Love in Dark Settings

"'I wouldn't want to make it look like a gardener's garden, all clipped an' spick an' span, would you?' he said. 'It's nicer like this with things runnin' wild, an' swingin' an' catchin' hold of each other."

"'Don't let us make it tidy,' said Mary anxiously. 'It wouldn't seem like a secret garden if it was tidy.'"

--Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Secret Garden.

That's what I want too: a "lovely wild place" that "would be a wilderness of growing things." But I'm darned if I can find any writings on this topic.

What I want are some writings - online or in book form - about taking care of one's home landscape, with minimal interference.

I've tried looking under every keyword I can thinking of - natural gardening, sustainable gardening, organic gardening, conservation, forestry management, native landscapes, habitat garden - and I can't find anything that talks about conserving what you already have. They all seem to assume that the homeowner will want to plant things.

I don't want to plant. I want to take care of my garden in such a way that seeds or nuts that plant themselves will grow. And I want to leave plants alone, as much as possible, to see what they do.

My mother, when she sold us this house, told me how to prune the rose in our back yard. I didn't prune it. As a result, we now have an eight-foot-high rose. It's awfully interesting to see it swaying in the wind.

I'm getting rid of the English ivy because it's taking over our lawn and choking the other plants. I'd like to do anything else that needs to be done to encourage young plants to grow.

o--o--o

They were working industriously round one of the biggest standard roses when he caught sight of something which made him utter an exclamation of surprise.

"Why!" he cried, pointing to the grass a few feet away. "Who did that there?"

It was one of Mary's own little clearings round the pale green points.

"I did it," said Mary.

"Why, I thought tha' didn't know nothin' about gardenin'," he exclaimed.

"I don't," she answered, "but they were so little, and the grass was so thick and strong, and they looked as if they had no room to breathe. So I made a place for them."

o--o--o

That's my vision of gardening. The closest I've been able to find what I'm looking for is information on the Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka, but again, he's talking about planting, not letting seeds plant themselves.

Have you guys stumbled across anything similar to what I'm talking about? Do you have any suggestions for keywords I could try?