The Curious Case of Ornamental Gardening

The purpose of a vegetable garden is to grow food, but from from my observations, many people seem more interested in how they look, rather than what they produce.

There is something about a well-designed garden space that is pleasing to the human eye. Perhaps it is the combination of nature, geometry, and artistic expression that draws us in; or, perhaps it is a manifestation of a more basic desire to witness creation as expressed by the human hand. I sincerely doubt that the first human gardens were works of art - but I’m sure that it didn’t take long for people to start finding ways to experience aesthetic pleasure through them, because there is something truly wonderful that takes place when the energy of inspiration becomes realized in physical form.

But gardens are about food… aren’t they?

Ancient ornamental gardens were like monuments, and were primarily aesthetic in function, as opposed to the more pragmatic subsistence gardens of peasants.

A little history

The first people who realized that they could manipulate their environment to produce food more easily changed human history forever. Somewhere around 10,000 B.C. (depending on your source), various forms of domestication of plants and animals in different human groups began to occur around the world. This new stability of food sources during the Neolithic Revolution resulted in the first permanent villages and towns within a few thousand years or so, and shortly thereafter, we had cities, writing, governments, and the first Bronze Age civilizations around 3000 BC.

It is fascinating to think of how rapidly the speed of human societal evolution accelerated as a result of our knowledge of agriculture. From 200,000 BC to 10,000 BC