Curvilinearness is believed to be next to godliness. The liberal solution is what has come to be known as a “natural garden.” Judging from the looks of it, it might more properly be called a “naturalistic garden.” These gardens contain many elements cribbed from nature herself, such as sinuous paths, free-form ponds, curvy clumps of shrubs, and squiggly planting beds. The basic idea is that nature is good, man is not, and the more we can keep the beastly hand of man out of things, the better. This liberation of grass struggling to be free was yet another response to the man/nature divide that has worried liberals for centuries. Remember the ‘70s, when people were turning their suburban lawns loose and allowing them to aspire to being meadows? They were letting the grass express its natural inclination toward longness and reduced greenness, while their neighbors were handing them citations demanding a return to neatness and neighborliness. The most extreme liberals believe that there is an original or a natural state in which the environment would be if we hadn’t shown up on the scene, and that we have not only the ability but also a moral imperative to help nature return to this state. Liberal gardeners are people who feel that, through gardening, we can alleviate our sense of alienation from nature and that, through good gardening, we can repair some of the damage we have done to our environment. Since they are the majority, and their views the predominant ones, I feel compelled to come forward on behalf of my fellow politically incorrect gardening compatriots. Their hearts may be in the right place but, as a result of attachment to dogma and oversimplification of facts, there is much that they fail to understand. Like most people, gardeners can be categorized as liberal or conservative.
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