Marcus Tullius Cicero: “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
I bought my present home two years ago this month. I didn’t have enough time the first summer to do any gardening. After I saw what was coming up the second summer, I spent my time on the flower gardens that run along the front of the house—they needed a lot of work and several new plantings. Over the past winter, I decided to set up a vegetable garden this summer, which would not only give me pleasure in seeing things grow and provide good food, but also cut down a bit on the width of the yard, which would then hopefully allow me to cut the grass myself rather than needing to hire someone to cut it for me.
I’ve been pretty late in getting the plants and seeds in, though, since I spent April and half of May working nearly everyday for Census 2010. However, that might be just as well, as it’s been mostly a very cool spring. The morning of June 1 got down to 38* here! Most of the planting is done now, and it’s been a lot of work and really, really worth it—way before I get to harvest anything.
I’ve had offers of help. I did get a young man with stronger shoulders than I have to drive the metal fence poles into the ground and hang the fencing. He offered to till the ground for me, but I said No, thanks. I knew what I wanted to plant but not where, and doing the digging and forking has allowed me to get a good sense, step by step, of which location and soil type would be good for each plant. In a sense, I let the garden unfold itself.
One other thing I’ve been able to do through this process is to reuse the sod. Last summer, my younger son broke up the macadam driveway, or at least the part that ran past the house and dead-ended at the stream that runs behind the house. This summer, I’ve moved sod from the garden to this area, and now I have a nice green bit of yard next to the house, where there used to be just crumbling asphalt. Plus.
I’ve also developed a good sense of the nature of the soil in the garden, and now I know why my blueberry bushes are thriving and my hazelnut bushes died. I know well now where the sunlight dwells in the garden at each hour in the day. I have a much better sense of how far I can push my back and shoulder muscles before I hurt them. I know myself and the ground much better, both literally and metaphorically, because I chose the slow way to till the earth.
I’ve only recently realized (yes, DUH) that the words “mother” and “matter” come from the same Latin root, mater. (Love that word “root”!) That’s undoubtedly one reason we have developed the phrase “Mother Earth.” All living things come from the earth; Earth truly is our mother in the literal, physical sense. But it occurred to me again as I was digging in the garden (a prevailing preoccupation with me) that the material world gives rise to more than just our bodies; it molds our souls, or psyches, as well.
I think the concept that we humans are dualities, mind somehow separate from body—an idea from philosophy and religion, has done us great harm. Judeo-Christian theology tells us, starting with the making of Adam, that our bodies are made from the earth, but our souls have been breathed into us by God. Because of this, unlike anything else alive on Earth, we are special, made in the image of God. And Genesis assures us that because of this specialness, we have the right to rule everything else on earth. Because of the hard-to-explain human psyche, particularly our self-consciousness, we are not exclusively of this earth and thus not tied to it or indebted to it or responsible for it. We have a Father God as well as a Mother Earth.
I’ve been reading recently a great new book on the history of gardening in England, which notes that when pineapples were first successfully grown in England in the eighteenth century, “For many, pineapples were the proof that man controlled nature and therefore a most sought after status symbol.”[1] Some people at this time, like the English Quaker Peter Collinson, “believed that plants were a direct route to a relationship with God, while other material possessions were only a pompous display of wealth—they were ‘man’s work’. . . .” Others believed, like Linnaeus, that humans needed “to bring order to the natural world.” I think you can see in these quotes the difference in attitudes between those who see themselves as part of God’s creation of the natural world, and thus humble within it, and those who see themselves as somewhat separate from it and, indeed, obliged to fix it or order it.
I am pretty firmly in Collinson’s camp. When I worked on my flower gardens, yes, I felt I needed to bring order to disorder, but that’s only because previous owners had planted things in a really hodge-podge way and then neglected the gardens. So, the gardens were man-made things that were not maintained.[2] But I have no desire at all to impose order on the wood lot behind my house or on any other part of the natural world that humans have not messed up. I feel so much safer in the natural world than in a man-made environment. I am at ease climbing a mountain, but I cannot look out a high window of a skyscraper, or even ride up in the elevator to get to the top.
As I worked in the vegetable garden, I realized again that what I know of the human world comes from what I understand of nature. And I think that’s important. Urban humans who have lost contact with nature are at risk in some ways, I believe. Is it so hard to believe or accept that our minds are shaped by the world we grow from, that the laws of nature can tell us much about the capacity of our minds, as well? The link between matter and mind is one of metaphor, analogy. That’s one reason poets can tell us so much more than most people can see.
Consider this passage from a recent article in the New York Times, titled “The Case for Working with Your Hands”[3]:
The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career
trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end
up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of
their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best
intentions. . . . There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be
installed in the foundation of your mental equipment –at the level of
perception and habit. There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in
the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world
and your habitual responses to it. This is due [in part] to the immediate
feedback you get from material objects . . . .
Make you think of Eliot Spitzer, George Bush, Wall Street financial wizards?
It’s an old and often-forgotten piece of wisdom that to know where to go, you should start by knowing where you come from and where you are now. I have a much better idea of what will work in my vegetable garden because I have dug in the soil myself. But I also have a better idea of who I am and what works for me when I am digging in the soil, or walking on a country road, or sitting on the beach gazing out over the ocean. I feel that I have a place, that in fact I am situated, and that from that physical place I can think and act with wisdom and pleasure.
[1] Andrea Wulf, The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire & the Birth of an Obsession. NY: Knopf, 2009, pg. 41. The following two quotes are from pages 23 & 49, respectively.
[2] There’s a whole other blog here on how, when we humans mess around with the natural world, we have to fix the consequences of our intrusion and then fix the consequences of the consequences, ad nauseum, which I will get to some day.
[3] Matthew B. Crawford, “The Case for Working with Your Hands,” New York Times, 24 May 2009, pg. MM36.
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