Such is the title of my new book. I provide a copy of the Table of Contents below so you can see what I have in store for you. Following the TOC is my excuse for an introduction, the title of which (“Better Read This First”) might sound a bit sinister. I want to make it apparent that this is neither your mother’s nor your father’s gardening book. You can’t say I didn’t warn you. 

Feel free to leave your comments on my Contact page along with your email if you have any questions or need a response. 

Contents
Part One: Foreplay 
1. How to Survive Making a Garden 
2. Seduction and Sex in the Garden
3. Journey to the Plant Kingdom 
4. “Plants ARE Alive, You Idiot!” 
5. How to Ignore Plants (But Water Them!) 
6. Name Your Plants 
Part 2: Play
7. Balance, Harmony, Yadda Yadda 
8. Hue’s on First? (Color Your World) 
9. Abbreviations, etc. 
10. How Size Matters (Measure Up!) 
11. A Free Trip to Flatland (2D Measuring) 
12. Think Inside the Box (3D Measuring) 
13. Weight a Minute 
14. It’s a Material World 
15. The Root Word of Plant is Plan (Map It) 
Part Three: Afterglow 
16. Join Me in the Bath (Shinrin-yoku) 
17. Plants from Among the Stars 
18. Germs of Mind 
Epilog [sic] 
Appendix 
Acknowledgments 

 

Better Read This First (It’s the Preface, after all)

This book is about making gardens. According to the Ancients, it is also about happiness. When I started writing it in the last millennium, I envisioned a manual of sorts, a compilation of data and non-botanical technical knowledge that I had amassed over what has become more than a half-century odyssey throughout the archipelago of the horticultural arts and sciences. Ho hum, right? That primordial variant was intended to help people make and tend gardens and landscapes; but, pitifully, the first draft was nakedly informational—all decent people to behold it averted their eyes. It was emotionless, somber, and encyclopedic, stuffed with data, mathematics, and over-ripened ennui. Writing it bored me nearly to death. No happiness there.

I knew that I could help people make gardens, but I feared that if I stayed the data-centric course the book would be relegated to the company of dictionaries and their ilk, languishing on shelves musty and long forgotten. Face it—you know how casually people use reference books. I want our relationship to have a little spark and not be limited to the old in & out, with you just coming to the book when you need to cherry-pick a formula or leer at my tables. Then you would never call and wouldn’t come knocking until the next time you succumbed to some seasonal lust for information. Shame on you, but this book will help you sort out and cope with your baser horticultural urges.

My ulterior motive for writing this book? I really do want to turn you on.

No, not that way. At least not until Chapter 2. I mean to turn you on to plant life and more; to flip the light switch in your attic where you store perceptions, meanings and memories of plants, gardens, and Nature—not only to illuminate them, but also to cast their shadows.

You may be wondering: “Who is this guy and why should I be listening to him?” Since you asked, I will tell you. I speak from experience. Be Happy Forever? Make a Garden! is a fruit of my decades of labor making, renovating, and tending gardens in diverse places, including California (north, south, and central), Hawaii, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Oregon, Washington, New South Wales and the Dream Time in Australia, and now in Taiwan.

It may strike you as odd that the seeds for this book were planted in New York City, where I toiled for seven years making and maintaining gardens in the tristate area in every setting you can imagine—high in the sky on rooftops and terraces, in office plazas, vest-pocket parks, atriums and estates, even inside Grand Central Station, which was, to say the least, a challenging setting.

Landscaping in NY kept me busier than a bat in an echo chamber and making a garden in the city was no mean feat. If someone wanted an Eden on the roof of a fifty-story building or a five-story walk-up brownstone, then everything, including planter boxes, soil, shrubs, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, token talking snake, decking, fencing, irrigation, lighting, tools, bricks, and boulders had to be hauled up elevators or stairs, schlepped down hallways, and tiptoed through ubiquitous, white-carpeted parlors.

If you have ever planted more than your foot in a garden, then you know, as I increasingly learned, that situations arise in gardening and landscaping that require measurement and mathematics. Gardeners are famous for being able to multiply by dividing, but we also occasionally need to calculate the square footage of an oddly shaped garden bed, figure out how much soil, mulch, or sod to order, how much groundcover to buy, how to gauge the height of a tree, or estimate the weight of landscape materials that have to be lifted, moved, or supported.

Throughout my plant-based labors I routinely consulted a number of reference books, guides, and pamphlets that contained the necessary information, but they invariably presented either too much data or not enough of it—not to mention that reference works are usually insufferably dry. I’m not saying that reference books are not useful. Quite the contrary. Some of the ones on which I suckled are listed at the end of this book. It was inconvenient that the most useful information was not in any one book. More importantly, the making of a garden involves so much more than numbers, facts, and mundane concepts. You need to understand plants, a topic sorely lacking in garden reference books.

I set out to remedy those deficiencies by beginning to compile the volume before you now. The informational chapters will help you build gardens with greater efficiency, ease, and enjoyment. Then, the narrative chapters will give you something to think about while planning your garden, or when you are suffering from the delusion that you have finished making it and are wondering what to do next.

I hope you have gathered by now that this book is not your garden-variety garden book. You will find no lists of recommended or favorite plants, and scarce tips for growing, propagating, or pruning plants in this book. Although Be Happy Forever? Make a Garden! is a good reference book, albeit a quirky, yea, even a kinky one, it ventures far beyond simply providing answers.

Accordingly, this is the perfect time to ask a fundamental question: what are plants? You botanists put your hands down. What are they really? There is much to add to the discussion of the nature of vegetation, even though people have pondered plants for millennia. Aristotle believed that plants have souls but lack sensation. It is anybody’s guess what a soul is, and those who think that they know what a soul is may not believe that plants could have souls, that plants may have that same animating force, purposeful life, and entwinement with the Great Spirit that many humans are fond of believing we monopolize.

We don’t want to wade into those weeds right now, so consider just the second part of Aristotle’s belief: that plants lack sensation. Do you think that Aristotle meant sensation as sense perception, which, by extension, involves response to stimuli? Plants do react, but usually at a slower speed than we can easily perceive. We generally don’t consider them to be movers and shakers, at least in the way we typically define mobility.

Most of us can physically respond quickly to a strong stimulus—think of the classic examples of touching a hot stove, ducking a sucker punch, or blowing through a paycheck; but there are plants that move as fast as or faster than you can. Consider the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), which snaps shut fast enough to catch a fly, or the sensitive plant (Mimosa pudica) whose leaves immediately fold up when touched.

Give Aristotle a break. He may not have known of these plants since they are of New World origin. Yeah, blah blah blah Dad, as my children would say. But think—did Aristotle mean sensation as in feelings? It’s all Greek to everyone; maybe translators got it a little wrinkled. Was he saying that plants don’t have feelings? Did he mean that you can’t embarrass, delight, inspire, sadden, or piss them off? Perhaps. But go back to consider Aristotle’s entire premise. Ask yourself, could a plant, or any living being for that matter, have a soul but lack feelings? And by feelings, are we talking about emotions, or about instincts or intuition?

 It has been said that the difference between people and animals is that animals have instincts, whereas humans have intuition. I didn’t say it and don’t believe it; I’m just reporting here. But are intuition and instincts different things? Are we not animals? Could plants have instincts? We humans have in common with every plant a large part of our genetic blueprint, our DNA. Gene sequencing has demonstrated that we share more than 60 percent of our DNA with a banana plant. Are you glad to see me or is that a double helix in your pocket?

All kidding aside, is it possible that we share other traits as well that we generally believe are restricted to the Animal Kingdom? Do you have enough in common with plants to be able to understand them, to perceive their state, their motives, or even to communicate with them? If you speak English loudly and slowly to them, will they know what you are saying? Can plants read your mind, sense your presence, your mood, or remember you?

If you are not willing to ask questions such as these, then put this book down and go watch TV. If you can’t imagine that you are somehow similar to plants, go be a couch potato, even if you are a health nut. Be my guest and “veg out” in the parlance of the day, no similarity to plant life there. But if you think you have an answer to any of these questions, then by all means ask yourself, how do you know? Do you know by reason and empirical evidence, or by faith, teachings, or superstition? Do you have a hunch, a feeling, an intuition? Do plants have feelings? Do they have souls? Was Aristotle right?

If I haven’t asked too many questions or impugned your cherished beliefs, and you are still willing to read on, first ponder one last question: is it possible for me to hurt plants’ feelings, which they may or may not have, by not spending any time in this book praising the virtues of this vine, that shrub, these grasses, or those trees? That would be your mother’s gardening book, and that is not what this book is about. There are bushels of books with that kind of horticultural lore, but a dearth of books with solid information to help you make a garden as well as understand plants, and that seek to entertain and enlighten as well as inform. So here you have it: Be Happy Forever? Make a Garden!…with a little Aristotle thrown in.

Will Caplinger
Taipei, Taiwan
March 15, 2021