Too little
Use alone
“It contributes nothing to my plan.”
Lack of personal benefit settles the question too quickly.
Reverence
Let living worth matter before usefulness.
Readiness to regard inherent worth with respect beyond its usefulness to oneself.
For a gardener, reverence means regarding living things as more than raw material for a design or a harvest. It need not require a religious belief or a constant feeling of wonder. Its practical question is whether usefulness to you has become the only reason anything receives consideration.
Reverence gives consideration beyond the useful and impressive
You prepare a grand entrance and discover a small flower exactly where the red carpet wants to go. The carpet has excellent credentials: expensive, straight and photogenic. The flower has none. Reverence permits a modest change of route before asking what the flower can do for the event.
Finding the balance in Reverence
An illustrative everyday situation
A harmless living detail has no obvious place in your preferred display.
A fitting response
Regard beyond use
“What deserves consideration here, apart from my design?”
Living worth enters the decision alongside real needs.
Pursued too far
Untouchable ideal
“Any intervention is disrespect.”
An absolute rule prevents necessary care and proportionate choices.
Reverence changes what counts in the decision; it does not abolish judgment.
When the situation changes
When access, responsible care or other legitimate needs conflict, seek a proportionate response. Respect does not guarantee that every living thing can remain exactly where it is.
What Reverence makes possible
This orientation can temper the habit of treating a garden as a personal exhibition. It makes room for regard without a promised return. It does not establish a scientific claim about a plant’s feelings or prescribe a single method of managing land.
Reverence in ordinary life
The unshowy corner
You notice a small plant in a corner that will never feature in your garden photograph. Its place need not be justified by a prize.
The living soil
You look beyond the display of flowers to the life and processes in the soil that your design usually leaves out.
Nearby virtues, different work
Nonpossessiveness
Nonpossessiveness loosens control; reverence gives worth a place beyond what you can own or use.
Gentleness
Gentleness moderates a response; reverence concerns the regard that makes unnecessary harshness worth questioning.
Reverence and its counterfeits
Counterfeit: The picturesque exception
Admiring a spectacular flower while dismissing all unshowy life can imitate reverence. Beauty may awaken regard without setting its entire boundary.
Counterfeit: The sacred excuse
Declaring a space untouchable while ignoring another person’s real access needs is a counterfeit of reverence. Regard must reach the people affected too.
How to cultivate Reverence
Notice something living that is not useful to your plan.
Ask what your first reaction leaves out.
Let that regard inform one proportionate ordinary choice.
Try it today
Choose a living detail you usually overlook in your garden. Let it enter one decision about the space, rather than asking only what it contributes to the display.
In a garden
Notice living worth beyond what serves your plans.
Questions worth returning to
What receives my regard only after it becomes useful?
Which person or living detail lies outside the display I am proud of?
Keep the practice proportionate
Regard is compatible with necessary care and access. Observe wildlife without approaching or disturbing it, and respect the people sharing the space.
About these practices · DisclaimerQuotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
I hold that this most refined and delicate class of beauty equally deserves faithful championship.
Gertrude Jekyll · Wood and Garden · Chapter IV, March; Rhododendron Multum maculatum · excerpt
Jekyll defends a flower dismissed by fashionable judging. Her aesthetic example helps question selective regard; the page extends that question beyond beauty to living worth.
Why do we respect some vegetables and despise others, when all of them come to an equal honor or ignominy on the table?
Charles Dudley Warner · My Summer in a Garden · Ninth Week; vegetable rank · excerpt
Warner satirizes social rank through vegetables. His question unsettles reflexive contempt; the article carries the inquiry beyond the usefulness of a crop.
The sacredness to us of the earth is intrinsic and inherent.
Liberty Hyde Bailey · The Holy Earth · The earth is holy; intrinsic worth · excerpt
Bailey states a conviction about the earth’s worth. Reverence asks what deserves regard before usefulness is calculated; agreement with a religious belief is not required.
And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
Kahlil Gibran · The Prophet · On Clothes; Almustafa speaking · excerpt
Almustafa personifies earth and wind in a poetic invitation to regard. It is not an instruction to go barefoot or a factual claim about nature’s wishes.
GOD Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures.
Francis Bacon · Essays · Of Gardens; opening · excerpt
Bacon opens with a biblical allusion and high regard for gardens. His delight offers one entrance to reverence; living worth on this page extends beyond pleasure.
I love a broad margin to my life.
Henry David Thoreau · Walden · Sounds; summer contemplation · excerpt
Thoreau leaves room for receptive experience. Regard for living things may begin when every moment is no longer required to yield a task or a product.
leaving out of account, as if unworthy of consideration, such matters as gardens and garden beauty, and human delight, and sunshine, and varying lights of morning and evening and noonday.
Gertrude Jekyll · Wood and Garden · Chapter I, Introductory; limits of show judging · excerpt
Jekyll criticizes rules that exclude much of a garden’s experienced value. The excerpt challenges narrow appraisal; it does not endorse all her judgments about worthy flowers.
Continue exploring
Take these ideas into everyday life
Read freely, follow the fourteen-virtue program, or adapt this collection in My Virtues. A harvest is never a character score.