Techniques

Techniques

When you stand in a space you would like to call a garden, tools at hand, you are at the threshold of action. You are where a garden becomes gardening.

Gardening develops where land, body, and tools meet. Techniques do not add a layer to the garden. They are where prior forces finally act together. Techniques are responses to existing conditions.

Whether you call them techniques, responses, or gardening, these actions originate in the conditions. They arise from awareness. Awareness of land, body, and tools is where action begins. Without attention, techniques degrade. What was once a sensitive response becomes a rote action, which loses sensitivity, then accuracy. In a garden, this shows. It shows through repetition.

Gardens are filled with repetition. Similar plants ask for similar actions. Seasonal patterns ask for patterned action. For a gardener, it is in this repetition of responses that familiarity is found. By repeating actions, we get to know them, where force flows and where friction arises. Techniques are not learned once and then refined. They are distilled from repeated action.

Repetition is not foolproof. Just as repeated action distills embodied knowledge, it can also reinforce friction. The difference is attention. Distilling techniques depends on awareness of feedback. Did a desired effect appear? Did it fail? What repeats is diagnostic.

This is where technique reaches its limit. It does not complete the garden.

Techniques are embodied knowledge. They do not hold that knowledge. A technique cannot tell you when to use it. 

That is up to you, the gardener.