Is it not curious how we recognize and love the beauty of nature? With the smallest remove from the press of need we begin to select in our surroundings for beauty, efficiency and ease. We need not be aesthetes to be attracted to a seascape, the colorings of pebbles, or the satisfying elegance of a well crafted utensil. In this regard, it seems that most people long for a place, a home—a sanctuary in which to enclose, renew and retreat from the often turbulent flow of effort required to gain a little space for repose. Somehow the satisfaction, the sense of well-being that a restful eye beholds upon nature’s beauty confirms a more permeable identity; that is, a less constrained, more open and absorbent sense of who we are, that in effect, brings us home.

Paradise in its linguistic roots denotes an enclosure that partakes in sanctuary. A garden, a park, an orchard, a court of estate, a home; each gives us a place to stand or rest. Eden is imagined as a garden where we are free from travail, immersed in beauty and without shame.

In its highest form, landscape gardening aspires to this call of paradise, blurring the edges and sharing in nature’s seeming inability to make artistic or aesthetic errors. This blurring allows nature to come right in and confer upon us both its tame and wild aspects, dissolving or suspending cultural or otherwise conceived separations between our quotidian lives and the paradisiacal realms of an unfallen nature.

Perhaps this seems a bit overblown, so in contrast we can pare down our highest form of landscape gardening and aim for a middling sort of application. This becomes a blend of virtues and qualities intended to complement our lives: realms of both public and private space that are refinements of matters connecting inhabitation with practical and utilitarian works; such that we may undertake to live day to day with some measure of grace. Here we can regard such elements as outdoor living, recreating, plantings, site repair, paths and walkways, patios, fountains or shade trees as effecting the sharing of beauty or the recovering of elements of nature in our often disturbed surroundings. Present here is the interactive quality of cultivation, grooming and the sustaining of a human scale.

Upon a broader more fundamental level we can regard landscape gardening without the designation of gardening at all and call it simply, landscaping. In this manner of usage, landscaping becomes a practice regarded as utilitarian, decorative, or mitigating (that is, softening). Often the motivating considerations of landscaping have specific requirements--like erosion control, architectural boundaries, screening or masking, temperature modification, water management, pedestrian or traffic flow or virtually any other human or even non-human behavior out-of-doors.

These distinctions in the character of landscapes pivot around the scale and nature of the project. When we drive by acres of automobile-friendly shopping realms, we don’t tend to regard the plantings as gardens. In kind we do not name as gardens fields of crops, urban parks or undeveloped natural lands—however these are all commonly regarded as landscapes.

Landscape gardening as such, somewhat narrows its provenance to those places where human scale and intimacy with both natural and man-made elements may couple and prosper. With but a measure of reflection we can imagine or recall places where creativity, skill and the elements of stone, wood, water and plants collaborate and enhance our lives. In taming our propensity to restlessness we may open, and leave open ground for human nature to find a higher affirmation in something so prosaic as merely, considering the lilies.

A landscaped garden presents the ground on which we may connect our daily lives with nature, and with indeed, our own human nature. Between, or in relation to wild nature and the massive impoundings of our modern cities, nature herself remains omnipresent and vital. Notwithstanding the steady accretion of unnatural living and a cross-threaded relation with our environment, nature remains available and awaiting our recognition.

How we regard nature implies how we regard ourselves. A garden offers us a realm to share and work with nature as a pattern of hand which daily and immediately offers through its presence a possibility both of ebbing and dissolving the unhealthy effects of over civilization. It is not civilization that burgles us of our natural grace, it’s over civilization. Gardens and garden living offer a way of eluding, of calming the tide of numbing mass material culture which flattens and oversimplifies as it creeps through our lives.

Bringing the elements of leaves, flowers, stones, waters, wood, bricks, fur and feathers into our enclosures—public and private—requires no justification. These natural elements, gathered and allowed to exist reverentially alongside us, are their own self-evident treasure poised with a suchness and grace that overshadows comparison and recalls us to what it is that makes life worth living.