Littleweed's Consilient garden

My garden:
Naturally my gardening style was originally very heavily influenced by my English perspective:
Gardens were delightful, secure places, where fairies lived (‘there are fairies at the bottom of my garden’) and small creatures scurried, heard but unseen. There were gates to open and shut, benches which smelt of old wood and rusting iron to climb upon and rest a while; sweet scents of blossoms and water and decaying leaves, and a robin who would sit and look sideways at you from two inches in front of your spade as if to say: “Where’s my worm, then?” The smell of new mown grass and the putter of a push-mower (these could also be reminiscent of village greens with a game of cricket in progress!), fluffy white clouds in the deepest blue sky, seen as your hair almost swept the ground on the downswing of a board at the end of two ropes strung from an accommodating apple tree branch. Grass that was as smooth as velvet and as soft to the touch…

*What changed everything was my increasing knowledge of the plants I was using:": seeing plants I had been familiar with in a garden context all my life growing in their natural habitats, in places where nobody would think to plant them!
I believe it is the plants that keep me here. I have learned, with awe and pleasure and excitement, about the diverse plant population of this state, meeting Liatris and Monarda and Indian grass, milkweeds and sundews, flycatchers and orchids in their natural habitats.
On arrival in Indiana I was not entirely intentional in my plantings, despite the fact that I had already partially learnt the lesson of ‘survival of the fittest’ in my five years of gardening in Delaware. There I had learnt from observation and, eventually, from books to make the transition from English gardening in England to English gardening in America using plants already well adapted to the mid-Atlantic climate, the so-called native plants. I felt very pleased with myself, and when we moved to Indianapolis intended to implement my new found knowledge. We brought many plants with us, all of them in pots in which they remained until the following spring when we had time to dig a perennial border. In the meantime we dug holes in an existing raised bed and buried the pots, trusting the plants would make it through.
Our first winter in Indianapolis, December 1989, the temperatures plummeted to
-25ºF! We learnt the difference between a maritime climate and a continental climate in one fell swoop. Most of the few plants that survived this ordeal were (surprise! surprise!) native plants such as New England and New Belgium Asters, Echinacea, Eupatorium coelestinum ‘Cori’ and Solidago (goldenrods).
Because of this episode, and my growing acquaintance with them, the majority of plants in my garden became either indigenous or of native parentage.

*This experience turned my gardening style topsy-turvy but my full epiphany didn’t occur until much later.":
When it happened it didn’t seem like an epiphany, I just gave up fighting.
Because of the pressure of work outside my own home I was way behind on all those routine maintenance jobs in a perennial border, such as cutting back Asters, dead-heading roses, pulling weeds in my own garden. As I stooped over the Asters in the middle of the bed the view before me was daunting. How could I ever get back to that pristine, English garden look I used to have? Suddenly I straightened up, walked into the house and just gave up.
Of course, I hadn’t given up on my garden, which is obvious today, but what I had given up on was my cultural perspective and I’m really only putting this into words for the first time right now, as I’m typing. My thought then was: “This is not the Formal Garden. This is not an English garden in England. This is a garden in the mid-West of the United States of America. It is a garden around a settler’s home from the early 19th century, in the middle of flat, open land that was probably originally wetland forest with open glades of prairie; and home to Native Americans who were driven from this area in precisely the era my house was built.”
I thought: “This is not like Europe. There are no thousand year-old castles, no thatched cottages, no 500 year-old brick mansions encircled by equally aged walls, ideal for wisteria, roses and other climbers to smother. The landscape, although infinitely more changed by the latest influx of the human race than by previous civilizations, is still relatively untouched compared with the landscape in Britain where those same peoples have been at work for two thousand years and more; where Capability Browns and William Robinsons have bulldozed whole counties into their concept of what a civilized landscape should look like!”

I wondered what plants those people who built my house would have seen out of their windows.":
I have experienced a vague sense of what this mid-Western landscape must have looked like originally from various descriptions by some of the first settlers; and, more immediately, whilst walking into remnant prairie areas in Indiana or Kentucky, Illinois or Wisconsin on hot, humid summer days, getting caught on various sharp thorns or avoiding the poison ivy growing throughout the grasses and forbs and the knife-edged leaves of ripgut (Spartina pectinata/prairie cord grass), hearing only the hum of multitudinous pollinators and the occasional hawk overhead. Or whilst walking through a central Indiana woodland in mid-spring and trying not to trample the magic carpet of wildflowers, amongst them Geraniums, Trilliums, mayapples, Jack-in-the-Pulpits, Virginia bluebells and celandine poppies as far as the eye can see; and hearing the uplifting songs of some of the earliest migrating birds as they flit from treetop to treetop. Or, yet again, stumbling from sedge tussock to sedge tussock in a bog, trying not to let my sticks sink two feet into the mud, leaving my stick rubbers behind when I finally rescue myself…and seeing a whole bunch of sundews, followed shortly thereafter by Saracenias (flycatchers), growing wild all around me. There’s the magic of a full moon over the lake as we stand shivering on the shore, or a walk over the shifting sand dunes in the reflected heat of the hot sun, continuously slapping at oneself trying to be rid of the mosquitoes and biting flies which are actually painful; wondering at plants such as milkweeds and Aspen growing out of this seemingly nutritionless medium. How do they (the plants) do it? And what a revelation, thinking of the places I now know these plants will thrive! How about a night-time stroll through a remnant virgin forest? Owls and Whip-poor-wills and a steady munching sound as the ‘frass’ rains down on our heads from the caterpillars in the leaves high above us. In a shady glade amongst the trees in that same forest during the day, seeing Cimicifuga racemosa and Thalictrum dioicum growing side-by-side.

*My wildlife garden now:":
With all these influences working in me my garden has now become fully intentional. Well at least the plants are intentional. Their placing is not! When I gave up fighting I gave up worrying…about ‘designing with perennials’, about weeds, about bugs, about disease. I never water or fertilise my plants after the initial planting and even then I prefer to plant only on days when I know rain is imminent as rainwater is so much more effective than tap water.
Once a plant is in the ground I allow it to tell me if I have chosen the right place for it. If I was wrong it will either fail to thrive or it will move! Plants are amazingly capable of repositioning themselves!!
I only weed out those plants which are aggressive, especially invasive aliens. Many others which are considered weeds I leave for their ornamental qualities or bug-attracting properties (‘decoy weeds’) or their function as ‘green manure’.
Now my garden on this two acres is slowly being surrounded by developments and will eventually be encircled by mass production ‘boxes’. I have grieved over that, as my old farmhouse and acreage was a ‘dream come true’ for me, coming, as I did, from subsidized housing in densely populated south London with little green space around me. My chickens, cats and dog were part of that dream.
Thank goodness it has been gardened entirely organically for 17 years and has always attracted many forms of wildlife, familiar and otherwise. Now there are just more of them in the dwindling space that was their former habitat, making my tiny plot a wildlife refuge…
I have watched the actions and interactions of my new, non-human, ‘neighbours’ with mounting awe as they figure out their new pecking orders, for instance the great-horned owl and the turkey vultures time-sharing the barn, with the owl’s occupancy typically being from November through March and the vultures’ from April through October!

*In the meantime":
after experiencing seventeen years of Indiana winters and summers, seventeen years of floods and droughts and temperatures as low as -27F and as high as 103F; after seventeen years of increasingly intense learning, what remains of my ‘English garden’ in Indianapolis? Not a lot…