The Magical Skilled Craft of Gardeners

We at Garden Juju Collective work with all things gardens, farms and everything associated with how to make these successful, sustainable, beautiful, abundant, profitable, healing and just. We make recommendations, support design processes, appraise places and projects, help assemble teams, employ contractors, implement designs, and once established (no small feat), set them up for success into the future. We are educators, designers, team leaders, mentors, presenters, researchers and more, but above all we are gardeners. And we are always on a quest to recognise, support, learn from, and celebrate fellow gardeners.

We’re a magical and weird group of people. We engage with trees, vegetable gardens, indoor plants even, as much as other humans, perhaps even more. Gardeners are only partly in the human-centered world; maybe they seem distracted to some, because the other part of us is in dialogue with all the rest of the enormous more-than-human world. This world that seems invisible or dead or somehow merely following mechanical patterns to most people and all the post-industrial and neo-feudal organisations that drive these crazy times. Meanwhile we’re in another realm intimately relating with hills, trees, flower beds, swales and berms, bees, soil, mulch, fungi…and other gardeners.

Another side of gardeners is that they are physical and embodied, always finding tasks to do in the complex shifting mosaic that makes any great garden or farm. Prune this, feed that, observe something else, harvest or plant something. Carrying things backwards and forwards with a kind of obsessed focus on an endless series of tasks orientated around weather, light, season and how much energy and time can be given to any particular task. Gardeners and farmers are hard workers almost as if they are in service to some wider ambitious vision or higher cause…. All this often without clear verbal language.

We/they are outdoors probably more than anybody. We are humans face-to-face with the rest of life on planet Earth. This is the history of all of us before we collectively headed indoors, into houses, offices, malls and cars, staring hypnotised into human-controlled mind-numbing screens. Whether we know it, or not, we are paying little attention to the Cartesian Divide. We work (play) with both mind and body, with both reason and intuition/feeling, with the ever twisting, enfolding sensual female/male dance…and finally with both the more-than-human and the human. We are some of the few people who really engage with the actual livingness of the world. Lucky us!

But here’s the rub. Much of this doesn’t necessarily apply when the gardening and farming is carried out via endless rounds of chemical and mechanical actions or delivered to sad monocultures from the inside of a heated/screen-connected machine cab. A machine that maybe doesn’t even have a person sitting in it. It doesn’t really apply if gardening/farming depletes ecological systems, downgrades living mosaics, exploiting rather than cultivating. It doesn’t really apply if the gardeners are hired for their physical skills and endurance rather than possessing refined, agile, complex literacies and practices. A great garden is about cultivating complex, rich, multi-species relationships for the benefit of all in that nest of relationships.

And finally these are skills that we all once possessed. The work of, amongst others, Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that Indigenous peoples’ skills cultivate landscapes, food, medicine and fibers. These practices cultivate complex, beautiful, abundant, multi-species, sacred places. There is so much power and freedom out here! Told you we’re a strange mob…

Inspirations:

Gammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate On Earth. Allen & Unwin, 2012.

Georgiadis, Costa. Costa’s World: Gardening for the Soil, the Soul and the Suburbs. Harper Collins, 2021.

Hemenway, Toby. Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-scale Permaculture. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2009.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Okotcha, Poppy - See interview below by Pip Rich.

Pascoe, Bill. Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture. Magabala Books, 2014.

Pollan, Michael. Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education. Grove Press. 1991.

Raxworthy, Julian. Overgrown: Practices Between Landscape Architecture and Gardening. The MIT Press, 2018.

Reynolds, Mary. The Garden Awakening – Designs to Nurture Our Land and Ourselves. Green Books, 2016.

Rich, Pip. “The Poppy Okotcha Interview: Learning How to Garden, to Plant Successfully and Find Joy in the Little Things”. Living etc: Bringing Life to Design. Updated 02/2021.

Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the end of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Williams, Florence. Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier. W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.