Garden

A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the display, cultivation, or enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature, as an ideal setting for social or solitary human life. The single feature identifying even the wildest wild garden is control. The garden can incorporate both natural and man-made materials.

Gardens often have design features including statuary, follies, pergolas, trellises, stumperies, dry creek beds and water features such as fountains, ponds (with or without fish), waterfalls or creeks. Some gardens are for ornamental purposes only, while others also produce food crops, sometimes in separate areas, or sometimes intermixed with the ornamental plants. Food-producing gardens are distinguished from farms by their smaller scale, more labor-intensive methods, and their purpose (enjoyment of a hobby or self-sustenance rather than producing for sale, as in a market garden). Flower gardens combine plants of different heights, colors, textures, and fragrances to create interest and delight the senses.

Landscape architecture is a related professional activity with landscape architects tending to engage in design at many scales and working on both public and private projects.

The most common form today is a residential or public garden, but the term garden has traditionally been a more general one. Zoos, which display wild animals in simulated natural habitats, were formerly called zoological gardens.Western gardens are almost universally based on plants, with garden, which etymologically implies enclosure, often signifying a shortened form of botanical garden. Some traditional types of eastern gardens, such as Zen gardens, however, use plants sparsely or not at all. Landscape gardens, on the other hand, such as the English landscape gardens first developed in the 18th century, may omit flowers altogether.

 

Uses

A garden can have aesthetic, functional, and recreational uses:

Cooperation with nature
- Plant cultivation
- Garden-based learning

Observation of nature
- Bird- and insect-watching
- Reflection on the changing seasons

Relaxation
- Family dinners on the terrace
- Children playing in the garden
- Reading and relaxing in the hammock
- Maintaining the flowerbeds
- Pottering in the shed
- Cottaging in the bushes
- Basking in warm sunshine
- Escaping oppressive sunlight and heat

Growing useful produce
- Flowers to cut and bring inside for indoor beauty
- Fresh herbs and vegetables for cooking

 

Gardens and the environment

Gardeners may cause environmental damage by the way they garden, or they may enhance their local environment. Damage by gardeners can include direct destruction of natural habitats when houses and gardens are created; indirect habitat destruction and damage to provide garden materials such as peat, rock for rock gardens, and by the use of tapwater to irrigate gardens; the death of living beings in the garden itself, such as the killing not only of slugs and snails but also their predators such as hedgehogs and song thrushes by metaldehyde slug killer; the death of living beings outside the garden, such as local species extinction by indiscriminate plant collectors; and climate change caused by greenhouse gases produced by gardening.

Climate change

Climate change will have many impacts on gardens; some studies suggest most of them will be negative. Gardens also contribute to climate change. Greenhouse gases can be produced by gardeners in many ways. The three main greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Gardeners produce carbon dioxide directly by overcultivating soil and destroying soil carbon, by burning garden waste on bonfires, by using power tools which burn fossil fuel or use electricity generated by fossil fuels, and by using peat. Gardeners produce methane by compacting the soil and making it anaerobic, and by allowing their compost heaps to become compacted and anaerobic. Gardeners produce nitrous oxide by applying excess nitrogen fertiliser when plants are not actively growing so that the nitrogen in the fertiliser is converted by soil bacteria to nitrous oxide. Gardeners can help to prevent climate change in many ways, including the use of trees, shrubs, ground cover plants and other perennial plants in their gardens, turning garden waste into soil organic matter instead of burning it, keeping soil and compost heaps aerated, avoiding peat, switching from power tools to hand tools or changing their garden design so that power tools are not needed, and using nitrogen-fixing plants instead of nitrogen fertiliser.

 

Source: Wikipedia contributors. "Garden." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 17 Jun. 2021. Web. 28 Jun. 2021.