Garden Diplomacy: How to Garden and Maintain Peace in Your Neighborhood
Tilling up my front yard and a showdown in City Hall
The Homegrown National Park movement popularized in Douglass Talamy’s new book Nature’s Best Hope is the largest cooperative conservation project ever developed. This movement intends to restore diversity to the 40 million acres of land devoted to lawns in the US. Ninety percent of this land is currently covered by exotic turfgrass. (Kentucky bluegrass is not even native to Kentucky!) Turfgrass provides no shelter and minimal nutrition. In general, no species of wildlife can complete its life cycle in a lawn.
The low-quality habitat provided in most yards can be remedied with the thoughtful use of native plants in landscaping. Integrating native plants into our yards can turn them into sanctuaries for us and wildlife. Adding your yard to this movement is the most important thing you can do to restore biodiversity. Many small patches of restored land linked together in corridors that form vast, interconnected networks will create viable habitat that allows wildlife to reproduce and expand their populations.
Remember, it is your yard, and it is your choice. You are the only one with your voice. You can push back against the ugliness and chaos in the world by creating something beautiful and introducing a small, lovely note into the void, where it will take on a life of its own.
We moved into our current home ten years ago, and one of the first things I did was till up my front and back yard. I had recently been managing 15 acres of vegetables on my farm, and I had a $5,000 Italian walking tractor and an attitude. This resulted in one of our neighbors stopping by city hall to file a complaint.
The way this happened was pretty funny. Nancy, the next-door neighbor in question, marched into the Inspections and Planning Department and said, “My neighbor just dug up their front yard for a garden. Is that legal?” My wife is the Town Planner and happened to be walking through the office at the same time. So basically, Nancy was complaining to my wife about … me.
She told Nancy that, in fact, front yard gardens are legal in our town. This is not always the case; if you live in an area with neighborhood covenants, they may be more restrictive. Even these institutions are changing, as illustrated by this recent court case in Maryland.
After the complaint incident, I decided to go around and talk to our neighbors about our plan to start gardening. I took a beautiful coffee table book about French Kitchen Gardens with me to show my neighbor across the street what my garden would look like. Mary Ann was around 80 at the time, and when I showed her a few pictures and told her I was planning on having a garden in the front yard, she looked at me and said, “It is your yard; you should do whatever the hell you want.”
After a few more visits, I had a better sense of how my immediate neighbors felt about gardens. We talked about their yards and gardening. Many people shared a similar story about how their parents made them work in a garden when they were kids, and ever since then, they decided they never wanted to garden again. That strikes me as an overreaction, given that as an adult, you can garden in a way that fits your life. Unlike a child, you are in control, and you can change the scale and type of gardening to suit your preferences.
After a walk up and down the block, I realized that about 50% of my neighbors were supportive, another 40% were ambivalent, and a few expressed skepticism. I took this as a green light and started planning the gardens.
Ten years into having a front yard garden adjacent to a sidewalk, I am happy to report that most people who walk by are supportive and curious. I have had many conversations with passers-by about flowers, vegetables, birds, and berries. I added an Illinois Audubon Society Certified Bird Friendly sign a few years ago, and I have been featured on numerous garden walks over the years. This has helped raise awareness and increase appreciation for gardens.
We now have a new neighbor in his thirties who moved here from Los Angeles. He works as a compositor for films, television shows, and commercials. He is on our page. One of the first things he did when he moved in was to set up beehives. He also started a small vegetable garden and planted shrubs for the birds. We now share the bounty from our yards; he gives me honey, and I give him the fruit that his bees have pollinated.
My garden has now taken on a life of its own in some respects. Plants are starting to spread through me sharing seeds, cuttings, and saplings. They are also spreading on their own! Plants have their own initiative; seeds have a way of moving, whether by the wind, ants, birds, or other unforeseen forces. I can see garlic chives, chicory, and penstemon seedlings popping up in the little out-of-the-way corners of neighboring yards. Nature is starting to push back against lawns. Each tiny plant making its way in the world is a peace offering to nature. If my neighbors stopped mowing, plants from my yard would recolonize the landscape. They lie in wait below the whirring blades.
I like to think of sharing plants, intentionally or unintentionally, as a way to connect people by offering an invitation to experience awe and wonder. The world is so beautiful, and all it takes is a shift in perspective to become open to it. Mary Oliver describes it this way:
“There are things you can’t reach. But you can reach out to them, and all day long. The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of god. And it can keep you busy as anything else, and happier. I look; morning to night I am never done with looking. Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around as though with your arms open.
I don't want to live a small life. Open your eyes ... open your life, open your hands.
Make more room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing - the reason they can fly.”
We must let our imaginations fly with the birds and embrace new perspectives. Ram Dass embodied this approach when he recommended turning people into trees.
“Part of it is observing oneself more impersonally… When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.
The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying, “You’re too this, or I’m too this.” That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”
This practice helps place gnarly neighbors into a broader perspective. Their views are shaped by our broader culture, and it takes time, patience, and garden diplomacy to help them appreciate change. Sharing a few ripe heirloom tomatoes is a good first step. Sharing tree-ripened peaches changes everything. When they take their first bite of a ripe peach, you now have their taste buds on your side. They may not agree with all that you do, but they cannot deny that you deal in the sublime.
If we think of people as trees, we quickly see that we are all small seedlings who need support. We need kindred spirits who can help us grow deep roots in the rocky soil of our culture. As we find our rootedness, we join a wider mycelial network that holds us all together.
Within your yard, keep in mind the possibility of creating natural outdoor rooms or protected spaces where you can surround yourself with beauty and soak it in. When surrounded by birds, native plants, and the sounds of wind in the leaves, you can become completely absorbed and lost in the moment. These are spaces where you can allow your attention to be soft and diffuse. This is deeply healing and serves as an antidote to the direct, pointed attention screens demand of us.
Ideally, you would include a water feature in your outdoor room. They are a strong attractant for wildlife, and they concentrate activity into a smaller space where you can look closely at birds and other critters. If you look closely enough, you can even identify individuals; the once wild bird now takes on the quality of a natural pet. As you observe them going about their lives, you will see subtle details in their plumage, color, shape, and distinctive behavior. This fosters close relationships and can bring the same benefits as caring for a cat or a dog.
During migration, these safe spaces attract migrating birds. I am constantly amazed at the birds that show up at our small water feature during spring and fall migration.
This past October, I watched a pair of Tennessee Warblers take a bath in our small pond. They were inseparable and would routinely rest with their bodies touching. I have often seen migrating birds traveling in seemingly connected groups, and watching these warblers highlighted this phenomenon. Recent research that uses tiny transmitters to track the locations of migrating songbirds has confirmed that some species migrate in the same little companies from their breeding grounds to their wintering grounds. They stay together for thousands of miles despite strong winds and many obstacles in their path. If groups get separated from the main flock, most of them join the flock within a few days. Somehow they know where their flock is going and how to find it.
When we observe birds during migration, we are seeing a tiny sliver of their incomprehensible lives. Their complex and mysterious world is beyond our understanding in many ways. Subtle and nuanced behavior is often beyond the reach of our modern technology and mechanistic worldview. Migrating birds intersect with our lives as part of their little companies or flocks. We see individuals, but they exist within cohesive groups maintained by near-constant communication.
Researchers have found that birds recognize individuals by their songs and calls. New research has shown that birds experience physiological resonance with other birds and that this resonance generates pro-social behavior. This means that a song's quality can change a partner's mental state and lead to more cooperation. Empathy is at work.
The energy of a flock is a visual and acoustic representation of a balancing act where self-interest mixes with empathy, connection, and pro-social behavior. Individuals are contributing to the safety and viability of their little company. The birds are modeling a way to be in the world, a way based on being connected through a web of relationships held together by mutualism. They show us how well-being originates from balancing autonomy with a way of being that supports the flock.
Learn to appreciate your artistic side by reading The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin As an alternative, you can listen to Rick Rubin discuss this book on the Tim Ferris podcast.
Being fortunate to live in your community, I really enjoyed watching your front lawn transform into an edible vibrant landscape in our mostly-manicured neighborhood! Your sharing of background work on human-neighbor cultivation is as interesting as the plantings themselves.
This post also reminds me of "The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession" by V Jenkins which I reviewed as our local Ecology Action Center was developing it's Yard Smart Program. The book narrative reads like a PhD dissertation, thick with facts. But what I found especially fascinating was a section on visuals plates advertising lawn mowers in the late 1800s & beyond, marketing the idea of "grass cutting simplified" (even your wife or kid or dog could do it; of course it was not.) The front lawn was to be an extension of the parlor - not functional like previous front yards grazing messy animals etc. Then the ads for chemicals began after WWII (using war language like "Give em hell" a wife says to her husband spraying weeds) which enabled monoculture lawns, demoting once-prized clover to a weed.
It's yet a reminder that turf lawns are cultural creations. And edible vibrant pollinator-attracting yards can be too. Thanks for demonstrating this in your own front & back yard (and our neighborhood).
Finally, I love imagining people as trees, beautiful gnarls and all!