Can A Garden Ever Really Be Sustainable?
Touring Leaning Pine Arboretum with Hunter Francis and Chris Wassenberg Is gardening sustainable? Well, that depends on our definition of what sustainable gardening is, doesn’t it? The short answers are no, and no. Why? When we say a system is “sustainable,” we imply that it will stay the same without additional inputs of whatever keeps that system running. Look out the window. If you took a two-month vacation in high summer, how would your garden look when you came home? Without someone to take care of it while you’re away….. If it would be a disaster, with brown grass, shrubs dropping their leaves, and perennials fried to a crisp, plants defoliated by insect pests, or decimated by disease, then your garden is not very sustainable. If, instead, it would look pretty much the same as when you left, except that it would be less tidy and everything would seem to have grown six inches, then it’s more sustainable. Despite what you may have heard, there’s no such thing as a sustain