beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Sepp Holzer's Permaculture was the very first book I read on permaculture. I had been an organic gardener all of my adult life, so I was dedicated to compost, mulch, no chemicals, neat beds with an occasional companion plant, and no weeds because weeds were said to compete for water and nutrients. So when I examined the photos of Sepp's garden, all I saw was disorder and chaos. I confess it puzzled me, but on the other hand, everything he said was revolutionary to me. I have to say that this was the beginning of my permaculture journey. It wasn't just me, personally, that was revolutionized, my garden was too! Now, I'm guessing passersby look at it and think, 'what a mess,' but I can identify everything I see and it's all good!

garden beds

Garden beds: cherry tomatoes, watermelon, mangels, horseradish, celery, lambs quarter, sweet potatoes, red raspberries, cowpeas, landrace brassicas, morning glory, a couple of carrots, and a potato plant or two.

hoophouse

hoophouse

and hoophouse

Hoophouse: hopniss, cherry tomatoes, winter squash, cultivated grape, Chinese yams, Malabar spinach, violets, lambs quarter, dandelion, strawberries, burdock, and morning glories (because I can't get rid of them!)

hugelkultur

Hugelkultur: winter squash, turtle beans, cherry tomatoes, chicory, clover, morning glories, lambs quarter, & sunchokes

As my fundamental concept about gardening changed, so did how I see my garden. I'm living proof that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Thanks for posting this Leigh. I love your hoophouse - I bet that's nice underneath when it's hot outside. I think you can be proud of your healthy looking plants. I wouldn't count that messy at all!

Some people see weeds where we see diversity.
I've shared previously pictures of my exuberant polytunnel (Forest Garden thread). It's a bit sad this year since I still haven't put the new cover on, but it's been interesting to see which plants are thriving despite not having the extra heat.

Below is a picture of my drive bank: The lavender is looking a bit lop sided because I left some of the flowers for the bees after taking the rest for scenting the house and making some lavender wands. The wild strawberries are running rampant. Unfortunately these are not the best fruiting (although I got them from some one who said they were good....) There's a couple of daylillies and a Trachycarpa palm, some sage and thyme and sedums, all useful and/or edible.

Below that and more messy is my pallet garden - this picture was taken this summer after "chop and dropping" some of the docken, which of course has since grown back. The yellow flowers are kale going to seed. This is now my experimental perennial garden, much of the interesting plants are hidden in the undergrowth, but I've got lots of very productive berry bushes, Good King Henry, sweet cicely, skirret, jerusalem artichokes, potatoes, more strawberries, silverweed and too many more to mention. Someday I'll get a good balance between the docks and the rest of the plants, but in the meantime it gives me a lot of pleasure.

Love those pictures! It looks great! So lush and natural. The dream for when I move out of an apartment

Here's another picture from this year of the pallet garden looking a bit more lush in  early June. In the foreground is skirret and scorzonera, with a young blackcurrant bush in between them, behind is the taller perennial kale, I can see strawberry leaves amongst the buttercups, some alfalfa and mallow towards the left and some of that grass should be perennial rye, further back there are raspberries and the tall white flowers are sweet cicely (Myrrhis odorata)

Yes I have had friends in the landscaping  / commercial horticulture trade say they've never heard of gardening like I do but are amazed at how plants will survive and yield bounty in a drought. I have had a friend house sitting who is happily amazed there is no watering required. I try to keep things tidy, but I plant non noxious weeds over new composting hills to hold the soil and bulk up green manure.
This year I got a small group of beans out of a cut barrel I was given. It wasn't traditionally pretty but I sure found a few handfuls of fresh beans beautiful when arriving back from up north.

I've found a thread that help give a deeper meaning and purpose to some of the messiness in my life: https://permies.com/t/2994/permaculture/Orderly-Chaos-Chaotic-Order . So aiming for Orderly Chaos is a good thing!

Saying that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” suggests that beauty is entirely subjective, depending solely on personal taste or opinion. However, this idea overlooks a fundamental fact: human beings share biological, perceptual, and cognitive structures that profoundly shape our experience of the world.

Our visual perception, for instance, is organized according to universal principles—such as symmetry, proportion, and contrast—that the nervous system tends to interpret as pleasing or harmonious. These preferences are not merely cultural constructions; they reflect processing patterns common to our species. This is why certain faces, landscapes, or compositions are regarded as beautiful across very different cultures.

Moreover, the cognitive mechanisms involved in aesthetic evaluation—such as the detection of order, anticipation, and the balance between predictability and surprise—are also shared. This suggests that beauty is not just an individual projection but an experience emerging from a common perceptual architecture.

Therefore, although individuals may vary in their aesthetic sensitivity, beauty is not purely subjective. It arises from the encounter between an external form and an observer whose mind and senses are structured by a shared biology and evolutionary history. In other words, beauty is not only “in the eye of the beholder” but in the deep correspondence between the world and the human perceptual structures that make it intelligible and meaningful.

I agree in part about beauty being universal. May I suggest that inherent beauty is an evolutionary means of evaluating ecosystem health on an emotional, instinctive level? It would make sense that a biodiverse and healthy ecosystem is more capable of sustaining life and thus out instincts would have us seek those places out. The proportions and colors and shapes in a healthy ecosystem are much different from in a monoculture or degraded wasteland—there’s also however an element of aliveness that the image itself fails to capture but is easily perceived in person.

The idea behind starting this thread was my own realization that permaculture creates a unique beauty that is different from a standard cultivated garden or landscape. When I first read Sepp Holzer's Permaculture, I looked at the pictures and thought "What a mess, how can he tell what's what?" But as I started to implement the permaculture principles I was learning, I started to see that the permaculture garden and landscape create their own unique beauty. So while the typical cultivated urban landscaper may see a mess, a permaculturist will see a wild natural beauty as our gardens and landscapes are allowed to create their own ecosystems. The "beholder" in this case are the Permies!

Leigh, I agree that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder and that it changes with permaculture knowledge. Maybe there are "universal" aspects of beauty as well, but when it comes to plants, in gardens, in nature and on farmfields, my idea of beauty has shifted from one end completely to the other.

I remember how I used to think about what they "should" look like, but now, when I see one, I am horrified. I have found it extremely difficult to let weeds grow, and at times, I still do. The need for tidyness is so deeply rooted in my upbringing and probably my culture as well. I really had to learn to see the beauty of a messy ecosystem.

Today I am proud of my messy garden that provides my familly as well as birds, frogs and insects (and other critters), with so much food. The wild flowers and the wildlife cheers us up everytime we see them. However, my husband (and many friend ans family), are not at the same level of accepting the "eco sysem messiness" they need their time to get there. What really makes a difference: if the edges are tidy, the whole place looks tidy, to me as well. So my husband takes care of the edges. Edges are weeded and the edge of the lawn, which is slowly turning into a wild flower meadow, is mown. It does make the whole place more visual appealing to everyone.

So, I think our place looks great and so does my husband. However, my dad looked at my berrybushes in the cage, with groundcover and tall white flowers of a vegtable in between, nicely contrasting with the red berries, pathways clear to move around and neat edges, and said: "well that got out of control". I was so surprised. Same thing when I started to chop and drop in "syntropic farming" style: I really think the nicely arranged heap of biomass swirling through the garden, following the contours of my romanticly shaped gardenbeds surrounding the fruit trees, look great. I see reduced work, mulch, future compost, fungus feed and wildlife habitat. My husband looked horrified and said: "do you really want to keep it this way? I can help you clean it up." So I guess there are different levels, and there will always be. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.