More applying for grants garden education
Pursuing on from my previous post, more thoughts how we learn products. I've lost matter of the quantity of individuals I've interviewed over time about their backyards, mostly for publication articles. First few times I did so it, it was quite nerve-wracking, as no-one knew who I got, and sometimes it was quite posh folk, and I couldn't help being that these were probably pondering "who's this young whippersnapper?". This is the time around 1990 btw. Anyhow, I usually proven credibility pretty in early stages within an interview, when i knew my plant life. There have been some difficult occasions though, and I actually was trashed of the strange garden, despite using a magazine feature prearranged. I will notify more in the memoirs.
What I actually wished to say was that almost all the people I've interviewed found their love of gardening from a member of family, if not really a parent, a granny, an uncle, or a family group friend. Generally they have found knowledge and skills too. Before most garden knowledge could have been passed on this road, or appropriately, from professional to apprentice. Enthusiastic amateurs could always grab more from catalogs and journals, or from local gardening golf clubs. Nowadays of course, the data content of literature and newspapers has dropped significantly, so it is a lot more difficult to get much this way, as mentioned before.
Where do people consider? Not the telly definitely, as Gardeners' World and any Television set offering is lovely basic products, and has significantly less useful content than it used to; everyone I speak to about the program complains about any of it. Garden golf clubs and societies are one evident source and must take into account their continued recognition. A few of them may be somewhat of a justification for an over 60-s (yikes, I'm 59) get-together (and just why not) but every assembly is obviously built around a presenter. And such gatherings are a good way for the less-experienced to meet up with the more so.
There is a worry a couple of years ago that online discussion boards would displace your garden clubs, and some degree there may have been some erosion of the position, especially for more specialist societies. Will be interesting to listen to from someone in the Alpine Garden World if this is actually the circumstance. But such fora are most likely adding to the power of individuals for more information, and ask questions and get answers from options they may not did in pre-internet times (doesn't that appear to be in the past!).
Pursuing on from my previous post, more thoughts how we learn products. I've lost matter of the quantity of individuals I've interviewed over time about their backyards, mostly for publication articles. First few times I did so it, it was quite nerve-wracking, as no-one knew who I got, and sometimes it was quite posh folk, and I couldn't help being that these were probably pondering "who's this young whippersnapper?". This is the time around 1990 btw. Anyhow, I usually proven credibility pretty in early stages within an interview, when i knew my plant life. There have been some difficult occasions though, and I actually was trashed of the strange garden, despite using a magazine feature prearranged. I will notify more in the memoirs.
What I actually wished to say was that almost all the people I've interviewed found their love of gardening from a member of family, if not really a parent, a granny, an uncle, or a family group friend. Generally they have found knowledge and skills too. Before most garden knowledge could have been passed on this road, or appropriately, from professional to apprentice. Enthusiastic amateurs could always grab more from catalogs and journals, or from local gardening golf clubs. Nowadays of course, the data content of literature and newspapers has dropped significantly, so it is a lot more difficult to get much this way, as mentioned before.
Where do people consider? Not the telly definitely, as Gardeners' World and any Television set offering is lovely basic products, and has significantly less useful content than it used to; everyone I speak to about the program complains about any of it. Garden golf clubs and societies are one evident source and must take into account their continued recognition. A few of them may be somewhat of a justification for an over 60-s (yikes, I'm 59) get-together (and just why not) but every assembly is obviously built around a presenter. And such gatherings are a good way for the less-experienced to meet up with the more so.
There is a worry a couple of years ago that online discussion boards would displace your garden clubs, and some degree there may have been some erosion of the position, especially for more specialist societies. Will be interesting to listen to from someone in the Alpine Garden World if this is actually the circumstance. But such fora are most likely adding to the power of individuals for more information, and ask questions and get answers from options they may not did in pre-internet times (doesn't that appear to be in the past!).
I have a background in adult education, so this is something that interests me deeply. I used to teach English as a Second Language, firstly to Vietnamese refugees (the boat people), then to every other ethnic minority that ever showed up in Bristol (I'll have to write about this one day, some amazing stories and insights into the lives of others, as well as a sneak preview of Islamic fundamentalism). On our course we were taught that to be effective what people learnt had to be internalised. You can teach someone some information or how to do something and they can go off and do it, but unless they understand why they are doing it, they will be stuck in a dogmatic and repetitive rut, always going through the same procedure, and unable to vary it. This is what old-fashioned 'learning by rote' achieved. However the learner who has understood the underlying rationale for a course of action will be able to make allowances for different circumstances, think of improvements, adapt the procedure for different outcomes etc.
For some years now I have run a very successful workshop, called with my rather mad whimsical sense of humour, 'The Rabbits' Eye View' (serious sub-title: Understanding Long-term Plant Performance). I don't think I have ever written a post about it. Should do soon. Anyway – the whole point of this is to provide information that empowers students to go off and look at plants (often at ground level, hence the rabbit reference), and then make up their own minds about how they will perform in years to come.
What I'm leading up to is to give a bit of a plug for a course I do on MyGardenSchool
which covers much of the material we do on the Rabbit's Eye View course - Planting Design with Perennials. Students are encouraged to go off and take pictures of plants in ways which will help them understand patterns of growth, as well as deal with some basic design issues. Giving people tools as opposed to just saying “this one does such and such and this one blah, blah”. Part of the thinking behind this is that as so many parts of the world develop their own distinct garden cultures, using locally native plants, the traditional garden flora seems increasingly limited. 'New' plants are also of course something of an unknown quantity; everyone may agree some wildling is 'garden-worthy' but there will be so much to learn about it. Having a framework for interpreting its growth habit and lifecycle is vitally useful if we are to use it effectively. The 'Rabbits' workshop is intended to provide a way we can 'read the plant'.
Working with a designer presents other challenges. How do you explain a designer's work so that people can emulate or learn from it? I have for worked with Piet Oudolf for several years on just this. He is, like many artists, not analytical about his work – he just does it. It can be frustratingly difficult to pin down clear concepts about what he does that can be spelled out to others. I've made a pretty good try at it over the years, and worked out how t o do it for books. Last autumn I teamed up with MyGardenSchool to produce some teaching videos with him. All a bit of a leap in the dark, but we got some good footage, and they have been reviewed well by Gardenista
The course is available here – there are assignments, which I comment on. Here again we are up against the learning by rote danger. In the videos Piet shows how he selects plants on the basis of various characteristics based on plant visual structure. As an exercise we ask students to make their own suggestions for plants with these characteristics. That's the first stage. The more imaginative will go off and create some categories of their own.
Yes, you can take up Piet's ideas and use the same plants in the same categories and make some Piet Oudolf-esque plantings. Many of these will be very good, some of them will use the same ingredients but mix them in very different ways – so no-one who knows their Calamagrostis from their Achnatherum could possibly mistake it for the master's work. Most let's face it, will make 'also-rans'. That's not necessarily a bad thing – the world is a better place for having them, let's face it, there are very few innovators, and most of our cultural landscape is made up of copycat also-rans. We do the same thing when we do a Delia Smith recipe (Americans read Martha Stewart). How many of us create a new dish every time we cook?
Anyone following the course in a climate zone where the late-season perennials and grasses that define the Oudolf look do not thrive will be forced to innovate, to find a different range of plants to fit the structure categories we talk about on the course. In many cases they'll have to invent some categories of their own to reflect the aesthetics of the local garden-worthy flora. And this where the internalised learning should really take off – understanding that the Oudolf look is not just about using certain plants or even plants with certain shapes but concentrating on long-season structure, and developing a design language that articulates and uses that structure.
So far on the course, we've had people from all over, and what will be most exciting is seeing what people do with the information in climate zones with completely different ranges of plants.
Finally, check out the Garden Masterclasses I'm helping put on this summer: eight venues across the UK, 20 tutors, 13 events.
www.gardenmasterclass.orgwww.gardenmasterclass.org
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