Chaos Gardening

/ Laura Grace Weldon

Apparently there’s a newish fad in the horticulture world called “chaos gardening.” This is described in UK’s House and Garden as “inspired by the unruly growth of nature and a whiff of rebellion against the control and neatness of traditional horticulture.”

Oh honey, many of us have been chaos gardening for a very long time.

I’ve never had the energy, money, or interest to maintain neatly weeded and mulched gardens. The last time we spread mulch was at least eight years ago. It was free municipal mulch which I discovered to my discomfort, less than a day after spreading it, was full of chopped up poison ivy.

I have no garden beds in straight lines by choice. No plantings in straight rows either. I commonly don’t remember what I’ve planted until it grows. I’ve attempted to keep up on the weeding side of things, but have always failed. Laziness, mostly, but also a quiet delight in the marvelous plants we call weeds. (Well, it took me a long time to admit a grudging respect for thistles but I’m mostly there now.)

My husband and I have developed a nearly effort-free method of weed control that uses newspaper and the occasional tape-free stretch of cardboard between plants, with wide rows left free to grow vegetation we occasionally mow. By “occasionally” I mean we keep the growth low when young plants are establishing themselves. Then the weather gets too hot and we get too lazy to mow. By late August it’s a wildly alive mess of feral loveliness.

I’ve gardened since I was 18. (One of my first crops were apparently mistaken for magic mushrooms….) The obligation to keep up with the maintenance necessary for typical gardening used to slurp the joy right out for me. Instead I’ve learned to appreciate how perfectly the land cares for itself in concert with wildlife and weather and seasons. And yes, I’ve gone more and more toward the chaos end of things.

This year, however, I’m well beyond chaos gardening. 

One side of the house is planted with bulbs, sedum, hydrangeas, and other perennials but is currently nearly overwhelmed by strawberries that self-seeded from pots on a nearby porch.

Another side of the house has struggled to grow almost anything. I finally discovered after years of trying to establish an herb bed that the problem was due to deeply embedded landscape “fabric” put down by the former owner. As I’ve written elsewhere, products like landscape fabric, plastic mulch, astroturf, and other so-called weed solutions suppress the development of mycorrhizal fungi essential to plant health. They also wreck the habitat for beneficial soil-dwelling creatures, overheat the ground, prevent organic matter from being incorporated into the soil, and impede the health of plant roots. Their presence wrecks the necessary carbon dioxide and oxygen exchange between soil and air—essentially suffocating the soil. If that’s not alarming enough, landscape fabric contains petrochemicals which break down into toxic substances including microplastics. One analysis shows that three feet of landscape fabric can release hundreds of millions of microplastic particles. I think we’ve dug up all that awful plastic, it’s long past time to haul compost from out back to spread over the bed and start over next spring.

The front garden bed I established using soil dug up for septic repair remains a flourishing mess. Ancient pine trees at either side of the bed grow a bit more brown every years. Clematis does its best to climb up the moon mosaic. Lamb’s ear spreads from its spot under the trumpet man sculpture to pop up everywhere (no surprise, as it’s related to mint). Most of the rest are weeds I’ve come to consider friends.

Then there are our vegetable gardens. The asparagus patch, by this time of year, is a towering mass of vegetation. It offers a marvelous hiding place for all sorts of creatures and I’m pretty sure a nesting site for various sparrows as well as the Eastern meadowlark family we’ve seen all summer.

The side vegetable patch is a productive jumble. I wade in to pick tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, cucumbers, chard, leeks, and other delights. Each step brings up a rustle of butterflies, crickets, and other creatures.

And our hoop house out back hasn’t had its rows mowed in many weeks. There, too, are heavy harvests of tomatoes and peppers, but mostly grapes. We have picked at least four five-pound pails of grapes the last few weeks and are so weary of canning juice that I’ve been giving grapes away.

The pasture where our cows once grazed, where I’d hoped we might have a herd of sheep or a few donkeys, is now a meadow of its own making.

The sides of our pond and creeks have always been left unmowed, growing only with what naturally wants to grow. Our wooded acres are riddled with fallen ash and beech trees quietly fostering new life. All of these places are beautifully alive.

I’m mostly at peace with the chaos here, although my better self would like to tend more closely to our gardens. But my husband and I just don’t have the gumption right now to do more. We are exhausted by a country in chaos. Democracy is being undermined by well-funded extremists, authoritarianism is marching in, inequality is compounded, genocide not only ignored but fostered, and all the while the climate every life form relies on to survive is being sacrificed for profit.

Chaos, I’m reminded by evolutionary cosmologist Brian Swimme, is one of the powers of the universe. We’re here thanks to the cataclysmic death of stars. Their explosions provided the iron circulating in our blood, the calcium making up our bones, the oxygen we inhale. Cataclysms on our planet have caused five major extinctions. (We humans are causing the sixth.) We have endured many other catastrophes including wars, famine, plagues. And yet, from the cataclysmic death of stars, we get to live on a planet graced by orioles, humpback whales, monarch butterflies, sunsets, tides, elephants, newborn humans. We are all part of one another, composed of star stuff.   

May long and gentle rains like this one fall on every parched landscape. May beauty pair with chaos and peace rise from cataclysm.

amen

25 thoughts on “Chaos Gardening”

  1. “Oh honey, many of us have been chaos gardening for a very long time.” Amen & Amen! 🙂 I love your additions of garden sculpture to the organic neighborhood of earthy delights! And to your ending invocation, I also shout out a hearty, Amen & Amen!

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  5. I have a feeling my small back yard would feel right at home in a corner of yours. Yesterday I went out and took a few photos. My callistemon tree is home to a mass of bromeliads on the trunk and at least 3 different species of orchid, which are now flowering beautifully. The messy banana clump is busily producing its third stem of Ducasse bananas in as many months and we shall have to home most of the fruit as we can’t keep up. The passionfruit vine is in desperate need of a large haircut. My main vegetable bed has been entirely taken over by a volunteer pumpkin, but since we eat a lot of pumpkin I shan’t be pulling it up. Somewhere in there there’s also a volunteer sweet potato plant, which I may try and encourage a little. My oregano has survived the cooler weather and is flourishing again. And it’s only the first day of Spring down here! Beauty and abundance do emerge from chaos if we leave it to Nature. Let’s pray our man-made chaos will seed something productive in the end.

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  6. Thank you… truly! I am not fortunate to have more than a simple lot in a subdivision but in a neighborhood where True Green makes stops on the regular… my yard is the one where the chaos is in the lawn. My clover has fed a plethora of bunny families over the summer. And those delightful dandelions… they are simply magical spots of sunshine! I delight in them. I love to watch the bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds flit about the butterfly bush that this year is approaching 13′ tall! There is something quite calming about the chaos of an unkempt yard… as if our inner selves know that it’s not really chaos at all, but something more natural and serene. I echo your amen!

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  7. Chaos gardening rules! What I call our backyard wildlife refuge is humming right now with an astonishing number of bumblebees alongside butterflies, wasps, honeybees, rabbits, and assorted birds who have come to dine on the seeds that have now appeared. And I’m sure there are all kinds of things living there that I’m unaware of but welcome anyway. And we have a small suburban lot. There is so much we can do with just a little bit of ground. I just read a NYT article about this style of gardening in Britain and will have to go into my library app and find that UK House and Garden magazine. Loved this article, Laura.

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  8. Laura, ending with this glorious piece with a prayer (“May beauty pair with chaos and peace rise from cataclysm.”) and a video of rain (like Charles Kuralt’s Sunday program endings so long ago) was <chef’s kiss gesture>.

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    • You’re right, most of our so-called weeds are actually beneficial native plants. Thanks for protecting them. Thank you too for your very informative site. More and more of us are experiencing strong sensitivities/allergies to a world overloaded with synthetic awfulness.

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      • Thank you for your kind words.
        The site was all done with serious brain fog, so wasn’t exactly what I had wanted it to be, but something was needed at the time I started it, so I did what I could.

        Long Covid and the changes wordpress has done, have made it too difficult for me to post much anymore, not that much has changed as far as we human canaries are concerned, except more people are adversely affected now from 24/7 exposure to everyday, legal, hazardous pollutants….

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