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“Make It Look Natural!”
One of my favorite things I have to do at work is sometimes to make plants “look natural.” It’s one of those things where when somebody tells me to do it, it spins my mind off in some funny recursive questioning about the nature of Nature. But it’s also a line of thought that doesn’t help too much to bring up in a work situation.
Which is why I keep you guys around…
What is typically meant when they say “Make it look natural!” is to make it look irregular. But not so irregular that it looks weird and unbalanced. Recently I had to do this with some Japanese Blood Grass (imperata). The grass filled up a sort of rectangular section of a client’s yard and butted up right to the edges of the driveway and sidewalk. In this case, making it look natural meant pulling the grass out by its roots several inches away from these edges, and giving it a slightly irregular line between the grass and the now-exposed dirt.
I’ve also had to do this on a camellia which had been cut probably with one of those chainsaw dealies (our company doesn’t use them so I don’t know) at some point into a weird egg-shape. I had to spend several hours on a ladder cutting into the plane of the egg to remove its strange artificial lines. It came out looking really nice and, dare I say, natural even.
But the thing is: here I am with a plant. A plant is already natural. And then I (who am debatably or not natural) have to come in and make a series of conscious decisions (natural or not?) of where to cut with a largely non-natural object (pruning shears) in order to determine a shape which is somehow “more” natural than its current shape. It’s the type of situation where philosophically we could go round in circles with it, but while I’m toiling away at my twelve dollar an hour job, it’s better just to do it and save the philosophizing for when I’m home relaxing later on…
(I think we may have already sort of talked about this, but it’s one of those things that keeps coming up for me again and again)
- Aristotle on Nature
- Attack & Defense
- Collective Intelligence & Distributed Identity
- Horoscopic
- Sam Adams on Natural Rights
- Prev: No F*ing Sense
- Next: Let the World Change You
September 27th, 2006 at 11:24 am
Check out Fukuoka’s work on natural fruit tree shapes:
hxxp://fukuokafarmingol.info/fover.html#ov16
September 27th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
Sometimes fake works better than natural.
I don`t really fish, but I know that fish will bite on artificial bait, when
they won`t bite on real bait.
I also know that the Parthenon was built slightly askew in order to trick the eye into thinking it was more balanced that way.
One of my favorite sayings is , Flaunt the imperfection.
September 27th, 2006 at 12:18 pm
At least no one has yet asked you to make a plant look supernatural…
September 27th, 2006 at 12:22 pm
Makes me think of the Oscar Wilde quote “Man’s first duty is to be artificial”
Who knows, maybe the plants are vain and actually want to be beautified on some level!
September 27th, 2006 at 12:24 pm
What I mean is that, plants, like dogs, are bred to have certain characteristics - a lot of them have been domesticated and so are already reliant on us for certain things we provide them with like fertilizer, weeding, etc., pruning could just be a part of that. I don’t mean tormenting them, more like a person getting a haircut.
Speaking of which, my bangs are getting floppy and its really bugging me, time for a trim.
September 27th, 2006 at 12:29 pm
Artificial can be truly beautiful. I guess a lovely painting of a bunch of flowers could be be called artificial. Yet it make a reverie in the mind of beauty and happiness.
In the middle of winter its nice to see those blooming flowers.
Maybe books and words are the same.
September 27th, 2006 at 5:38 pm
Maybe “natural” does not equal letting the plant grow every which way. The meaning of “natural” changes in artificial situation. A lawn overgrown with weeds does not look natural… but an untouched meadow does. Am I making sense?
It’s possible that the plant, which was planted there (already artificially and not naturally), cannot express its true nature without the intervention of some human gardener to shape the plant. If that’s the case, the plant would express its own nature best when human nature is mixed with it harmoniously. Think of a zen garden, which is somehow more natural than natural, or a bonsai tree. The idea is to enhance the nature of it.
Doesn’t this go back to that quote you were quoting from that gardener dude who said that the idea that nature is something we must preserve and not touch is rooted in the notion of human separateness from nature? Isn’t the idea that messing with the plant screws with its nature an example of that fallacy? My thoughts are kind of scattered on this one.
September 27th, 2006 at 9:13 pm
Yeah I think about the haircut thing a lot - in both directions: that I am giving plants a haircut and that I myself need to have my hair or beard “pruned”
Yeah didn’t I link to that above? I meant to…
September 28th, 2006 at 6:39 pm
good point.
September 29th, 2006 at 5:26 am
Our aesthetic appreciation of Nature has competing elements - tame & wild - and in different places at different times the aesthetic varies. Japan is full of clever tinkering to recreate “the natural look” as of course in the art of bonsai.
I tend to think I like Nature at its wildest but that’s just a romantic fancy. Untamed, it’s hostile to man, and the most doctrinaire primitivist would long for any sign of civilization if lost at sea or in the desert or jungle or icy mountain-top. No need to go that far: it happened to me the other evening, walking through a wood at dusk, when it wasn’t possible to discern the path any more. By an extension of our mild anxiety, and our relief at seeing the distant electric light from a house, we felt how every human being craves home and comfort.
Our plant-aesthetic will always be somewhere on the spectrum of wild-tame, but never at either extreme.
September 29th, 2006 at 9:16 am
Well said.