What on Earth do The Internet and The Garden have in Common?!

Posted By elspeth @ 15:28 on January 25th 2012
Category: Blog, Gardening Courses, Gardening Education, Gardening People, January, The Gardening Market, Winter

Nothing many of you may think. WRONG. Ha – well I’m perhaps one of the few people in the world who get asked this! Having come from a technology background. I was one of the first people at eBay in the UK, and then Skype, and ten years later decided to retrain as a landscape designer. So weirdly, a) I get asked what on earth prompted such a radical change and b) To explain how I see many parallels with the internet and the garden. And equally I see many really strong parallels in the type people who are passionate about them (although both sides will deny this!). Here are my top similarities:

No-one owns the internet. No governing body. Yet there do seem to be rules, they are just implicit.
Some things just don’t work. And you are often guided by what you see other people doing.
It’s a place for freedom of expression.
No-one owns nature. Yet you have to abide by its preferences, or your garden will die.
Some things just don’t work. You’re often influenced by other people’s gardens.
And it’s also a place for freedom of expression.
The Internet is full of bugs, spiders, crawlers, viruses that test us and are constantly there to challenge our creativity.
So is the garden.
You can influence your garden, but never entirely control it.
The same is true of the internet
The internet is not one single body, it’s made up of millions of live components all interacting together
The garden is made of countless organisms
Even in the most beautiful of gardens, nature can be very cruel and dark, and life can be fragile.
On the Internet, there are dark corners. Where no-one wants to go.
Both are addictive
Both can be hotbeds of creativity. There is no master dictating what must be.
Processes can be experimental
They are full of talented and symbiotic communities that depend on one another
If you open your mind, the potential for innovation and creativity with both the Internet and The Garden are infinite

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