subject: Ordering Chaos Landscape Gardening, Soft And Hard [print this page] When one refers to soft and hard landscape gardening, one is referring to the two elements that make up proper landscaping the marriage of hard elements, which are manmade, and soft elements, which are natural i.e., a person didnt construct them. The two taken together form the basis for all good landscaping.
Its really true to say that landscaping doesnt work properly without man made elements. Hard landscaping the part of landscape gardening that refers to the INTRODUCTION of paths, fences, pagodas and so on is what sets a garden apart from a park or a full wilderness. Even a wilderness where the plants are tended and ordered isnt really a garden: it has no boundaries and so doesnt perform the essential function of all gardening, which is to impose a human order onto the natural chaos we see around us. Basically: without some kind of fence, a garden isnt a garden because it has no beginning and no end. Theres no way to tell where the garden finishes and the untamed or unordered world of real nature begins.
Landscape gardening is all about compartmentalising nature delivering the big wide world to homeowners and garden users in small and friendly packages. Many big thinkers over many years have come back again and again to humanitys desire to make sense of the hugeness of the universe by making small imitations of it in which to live the garden, which directly refers to the ultimately terrifying wildness that used to sit outside every cave in the world, is probably the ultimate example of this urge. To tame nature by ordering its plants into aesthetically pleasing arrangements is to take the organic chaos of which we are all ancestrally afraid and make it friendly again. Landscape gardening is no more nor less than an attempt, and a pretty successful one at that, to reconstruct the world in a more comprehensible, and so less frightening, form.
The soft parts of landscaping the plants are, then, of secondary importance to the hard. To landscape a garden one obviously needs the plants, and they are undeniably the stars of the show but they are also nothing without the paths and fences that keep the garden contained. People need borders and walls in order to feel safe: without them, the landscaped gardening is at best an ordered park it isnt fulfilling its complete potential.
Landscape gardening, then, is done the moment a person puts a fence down, or introduces a plant to a pot. Free standing planters, in fact, are the most compact and common form of landscaping the ultimate marriage of hard (pot) to soft (flowers). Containing little pieces of nature in this way allows us to make better sense of them in a way, to enjoy them more. Its like taking ones favourite movement out of a huge never ending symphony and just listening to that. A little piece that makes a lot more sense of the whole. All landscape gardening is the same as a plant pot just bigger and more ornate.
