The Integrated garden

Traditional styles of gardening have evolved a well established horticultural language, with a syntax that sets the tone and layout, a standard vocabulary of plants, and a fixed grammar that specifics how the flora should be deployed. The language is rich but can be stilted—and off-putting.

We can improve on this by using a language that is relaxed and immediate—more like speech than writing.

We can capture the essence of this new language in the word integration: integration of different features, functions, and qualities within the garden; integration of the house and garden; integration of the garden with the neighbourhood; and integration of the garden with the wider environment. Your garden will be link between you and nature.

Planning the Integrated garden

Take it easy. Whether you are starting from scratch or inheriting a fully formed garden, your year of initiation will give you plenty of time to work out alternatives. You may need time to break down stock assumptions and old habits of thought. As a planning exercise, consider various features, practical functions, and qualities of your garden and ask as many awkward questions about them as you can. Make a list of such questions, and your answers to them.

By considering each question and how each relates to others, you can come to view your garden in a new and different light. The aim is to integrate the various aspects of your garden. There will be conflicts, but look for ways in which these can be resolved or bypassed; or for situations where a small per cent sacrifice on one side may yield a 50 per cent benefit on the other.

Try turning problems into opportunities. Keeping the soil unfertilized, selective mowing, and the use of special seed mire all ways of combining laual, flowers, and wildlife value.

The first points to consider are:

Features: Boundaries, Paths, Scats,Trees, Slopes, Structures

Practical Functions: Growing food, Composting, Washing/drying, Play, Storage, Vehicle maintenance.

Qualities: Visual Privacy, Sanctuary Healing, Wildlife Security.

Features

Ask the following types of question about each feature in your garden.

• What roles does it play?
  
• What else could you do with it?
  
• How else could the role be served?
  
• How valuable or important is it to you, your garden, or the environment?
  
• Do you have another problem that could be solved by modifying this feature?
  
• What small changes could bring about a large improvement?

Take boundaries, for example. They are important because they define the frame of your garden. They may exist only as lines on a map or as the limits of agreed territory between neighbours. Usually they are marked by a fence or wall. So think of all the things a boundary feature could do:

Sounds rather words, a feature with near-vertical sides. Although you can screen such a notable feature out of your immediate perception - much as one ignores the frame of a painting - you could transform it into something significant.

• Keep out grazing rnimals, dogs. and people.
  
• Prevent people seeing into the garden.
  
• Define a view.
  
• Give the garden a vertical dimension.
  
• Become attractive in its own right.
  
• Direct the eye in various ways.
  
• Give a sense of enclosure.
  
• Provide secure support for nests and birdboxes.
  
• Constitute a system of microhabitats.
  
• Support climbing and trained plants.
  
• Provide backing for scats HUH?
  
• Reduce ambient noise.
  
• Provide shade or shelter from wind.
  
• Reflect sunlight.
  
• Store heat.

The potential problems a boundary may cause include:

• An oppressive sense of enclosure.
  
• An overwhelming visual element.
  
• An obstacle to views or cooling breezes.
  
• Turbulent air flow.
  
• Competition between the roots of hedges and other plants.
  
• An unattractive appearance.
  
• Excess shade.
  
• A hindrance to the free passage of wild animals.

You will have to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of a feature, according to your needs. For example, turning a boundary into a windbreak may block cooling breezes when the weather is hot; erecting a high boundary to give privacy might create too much shade; and a solid structure may exacerbate wind turbulence. These conflicts provide opportunities for creativity.

Think about the balance between what s you want and what changes are possible. If, for instance, the roots of a hedge compete with the edible plants you want to grow, why not then make the hedge itself edible? Or have a fence and grow climbing edibles? Or lay a path next to the hedge. Or use functional elements (sheds, compost bays, garage) as boundary features.

Practical Functions

You can perform a similar exercise with other garden functions, although the questions are different. Take play, for example:

• Who's playing?
  
• When and where do they play?
  
• Is the play quiet, clean, messy, wet, rumbustious, adventurous, open-ended?
  
• How does play relate to other functions and activities?
  
• Is it safe?
  
• Does it need supervision?

Small sand–gravel boxes or paddling pools placed on a firm surface outside the kitchen window are easy to incorporate into most gardens. Ball games that need a lawn may conflict with crops or herbaceous plants. Screens, frames, pergolas, or internal hedges/shrubs may contain play areas. Trees can accommodate swings and climbing frames without the need for special equipment.

Ponds are always a winner; play-houses double as hides for watching wildlife.

Qualities

Unlike features and functions, garden qualities are often vague. Consequently, they involve many angles of consideration.
The visual aspect of the garden, for example, concerns:

• balance
  
• depth
  
• texture
  
• views within and without
  
• unity
  
• interest and surprise
  
• daily and seasonal patterns
  
• jarring elements
  
• illusions—e.g., trompe l'oeil.

Serving many purposes

Integrated gardening encourages you to combine elements and so serve many purposes, visual and otherwise. In this respect, your garden's aesthetic may be unusual in that it lacks the crisp control of traditional gardens.

You can, for example, site productive plots near the house; tolerate, or even choose, dowdy or scruffy natives for their wildlife value; allow bizarre edibles to jostle with ornamentals in the borders; deliberately neglect some parts of the garden for months of the year; eschew bedding plants as a waste of space and effort, or because they require excessive resources to sustain them; and tolerate and incorporate what others view as weeds or pests.

Clever design can resolve apparent conflicts. Many edibles are visually spectacular and good enough for any border. Ornamentals may earn themselves a place as companions in the vegetable garden—precisely because they are good for wildlife. And careful management and choice of plants can reconcile minimum intervention with neathess.

It can be helpful to exaggerate the differences between the Integrated approach and the traditional style. For instance, Integrated gardening seeks to integrate not segregate, to make choices according to ecological or natural criteria instead of precedent or custom, and to be design not management intensive. In practice, though, any Integrated gardener must acknowledge a debt to the traditional gardening, and traditionalists are becoming more Integrated without realizing it.

Making a difference

An Integrated garden should emphasize the difference between it and its surroundings.

If your neighbourhood has been "homogenized" in the standard style, the creation of a bioregional—a a minimum-intervention—garden will be sharply different and worthwhile. But think of, say, a remote house in a desert or on a foggy moor, surrounded by millions of acres of natural habitat. A garden that merely imitates the habitat will be contributing very little to the diversity of the bioregion.

If you follow the Integrated approach, you will seek to enrich the local habitat. You will provide conditions that are complementary but still within the bioregional framework.

In "making a difference", the range of approaches runs from the minimalist and hands-off method to the elabourate design and construction style. But, of course, you can vary your approach in different parts of your garden.

Extreme minimalism applied across the whole garden is usually unsatisfactory—it tends to result in a mess of weeds, little diversity of flora or habitat, and very few wild edibles. The "editing" approach gives better results,; you can complement it by deliberately planting native species, or plants from similar bioregions to your own. For serious food growing, use "proper" edible cultivars (preferably those that flourish without too much input) and local land races wherever possible.