by Greyson Keller
President of The Garden Group, Inc. & Landscape Designer at Studio Viburnum
I woke this morning borderline astonished that the coffee maker had done exactly what it was supposed to do.
This is not particularly impressive technology. A timer, some water, ground coffee, a heating element. Humanity has accomplished greater things. But there it was at five in the morning, a pot of coffee already made, and with it something I hadn’t quite expected… twenty minutes I would ordinarily have spent making it myself. I took the coffee and sat down.
It was raining outside, gently at first, and for those twenty minutes I had nowhere I particularly needed to be. The day hadn’t quite begun asking things of me. There were emails waiting, drawings to finish, people who would need answers soon enough, but for the moment there was coffee, my own thoughts, and the gentle rhythm of water against window.
The irony of what happened next isn’t lost on me.
Given twenty unexpected minutes of freedom, I made something. But it didn’t feel like productivity, at least not in the way I’ve come to understand the word. I wasn’t trying to produce anything. There was no deadline, no client waiting for it, no little red notification demanding an answer. My mind simply wandered somewhere it hadn’t been intending to go, and I had enough empty space that morning to follow it.
It began, oddly enough, with gardens.
I spend my life building gardens on an island that is constantly reminding us that we are not the captains of this ship. We draw plans. Of course we do. We measure, calculate quantities and labor, think about irrigation, choose plants for soil and wind and salt and deer. I spend an unreasonable amount of time trying to imagine what a place will look like five or ten or twenty years from now, knowing full well that I will get parts of it wrong.
And then Nantucket intervenes.
A northeast wind arrives with such a different plan, one might mistake it for the mother of the bride. Fog cradles the moorlands and loiters until noon. A hydrangea grows beautifully on one side of a house and another sulks fifty feet away. Deer develop an appetite for something every book insists they don’t eat. A tree we carefully selected spitefully struggles, while something planted almost as an afterthought, furtively becomes the focal point.
Eventually, if you do this work long enough, you learn that being a good gardener is not the same thing as exerting control. Much of it is knowing when your intervention will make something better, and when the greater act of care is to leave it alone.
I used to think that was mostly a lesson about plants. But the longer I’ve spent making gardens, and perhaps simply the older I’ve become, the more often I recognize the same tension elsewhere. We have an extraordinary instinct to improve the things we care about. We straighten the path, amend the soil, protect against failure, anticipate what might go wrong. Sometimes that’s exactly what love requires. Sometimes, without quite realizing it, we can improve something until there is very little room left for it to surprise us.
I’ve begun to think about this with my children, particularly now, as the world they’re growing into seems to be changing faster than I can make sense of it myself.
Artificial intelligence will almost certainly be ordinary to them in a way it can never quite be ordinary to me. They may have tools at their disposal that make much of what I spend my days doing now seem almost quaint: hours of drawing, calculating, writing, searching for an answer, staring at a problem until something finally gives. A machine may simply hand them the answer. And I don’t think that’s necessarily something to fear. There are plenty of afternoons I’d happily take back. What I wonder about is what they will do with the afternoon.
Somewhere beneath all the astonishing questions about what these systems will someday be capable of doing, I find myself wondering about something much simpler… What do we actually want them to give us?
A garden has been teaching me that one for years. There are things in a garden that absolutely should be made more efficient. Irrigation shouldn’t waste water. A crew shouldn’t spend an afternoon doing something a machine can accomplish in twenty minutes. I have no particular nostalgia for unnecessary labor, and I suspect most people who actually work with their hands feel similarly. The shovel is lovely right up until someone invents the excavator.
But efficiency has always seemed most useful to me when it gives something back. An hour, perhaps. And I worry that we are becoming very good at taking every hour technology returns to us and immediately selling it again. We answer more emails, take on more projects and, to borrow from Spinal Tap, turn the amps up to eleven simply because we can. Somewhere along the way, the technology that was supposed to give us more freedom simply raises our expectation of what we should do with it.
Gardens are wonderfully uncooperative with this way of thinking.
A tree takes the time a tree takes. You can buy a larger one, certainly, and sometimes we do. You can improve the soil and give it water and choose exactly the right place for it. But there is no app for twenty years of wind moving through its branches. No shortcut to the particular way an old tree begins to belong to a house, or the memory of children who once played beneath it and eventually bring their own children back.
We plant things whose fullest expression we may never see. We grow food that could be bought more cheaply. We move a shrub three times because it never quite felt right where it was. Sometimes a plant dies and the gap it leaves turns out to be better than what we had planned.
None of this is particularly efficient. I suppose that’s part of why I love it.
I want my children to be good at the world that’s coming. I don’t want them standing outside it, suspicious of every new thing simply because it wasn’t part of my childhood. I want them to understand these machines, to use them confidently, to recognize when they are wrong and to know enough about how they work that they aren’t easily manipulated by them.
If artificial intelligence can do in seconds something that would have taken one of my children six hours, I hope they use it. I just don’t necessarily want them to find six more hours of work. Maybe they make something or go somewhere. Maybe they taste a moment of spontaneity, or maybe they waste an afternoon with someone they love and don’’t realize until twenty years later that it wasn’t wasted at all.
There is a danger, I think, in teaching children that every unused moment represents unrealized potential. An empty afternoon can look terribly unproductive from the outside while containing nearly everything that eventually matters.
Gardening has made me suspicious of empty spaces in much the same way. Early in my career I wanted to fill them. A bare patch looked unfinished, an invitation for another plant. With time I’ve come to appreciate the restraint of leaving some ground alone. The empty space gives shape to everything around it. It lets the garden breathe. Perhaps a life needs some of that too.
As I sat there this morning, the rain began hitting the windows harder. Nothing remarkable happened. I didn’t accomplish anything by noticing it. The rain didn’t need anything from me and there was no reason to stop what I was doing.
But I did.
For a little while there was simply the sound of water against window and the peculiar pleasure of being warm and dry on the other side of it, knowing that soon enough the rain would soften and the moment would disappear.
I can imagine a future intelligence understanding everything about that moment. It could explain the weather system that produced the rain, the acoustics of droplets striking glass, the psychology of shelter and why human beings find storms comforting when they are safely inside. It might know more about the moment than I ever could.
But somebody still has to be standing by the window. That, more than anything, is what I want my children to understand. Not because rain is sacred, or gardens are somehow morally superior to computers, or because the world was better before machines became intelligent. It wasn’t. I am grateful for an enormous number of things that have made my life easier, and I expect my children will be grateful for things I can barely imagine. I only want them to remember what all that ease is supposed to make room for.
There will always be another problem to solve, another system to improve, another patch of ground that could accommodate one more plant. Knowing that you can improve something is different from knowing that you should.
Maybe this is the strange little piece of wisdom I’ve picked up from spending my life making gardens. The system is not the thing itself. The irrigation, the machinery, the schedule, the spreadsheet, even the drawing I labored over at my desk… none of them are the garden. They exist so that someday somebody might walk outside and find that the serviceberry is flowering, or sit beneath a tree, or watch children disappear around a corner, or stay at the table because the evening is too beautiful to go inside.
The garden is what happens after we’ve finished trying to make the garden.
I don’t know exactly what the world will look like when my children are my age. Increasingly, I’m not convinced anyone does. But I hope they are ambitious in it. I hope they build things I couldn’t have built and solve problems my generation couldn’t solve. I hope the intelligence available to them is staggering.
And when that intelligence offers to make everything faster, easier, more predictable and more productive, I hope they occasionally have the confidence to leave a little ground empty. To let something grow strangely. To waste an afternoon. To notice the rain.
We should build extraordinary systems. We probably will. I hope the best of them give us more room to live, then become quiet enough that for a little while we can forget they’re there. Maybe that is all I was asking of the coffee maker this morning, though I certainly wasn’t thinking about it at the time.
The window was doing much the same thing. The glass is doing something extraordinary, really: holding back the weather while letting the light through, giving us warmth without entirely separating us from what is happening on the other side. But standing there this morning, coffee in hand, I wasn’t thinking about the glass. I was listening to water against window.
