Someone Else’s Weeds
Not everyone's mess looks the same…
It was just after sunrise, the still-comfortable time outside in Charleston, but not too much longer before it becomes unbearably sticky. So, I got an early start and was out along the driveway flower beds with the hose, doing the slow, quiet work of watering everything prior to the heat of the day. My neighbor came by like he often does, dog in tow, hoping Mingo was out for some play time. The two dogs have a whole routine at this point of a short visit and a hello, while the two of us chat about random nonsense.
On his way in, he noticed something missing by the front gate… the rosemary. He'd been pulling from that bush for cooking for I don't know how long, and now it was gone, along with many other things that used to live in that bed. I told him the truth. That whole section was a mess, overgrown, half rosemary and half weeds nobody could tell apart anymore. It had been cleared out just a few days prior, and I told him it looks so much better now and is ready for a fresh start of new plants.
He didn't see it that way. He liked it better before. Wild. Untouched. We laughed about it a little, and then he said something that stuck with me the rest of the morning. He said one of the biggest problems people have is how obsessed they are with manicuring their gardens instead of just letting things be. Woah. That's a hell of a claim and I had to sit with that for a bit while I continued to water the plants.
A Shape to Hold Onto
We've been trying to make sense of the world since we were huddled up in caves. Better shelter, better tools, better roads, better everything. Somebody figured out that a straight wall holds up longer than a crooked one, and we've been chasing that same instinct ever since, in every direction you can think of. We didn't start doing any of that because chaos was working out just fine for us. We did it because a mind left completely to its own devices tends to go looking for a shape to hold onto. For structure and meaning.
Here's the thing about me, and it's worth saying quite plainly. Order isn't some preference I picked up along the way. It's closer to how my whole mind is wired. I've spent my career in photography and graphic design, which means I'm always thinking in terms of composition, whether I mean to be or not. Line spacing in a paragraph, alignment of elements on a page, or the way negative space breathes in an image. Even walking down the street I'll catch myself noticing a crooked shutter or a sign that's off-center, and it'll nag at me for a second longer than it has any business doing. It's not just my job'; it's how my mind settles. Give me a symmetrical row of trees or a clean grid of text, and something in my chest completely unclenches. Take that away from me and hand me true, untouched chaos, and I don't feel free. I feel unmoored, and almost guarded.
Nature agrees with this, whether we notice it or not. Look close at a fern leaf sometime, or a palm frond, or the cell structure holding either one of those together. That's not chaos. That's some of the tightest order you'll find anywhere. What we do in a garden isn't a fight against nature. It's borrowing the order she already built and arranging more of it where we can legitimately see it.
The Boundary Did the Rest
I think about it the way I think about framing a photograph. The order in a composition isn't something I invent out of nothing. It's already sitting there in the scene, or in the light falling a certain way, or in the lines running through a doorway or down a row of porches. My job behind the camera is choosing what falls inside that rectangle and what gets left out. That's exactly what composition is all about. And it's the same instinct at work in a garden bed. You're not creating order from nothing. You're choosing a frame around what's already there and trimming out what you choose doesn't belong inside it. And yes, it is indeed a choice.
Jackson Pollock is maybe the best proof of this I can point to. The man dripped and flung paint across a canvas laid flat on the floor of a studio that was, by every account, an absolute mess. Paint everywhere. Nothing about it looked planned from the outside. But the second that canvas got lifted up off the floor, something happened. The edges became defined. Everything outside that boundary just fell away, and everything inside it became the work. The weeds got pulled and the landscape curbing went in the moment somebody put a frame around it. Pollock never needed order in the paint itself…
…he needed a boundary around the chaos, and that boundary did the rest.
Finally, think about a Japanese rock garden, or a bonsai tree somebody's been shaping for thirty years. We don’t look at those and call them a problem… we call them art. And they only work because of how meticulous they are, every rock placed, every branch trained a certain direction over decades. Nobody's out here saying the bonsai master should've just let the tree do whatever it wanted, or else it wouldn’t be what it was meant to be. So the manicuring itself was never really the issue. It's whose manicuring. And where. And how much. It comes down to a preference of whether or not we or anyone else likes what we’re creating. And that, my friends, is subjective.
We Just Don't Notice Our Own
This shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. Try reading a book where the line spacing shifts every few pages and see how long you last before your eyes are completely worn out. Look at the stitching on your right shoe, then your left, and imagine if they didn't match. And think about this next one for a moment… for decades there was a real belief that foreign cars were built better than American ones, and a lot of that came down to tolerances. Door gaps are precise. Side mirrors are flush. American cars were simply not built to those tight tolerances, as simple as it seems. That's changed plenty since then, thank goodness, but the point still stands… foreign cars were indeed built better, if by “better” we mean more precise. It’s human nature to notice when things aren't ordered, even when we can't say exactly why it bothers us.
My point is… perhaps you know that feeling when you get into a brand-new car and how tight and precise everything feels? However, many times we simply don't clock it. We look right past all the ordered things that make a car, a book, or a garden lovely to be around, and only notice order at all when somebody else's version of it looks different from our own.
Order Pointed in a Different Direction
Here's the part that got me later, once I'd had more coffee and kept chewing on it. Even “let nature be” is its own manicured belief. Nobody arrives at a philosophy like that by accident. Somebody built it, tended it, and decided it was correct. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Just remember though that there's a real difference between preferring something a certain way, and declaring it the only way. The friend who's convinced there's only one right way to raise kids. The guy who thinks anyone eating differently than him is doing it wrong. The person who can't imagine a faith that doesn't run on their own private blueprint. We've all got a version of how we believe things should be, and it’s ready to come out the second somebody's life looks different from our own. I am most certainly not immune to this, and I hope I can always remember that.
I still love a manicured garden, and still think it's just borrowing a little of Mother Nature's own precision and putting it somewhere I can see it every day. But I've got a better sense now of how somebody could stand in that exact same spot, look at the exact same dirt, and walk away seeing something else entirely. And I'm grateful for that, to be clear. It's not every day somebody hands you a whole new way of looking at your own front yard.
DO THE THING
Notice the next time you turn a preference into a verdict. “I like it this way” is a different sentence than “this is one of the biggest problems there is.”
Before deciding someone else has no order in their life, ask what their version of it might actually look like.
Name one place where order genuinely settles you, and own it without apologizing for it.
Next time you disagree with someone's choice, try asking yourself what it's giving them instead of what's wrong with it.
Cheers,
Your pal, Kev