WORTH
How do we measure, prove and document our work as gardeners to non-gardeners?
I was recently asked by someone (office based I’m guessing) to “prove progress” made. That’s all well and good when you’re starting a new project and there’s lots of activity and very visible “results”, but what happens after this when all you have to show for your work are no dead plants, a tidy site and an incrementally changing space that takes months/years to be marginally different and the establisment of a garden with a relationship with its surrounding habitat? Lets be honest, for most people “the garden” is a background noise like nature in general, to many people it’s somewhere nice to opt in and out of, noticed only when it’s either particularly good, particularly bad or under extreme upheaval.
It seems to me that to most humans life has become so removed from “outside” that there are many who have sort of absorbed the world of tech-bro management “results-driven” pseudo-babble and are trying to apply it to every scenario! How do you explain to someone who has never selectively weeded the time spent selectively weeding is valuable, relevent and not wasted AND worth the money paying a gardener, despite it not being obvious anything has changed? How do you quantify the time and value of keeping plants alive in a dry/wet/windy/ patch and “prove” you’ve achieved anything when all you have to show for it in the end are the same plants, not dead. Should we put value on the sinews we’ve stretched, the bit by bit damage of bone, muscle, tendon, joint? Do we have the right to add on a handcream and Ipobrofen allowance to our bill? I’m guessing most horticulturists give their literal blood as part of the price.. ie: basically for free.
Other than videoing every hour put in and making a real time montage/video stream, I’m not sure it’s possible or indeed even helpful to “prove progress”… Then there are all the hours we don’t charge for, you know, the three o clock in the morning ones where we’re thinking about how to put a garden together, how to engage people, how to implement the next project, plant combinations, where to source stuff, what contacts to tap-up to get what’s needed to complete a job, contacting those people, doing that research, walking around another garden on our rare days off and thinking to ourselves “oh yeh! That would be great at the insert client’s garden” and all the rest of the afternoon’s worth of thoughts dedicated to that. How do you quantify the value of that!? How do you extrapolate the worth? How do you “prove” it!… Which is really what they’re asking you to do.
Gardening cannot be broken down into a spreadsheet. Not without a highly complex graph system with error-bars, addendums, bibliographies, references, diagrams and an interpretive dance/theatre performance and live painting show… Oh and a science experiment that blows some shit up and makes a neon gas, leaving behind a magical thing of beauty.
