When Did Sitting in the Garden Become Doing Nothing?
REFLECTIONS FROM THE GARDEN
Marcus Bergin
8/27/20266 min read
When Did Sitting in the Garden Become Doing Nothing?
One of the things gardeners seem to learn, eventually, is how to sit down.
Which sounds ridiculous. Sitting doesn't require any horticultural knowledge. No techniques, no tools, no instructions. You find a chair, lower yourself into it, and stop.
Except most of us don't.
We spend an extraordinary amount of time creating our gardens — planting, weeding, pruning, worrying. We move a plant from one side to the other and move it back again a year later. We put in the money, the weekends, the effort, trying to turn a patch of ground into somewhere that feels like ours.
Then we finally sit down in the middle of it and start looking for the next job.
The coffee's barely reached the table before we've noticed the weed coming through the paving. The roses need deadheading. There's a branch on the shrub that doesn't look quite right. Something in the border would be better six inches to the left.
Within a few minutes the coffee's gone cold and we're gardening again.
I'm probably worse than most, having done this for a living for over twenty-five years. When you're working in somebody else's garden, sitting down is not working — there's a clock running, and there's always another job waiting. Even on a break, part of your mind is already lining up what happens next.
Some of that never quite leaves you. I can sit in a garden happily enough, but my eyes are still gardening even when the rest of me isn't. They go round the borders looking for what needs attention. I prune shrubs and move plants and tidy edges without leaving the chair. I don't think I can look at plants anywhere without starting to work on them in my head.
I don't think professional gardeners are unusual in this, either. Plenty of people carry the same sense that being in a garden means they ought to be doing something to it — because there's always something that could be improved. That's part of the pleasure of gardening, and part of the trouble with it. A garden is never finished, so it can never quite give us permission to stop. Wait until everything's done and you may be waiting your whole life.
Gardens grow. Plants get too big, gaps appear, weeds come back. The hedge clipped last month will need clipping again. A border that looked wonderful in June may need attention by August, and the tree that fitted its space ten years ago might now be shading half the garden. There's no final day when we put down the tools and declare it finished. The only person who can give us permission to sit in an unfinished garden is us.
Even then, plenty of us find it surprisingly hard.
Some people learn to stop through experience. Others have it forced on them — by age, illness, injury. The body slows down before the mind is ready to accept it, and what starts out as a necessary rest can slowly become a different way of experiencing the garden.
I want to be careful here, because we talk about slowing down as though it's always a loss. We focus on the jobs someone can no longer manage quickly, the distance they can't walk without stopping, the tools that have got too heavy. Those changes are real, and they can be genuinely hard to accept. Gardening matters enormously to people, and losing any part of the ability to do it deserves more than a cheerful nudge to sit and enjoy the view.
But sitting doesn't have to mean withdrawing from the garden. A chair near the border can be somewhere to pause between jobs. A few seats scattered through a bigger garden let you keep gardening at a pace your body can manage. The rest becomes part of the work, not proof the work is over.
There's a difference, too, between sitting because you can do no more, and sitting because it lets you notice more.
I once cleared an overgrown garden with a small stool, carrying it round with me as I worked. Every time I moved it, the view changed. From one spot the eye ran the whole length of the garden. From another, a tree framed the view perfectly. A place that looked ideal for a bench when I was standing felt oddly exposed once I sat down, while a corner I'd have walked straight past turned out to be the best seat in the whole garden for a morning coffee.
Not a bad way to start making one, I think.
We usually design gardens standing up. Walking the boundaries, measuring the beds, looking down on the plants. But most of the garden we actually hope to enjoy will be seen from a chair, a kitchen window, or a favourite spot under a tree. The view from sitting height is a different garden. Plants that vanish below eye-level while we're standing suddenly aren't below anything. Light falls differently across a border. A gap barely noticeable from the path becomes the only thing you can see from the bench.
Sitting isn't the opposite of gardening. It's part of understanding it.
It's also when you notice the life going on without your involvement. Keep moving, cutting, tidying, and you mostly see the garden through its jobs. Stop, and you notice which insects visit which flowers, where the birds bathe, how the shadows move across a wall through the afternoon. You hear the leaves above you. You spot a flower you'd missed entirely while you were busy with the weeds beneath it.
Even the weed looks different if you give it more than a glance on your way past. It might still need to come out — but you might also notice something's been feeding on its leaves, or the flowers are covered in hoverflies. Stopping long enough to actually look doesn't mean deciding to leave everything alone. It just means deciding after you've looked, rather than reacting on the way past.
That might be what experience gives us, in the end. Not the ability to ignore a garden, but the ability to pause before we interfere with it.
None of which means the work itself is a chore to get through before the relaxing part starts. Plenty of us genuinely love it. Weeding, edging, deadheading, shifting plants about — that's not an obligation standing between us and enjoying the garden, it often is the enjoyment. There's satisfaction in a newly clipped hedge, a cleared border, a bed that's finally planted after months of thinking about it. Some days sitting down is exactly what's needed. Other days you're itching to get up and do something. Pulling a weed on the way past doesn't mean you've forgotten how to rest — sometimes you just wanted to pull it.
The more interesting question is whether you still feel you have a choice.
Can you sit in the garden without feeling guilty about it? Leave a few deadheads until tomorrow without letting them spoil everything else in view? Look at what's been done, rather than letting your eye go straight to what hasn't?
We're comfortable talking about what we do in a garden. We grow vegetables, tend roses, cut lawns, make compost, work for wildlife. We're less used to thinking about what it means simply to be there. A garden can be a workplace, a creative project, a refuge, a form of exercise, an endless list of jobs. It can also be where someone sits at the end of an exhausting day and lets things settle. Where someone recovering from illness measures their progress. Where someone adjusting to disability finds a different way of staying involved with growing things. Where a gardener in later life works at a slower pace without losing the relationship they've built with a patch of ground over decades.
None of that is doing nothing.
Sitting can be where the decisions get made, too. Ten unhurried minutes looking at a border tells you more than half a dozen walks past it with tools in your hand. You start to see why a combination doesn't quite work, or where something else is needed, or whether that gap that's been bothering you actually needs filling at all. Sometimes the best decision made from a garden chair is to leave everything exactly as it is.
Where you choose to sit is worth some thought as well. One chair catches the early sun, another only gets it later in the day. A bench under a tree shows you a different garden to a seat by the house. Moving around lets you follow the seasons — warmth in the cooler months, shade once summer gets too hot.
Maybe every garden needs more than one place to stop. Not necessarily an immaculate dining set nobody ever actually uses, but somewhere you naturally end up. A slightly battered bench. A chair by the back door. A stool you can carry to wherever the garden feels most interesting that morning. Somewhere that makes sitting feel like it belongs in the garden, rather than something that only happens once the gardening's finished.
I'm not sure I'll ever properly master it. I know myself well enough to know my eyes will carry on pruning and weeding even with a cup of coffee in my hand, and that I'll keep getting up for jobs that weren't remotely urgent.
But I'm starting to think sitting in a garden might be a gardening skill in its own right. Like pruning, it takes time to learn when to act and when to leave well alone. Like designing a border, it asks you to actually look. Like growing anything, it probably gets easier with practice.
We spend years learning how to make gardens.
At some point, it might be worth learning how to be in them too.
Happy Gardening.
Marcus
