“In all chaos there is a cosmos. In all disorder a secret order.” – Carl Jung

“It was the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place any one could imagine. The high walls which shut it in were covered with the leafless stems of climbing roses which were so thick that they were matted together.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.”
― Alan Bennett, Getting on

As I’ve mentioned in past posts, I’m more comfortable with a little anarchy than rigid imposed order. But anarchy depends on order. There is order to the cosmos and order to the world around us. Order and predictability are the bedrock of science. They are the foundations of our very existence.

I prefer not to use people, especially recognizable ones, as my examples. I once found myself as a character in a non-fiction book on Amazon. I knew the author in the past and they kept my first name but changed my last name. It was unsettling to say the least. They meant no harm and I got over it but I do not wish to do that to someone else. Because of that, let’s use gardens instead of people.

We all attempt to impose order on the world around us, we seek an order within our understanding. We know the world orbits the sun and we understand the properties of physical laws because we work with those laws every day. We can see the order of the big things; we can see the forest. But the complexity of the order that is within that forest is too much to take in, so we call the trees of the forest ‘wild’. So it is with gardens.

Wildflowers or weeds? Shrubbery or brush? Grasses or sedges? Italian formal garden or English cottage garden ? Espaliered fruit trees or an ancient orchard? My wildflower is someone else’s weed. My bent grass is someone else’s putting green. They all have their place. Some view wildflowers as well, ‘wild’, and therefore less valuable than a Rudbeckia cultivar or a Camelia Sinensis.

The easiest way to define a garden is with a fence. A fence says that there is an outside and an inside. Add a gate, and it’s now a special section of the world. It is a place where humans are meant to enter, but only when invited. Add a door, it becomes a sanctuary. The garden within those boundaries can run riot. It can look exactly like the world on the other side, or it can be made completely of tile and stone; its plants in urns. Gardens are contained within a boundary. That boundary is not what keeps the garden inside, it is what keeps the seeming chaos outside. The complexity outside the fence becomes the universe’s problem. That fence helps us live within an environment that exceeds our senses.

The complexity of the world is overwhelming. We can focus on a garden, but we have to give it boundaries. We can impose order, but only on a very limited part of our reality and even then we have to work within the boundaries of our reality. What may seem like anarchy is still working within the bigger system. We just can’t see the relationship between the two. I’m old enough to realize that it’s easier to be more comfortable with a little anarchy than to try and impose my order on the world around me. Fighting the underlying order of the universe just to have things my way is a battle that I am guaranteed to lose. So if the Oak trees don’t live here and the Tuberose would wilt and die, who am I to tell them otherwise?