Anthropocene

It seems important to look at the garden in the context of the manifesto of private ownership, the demarcation of what is my own and what is not mine, the search for garden individualism concealed from outside judgment, as well as class aspirations. In fact, this actually evokes the original character of the gardens built around middle-class or noble mansions, always fenced with a high wall and inaccessible to outsiders. In other words, the gardens that testify to the status of their owner, created for the chosen ones. One’s own, private gardens.

In their genesis, related to the systemic transformation, we should distinguish the mechanisms present in Poland from trends visible in Western Europe, for example in France or Switzerland – conditioned first by the consolidation of land for large-scale farming (the 1960s), and then the division of this land (zoning) in the suburbs of cities in the 1980s and 1990s, due to the intensive growth of those suburbs. Incidentally, both France and Switzerland have been in sharp retreat from – as the local discourse dubbed it – the bocage pavillonnaire, for decades at least. From the beginning of the twenty-first century, regulations related to the creation of private gardens, to education, and to financing the replacement of monocultures with native and biodiverse plantings have been put into practice.

According to the Global Garden Report, the average Pole spent the equivalent of 76 dollars (calculated per inhabitant) in 2010 on furnishing a garden or a balcony¹, and each złoty invested in gardening in 2011 translated into the value of the property more than twofold (by a factor of 2.2, to be exact)². The garden today is treated as a capitalist creation of value – you put in one złoty, you extract more in terms of the value of the real estate. According to the Global Garden Report, the most spectacular money-earning mechanisms include a well-kept lawn, decorative trees, and hedges.

The market is sustained both by the existing demand, and by the lobby of the three main actors – nurseries, contractors, and sellers of garden equipment. Repeatable monocultures are easy to implement, and the scale of production brings substantial profit (growing white cedars is not difficult, as thuja boasts a rapid rate of growth). An alternative solution in the form of greener, more species-rich gardens would disrupt the easy earnings. The landscape is being destroyed for quick profit, and striving for continuous growth once again proves characteristic of the capitalist system – more houses, more gardens, more cedars, more lawns, more tools, more services.

Alternative mechanisms have been tested in Western European countries since the beginning of this century, and are based primarily on education as well as on regulatory and systemic solutions. They operate both nationally and locally – in France, since 2010, the governmental unit ADEME (Agency for Environment and Energy Management) supports local governments in introducing legal regulations and financing private initiatives to replace single-species plantings of white cedar, bamboo or laurel with multi-species, wild hedges, which are attractive to animals and insects. Officials of local governments in Switzerland create lists of native and suggested species for planting, as well as verifying and influencing the availability of seedlings in plant nurseries. In the French agglomeration of Rennes, since the 1990s, monoculture hedge plantings were prohibited for new housing estates, including cedar, laurel, and bamboo (the guidelines are the equivalent of planning decision, verified at the stage of obtaining a building permit and project commissioning).

These activities give hope for the amendment of the cedar-and-lawn trend in Polish horticulture. As part of the exhibition, we are presenting a recipe for a wild and biodiverse garden – a recipe, which every visitor can take with them. After all, in order to change the Polish landscape for the better, we need to reach beyond the individually understood aesthetics, and initiate collective actions to improve the condition of the environment.