true plantsman knows, gardening is far from laissez-faire. In their book The Gardens of Democracy, Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer argue that moving from ‘… - Kate Raworth

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true plantsman knows, gardening is far from laissez-faire. In their book The Gardens of Democracy, Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer argue that moving from ‘machinebrain’ to ‘gardenbrain’ thinking calls for a simultaneous shift away from believing that things will self-regulate to realising that things need stewarding. ‘To be a gardener is not to let nature take its course; it is to tend,’ they write. ‘Gardeners don’t make plants grow but they do create conditions where plants can thrive and they do make judgments about what should and shouldn’t be in the garden.’46 That is why economic gardeners must throw themselves in, nurturing, selecting, repotting, grafting, pruning and weeding the plants as they grow and mature.