Design

I'm thinking again about what you really need to know to become a better gardener (and maybe what I mean is a good garden steward). I love learning more about plants and gardening (that's what makes it fun) and the images with Thomas Jefferson's quote at the end of my wildlife gardening talks reflect that (hmm, notice the rabbit!) I mused about this some months ago , largely because one of our local extension offices was offering a class for the public on 'home horticulture' that was a less-intensive version of our SC Master Gardener program. But I had a significant 'stirring-the-pot' experience this morning looking over Ann Lovejoy's excellent book 'Organic Garden Design School' -- she wonderfully describes what my gardening companion and I have bumbled into doing in our formerly large grassy expanse. We've created our garden landscape not from a horticultural perspective but an ecological one, and our garden landscape has been inspire...

I've been mulling over this today. There's a traditional horticulture approach that includes soil science, basic botany and entomology, fertilizers and composting, learning about ornamental, herbaceous, and woody plants, integrated pest management and pesticide safety. In the U.S., many of our Master Gardener programs coordinated by land grant universities follow a curriculum based on this approach. Some states have diverged into sustainable gardening ( Oregon , Illinois , Maine , and others) or EarthKind gardening at Texas A&M. But as a passionate gardener, who was 'trained' as a plant ecologist, I'm not sure that this is exactly what you need to know to be a good gardener. Do you really need to know about soil chemistry and cations, and how that works? Of course, understanding your soil's characteristics, building soil food webs, increasing soil health, and adding organic matter is important to any garden. If you want to grow plants that require nutri...