Cultivated wilderness

Natural History, June, 2002 by Elizabeth S. Eustis

Beside an old ice pond in the suburbs of Boston, I made a wild garden. It began as a vaguely naturalistic sprinkling of spring ephemerals among the ferns, blueberries, tupelos, oaks, and white pines spontaneously flourishing on abandoned farmland. In the course of two decades, my efforts have evolved into a deliberate attempt to encourage native plants and arrest the invasion of thuggish colonizers, such as the purple loosestrife and the common reed Phragmites australis volunteering at the pond's edge. This has become my idea of wild gardening.

The concept of a wild garden is a reflection of its time. In the Renaissance garden, elemental forces of nature were represented by fountains, statuary, and artificial grottoes. In the seventeenth-century English garden, rectangular plots of trees planted in straight lines were called wilderness; nongeometrical garden design was an exotic notion rumored to be practiced by the Chinese.

Irregular garden designs developed in Europe alongside changing ideas of cosmic and social order. In his widely read novel Julie: or, The New Eloise, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who proclaimed that freedom was the natural state of man, described a radically naturalistic garden as an "artificial wilderness ... without order and without symmetry." Reacting against the rigid grandeur of royal gardens such as the one at Versailles, Rousseau admired a new kind of English landscape garden, with serpentine lines and open vistas of meadows, streams, and groves of unclipped trees.

By the end of the eighteenth century, a fashion for simulated wildness in landscape design became known as "the picturesque." The foremost landscape designer of the Industrial Revolution, Humphry Repton, disparaged this "new and slovenly doctrine," declaring a limit to the desirability of having untamed land near a house. Repton substituted ornamental gardens for "the uncleanly, pathless grass of a forest, filled with troublesome animals of every kind, and some occasionally dangerous."

Prompted in part by a nineteenth-century surge of popular interest in field botany and fern collecting, English gardening writer William Robinson produced the first book on wild gardens in 1870. Robinson recommended artistically introducing plants into natural landscapes and then leaving them to their own devices--a disaster for delicate species and a bonanza for aggressive ones. We live with the results of such laissez-faire planting ideas. Barberry, knotweed, ailanthus, and the brilliant Euonymus known as burning bush are just some of the horticultural immigrants that continue to out-compete many of our indigenous species.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the idea of wild gardening is changing again. When I first planted a few wildflowers, I never imagined that my pondside garden would take shape in response to new environmental pressures and ecological imbalances. But something in my approach shifted as I learned that in New England alone, approximately 200 native species will soon require active human intervention in order to survive. Vast wetlands of Phragmites all over this region warn me to treat its recent appearance at my pond seriously and soon. If I can't save the world, I can at least refresh my little corner of it without making things worse by planting invasives, such as the pretty little goutweed that could so easily cover that bare spot under the beech tree. My role is shifting from wild gardener to wild guardian, a new reflection of our changing need for cultivated wilderness.

Elizabeth S. Eustis is co-curator of the New York Botanical Garden's current exhibition, "Plants and Gardens Portrayed: Rare and Illustrated Books From the LuEsther T. Mertz Library" (through July 31), and president of the New England Wild Flower Society.