My garden is foremost green. The design inside is fabricated to be sculptural and structural, rather than a feast of twinkling colors. I am still training to ‘grow’ my garden. Which means that I only cut the plants once a year, mostly by the end of March. After the cutting the various rhythms in heights, tempo and agility to crawl through tiny openings, orchestrate the spring, summer and early winter composition. My work is in the selection and spacing of the plants and the morphology of the earth surface. From various angles there are different variations in lower parts that slice through higher parts. Much like the impression of flying above a landscape and watching the canyons and mountain rigs and their mutual interaction because one is there due to the other. That is the most obvious reason why I like to keep it mostly green in my private garden: to enjoy the structures plants provide, as signs of circumstance adaptation. Similar to being high above the landscape where there is much less variety in colors than on the ground, nearby the explosive nectar and seed driven dances for survival. This provides another reason to garden in green: gardens are not about sex, they are about mutual disturbances and inventiveness. People have made gardens into a narrative of sex and abundance in desire, as if there is no end to the glory of seducing and affection. Yet plants are such strange creatures. They mate with each other through insects and carrying animals. They pare as much with the earth, the atmosphere and the nutrition cycles. They reflect so many different life processes as they adopted in size, structure and strategy, that they can be studied as signifiers of a language that is universal. For this reason alone, I would rather have a black and white garden than a colorful one. To study the universal language of life through the growth of various plants on a few square meters. To have access to such an experiential learning is so very precious and yet so little practiced in everyday life. Colors only distract the structure of life. Frederick Law Olmsted also distrusted flowery beds in his conception of Central Park. These would only distract people from digging deep into their revelatory walks, guided by long vista’s and grand perspectives. Display flowers to people and they are quickly satisfied as with a series of inconsistent snapshots that have an appeal due to their intensity instead of their story. Special effects with large holes in the plot, to simply forget about yourself and follow whomever provided such blissful distraction from everyday life. My garden however, should display everyday life in its very integral subtlety of inventiveness.
paul roncken 