Video Class: Where is Your Garden?

Rethinking how we define our outdoor areas

Redefining the “garden”

Over the past 20 years of working with garden owners in the US while also learning from British gardeners, I have noticed a difference in the way each culture speaks about their gardens.

In the US, people say “the garden” and are referring to a small part of their property—the spot with the peonies or the tomatoes in summer. But in the UK, I read and heard people, even non-gardeners, talking about “the garden” while referring to all of the space outside of their homes or apartment buildings. In fact, even in public spaces that in the US we would call “parks”, the British often refer to them as “gardens.”

Video

Today in this 19 minute video, I will share a bit more about how to make this mental transition to thinking of all of the space outside your home as “garden”, even when you do not use it for flower borders or shrubs. I explain why the mental shift in referring to your property as your “garden” makes a meaningful change to the way you use and feel about your property.

Using my garden at Havenwood as an example, I will show how expanding our assumptions about where our garden is can affect the location of your driveway, your lawn, your trash cans, and all the other things that you might have in your garden.

Yes, I think we should grow more plants and less lawn, but even if you do not want to do that, thinking of your property as your garden will help you in many surprising ways.

“If you think ‘Everything outside is my garden’, then I guarantee that it will start to give you some more creative solutions that will be helpful to you…”