Friday, June 18, 2010

Theory of Gardens

The past two weeks of working in high-class neighborhoods and learning the art of bush trimming from a talented landscape designer has been an eye-opening experience. It was the many days of maintaining beautiful landscapes that caused this thought: the way a person maintains their yard says something about their personality. This stems from a well-known theory: what a restaurants bathroom looks like is what the kitchen looks like.

That thought led me to these psychological readings on gardens:

If the plants are all close together and there is one too many, maybe the owner likes clutter.

If the garden is filled with lawn ornaments, one can assume their house is full of trinkets and when they go on vacation they buy everyone they know useless souvenirs.

If the garden is full of weeds, maybe their life has a lot of unwanted pain that keeps creeping in, and like weeds, if not taken care of they soon take over and make a pretty garden ugly.

If the garden has perfect landscaping, maybe they are perfectionists and controlling and if they are constantly using pesticides they are trying to hide the ugly because they are dominated by others opinions.

And for the people who put fake flowers in their gardens instead of real ones, maybe they have a fear of death or they just like to look good no matter how they are feeling.

Take a look at peoples gardens and tell me if I'm right, I hope I'm way off.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

My garden is a little of each I suppose. I compartmentalize them so they each get a different amount of attention. Some parts look great and some are neglected. That is kindof like my house. What do you think? Love, Mom

Mary Ann said...

hmm...my yard is made up of all these except the perfect part. Maybe when I started, that was the vision, but along the way I realized that there were better things to do with my time than putz in the yard. And now I love it just the way it is, sort of a controlled messy but still beautiful. A good lesson in life too.