate. “So far, the results provide exciting support for gardeners who have already switched to natives or who are enthusiastic about doing so.”
If Tallamy’s hypothesis turns out to be right, he says, “these gardeners can and will ‘change the world’ by changing what food is available for their local wildlife.” His work underscores one of the fundamentals of the Nature Principle: conserving wilderness is not enough; we must conserve and create nature, in the form of native habitat, wherever possible, on roofs and in gardens in our cities and suburbs. This is the road leading to natural communities. Tallamy’s book Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens, is among the best sources on this topic and useful reading for those who want to naturalize their property.6 When I asked him for some specific suggestions, he offered the following:7
• Rebuild local food webs. Nothing lives in isolation. Every species exists within complexes of interacting species that ecologists call food webs. For a species to thrive in your yard, you must provide the fundamental parts of that species’ food web.
• It all starts with plants. Food webs start with plants, because plants are the only organisms (with the exception of some bacteria) that can capture the sun’s energy, which fuels life on earth. All animals get the energy they need either by eating plants directly or by eating other animals that eat plants. The amount of vegetation in your yard will determine the amount of nature in your yard.
• All plants are not the same. Unfortunately, all plants are not equal in their ability to support food webs. Food webs develop locally over thousands of generations, with each member of the web adapting to the particular traits of the other members of the web. A plant that evolved outside of a particular food web is usually unable to pass on its energy to the animals within that food web because those animals find it unpalatable.
• Natives support nature best. Typically, when we build a development, we bulldoze all of the native plant communities and then landscape with ornamental plants. You can be sure that an ornamental plant from Asia or Europe did not evolve within your local food web and therefore will provide little or no food for the creatures you are trying to encourage. Look for plants that are native to your area because they support nature best in your yard.
• Insects are key. Most of us have been taught from childhood that the only good insect is a dead insect. To the joy of many, we have created sterile, lifeless landscapes, but that is precisely why our children do not have nature in their yards any longer. Insects are the primary way most animals get their energy from plants. Birds are an excellent example. Ninety-six percent of the terrestrial birds in North America rear their young on insects. Bottom line: if you want birds, or toads, or salamanders, or countless other species in your yard, you must also have plants that support local insects.
• Reduce your lawn. Lawns are now the largest irrigated crop in the United States, which has 45.6 million acres of lawns (including residential and commercial sites, golf courses, etc.), or 23 percent of urbanized land, and that figure is increasing. When it comes to supporting food webs, lawns are nearly as bad as pavement. Consider replacing the parts of your lawn that are not regularly used for walking with densely planted gardens of native plants. The life in those gardens will draw your kids out of the house.
• Plant a butterfly garden. Butterflies need two kinds of plants: (1) plants that produce nectar for the adult butterflies, and (2) plants that serve as food for larval development. Avoid planting butterfly bush (Buddleia). Although it is a good nectar plant, it does not support the larval development of a single butterfly species in the United States, and it has joined the long list of invasive ornamental plants despoiling our natural areas.
• Woody plants support more animals. Trees and shrubs are hosts for more species of moths and butterflies than herbaceous plants and thus provide more types of food for birds and other insect-eaters. Supplying birds with the caterpillars they need while nesting will bring just as many birds to your yard during spring and summer as a bird feeder does during winter.
If such gardens grew everywhere, wouldn’t unwanted insects soon inundate us? Tallamy says that an ecologically balanced garden may show a bit more damage from insects, but true to its biome, such a garden also attracts a diversity of natural predators such as ladybird beetles, fireflies, praying mantis, and thousands of tiny parasitic wasps too small to notice, along with a richer array of birds, toads, and salamanders. These keep plant-eating insects under control.
An online search for “native plant nurseries” by region can get you started. Short of replacing gardens and yards with native species, planting native shrubs and trees around the edges of your lot, or fitting them into existing landscaping, can also produce biodiversity. The payoff: a more interesting and potentially beautiful landscape, at least to the trained eye, and psychic rewards, as well. In addition to promoting biodiversity, a native landscape offers physical benefits (no pesticides) and may well boost the health of the gardener and the gardener’s family.
At one point, my local natural history museum considered (but did not act on) a plan to hand out packets of seeds to schoolchildren, so that they might plant their own yards with species to help restore bird and butterfly migration routes. The notion remains enchanting. Here is a way to enter into intimate participation in the life currents of the world through the modest doorway of a suburban garden or a window box in an inner-city neighborhood.
We exist in a matrix of electronic currents and beeping cell phones. What if we were equally aware of the swirling currents of, say, monarch butterflies, whose progeny each year migrate over a thousand miles to spend the winter in a small patch of Mexico? Or of the neotropical birds —the wood thrushes, cerulean warblers, scarlet tanagers, indigo buntings, and Baltimore orioles on the wing from Kentucky to the Andes? Or those birds that cross seas and mountain peaks to migrate from Europe to Africa? What if we were to take part in these migrations by nurturing the plants their food sources require? Those yards would then be connected to a very different kind of network, one that is immense, mysterious, and magnificent.
About now you may be wondering, who has the time to do all this? My wife and I don’t see ourselves as master gardeners or cutting-edge biophilic interior designers. Or as any kind of interior designers, for that matter. In the 1990 s, we bought a house in the stucco wastelands. The living room, as I recall, came with gold-flecked, semipsychedelic wallpaper. We were baffled and blinded by the decor. Trying to decide what to do led to one of our few real fights. So we scraped together dollars we didn’t have and hired a pro to help us. She replaced the semipsychedelic stripes with Victorian Vertigo. Since then, when newcomers arrive at our home, I point to the backyard and say: “See that mound? Interior decorator’s buried there.” We have, however, replaced that wallpaper and made some progress indoors, mainly by introducing as much natural material and as many images and icons of nature as possible. We’ve partially re-natured the garden (not a hard task, given our predisposition against yard work). We’ve reduced watering, made a none-too-successful effort to do some square-foot gardening, hung two bird feeders, and we’ve amped up our general awareness of who lives in or passes through our yard. Skunks, raccoons, coyotes, possums, and rabbits. And that alligator lizard that keeps showing up in our living room.
I asked Karen Harwell what she would say to people like us.
“The way we do just about everything in the United States is: ‘I’ve got to go get a degree in this and then I’ll start this process.’ And we constantly put off the doing of anything because we think we must learn more, go to another workshop.” She talked about Alan Chadwick, an English master gardener prominent in the development of organic farming. “He came to America and created the gardens at UC - Santa Cruz,” she said. “A quote of his is carved in wood at the garden center there. ‘The garden creates the gardener.’ Chadwick would ask people: ‘What do you like to eat? Plant that.’ He’d say: ‘If you plant seeds in the wrong place, the plants will tell you right away that something is wrong. Just learn as you go, but start now.’”
Harwell smiled. “When I first heard that, every cell in my body relaxed.” In other words, don’t worry, plant happy; and don’t sweat the small watts. She advised that the goal should be to create a home, with a little help from nature, “that just makes you feel good.”
For my family, the restorative home and garden remains a work in progress. But we’re moving in the right direction.