Why I Garden

For a change, this post doesn’t include photos. Otherwise, it might never get posted! Hope the featured photo at the top of the page can satisfy your yen for optics. Just this once!

If it’s New England, this must be winter…

After a November that couldn’t decide whether to do August or April, winter arrived in December at long last. Not just snow, but (sometimes) daytime temps well below freezing, and some nights barely into double digits. The kale, after realizing that the low 20s meant business, finally gave up the ghost. All that persisted, for a longish spell running to December 10 or so, was a lone oriental poppy. The poor baby got confused and started generating foliage in October, and it had me worried all November that it would try to bloom. The low teens eventually convinced it that would be a bad idea.

So, although we did get rain now and then (it’s still New England!), the garden really was done for the nonce. That gave me time to focus on the holidays for a while. In my house, that meant putting up jars of varicolored chutneys, cranberry-apple preserve, and pickled carrots. And baking. (It should have meant pickled cauliflower too, but there’s plenty of winter left. Because it’s still New England.) And knitting. There was a sweater in the works.

All those pursuits encouraged reflection. And since eagerness for the next gardening season already plagued me even while the forecast said single digits coming, I got to wondering: why on earth do I garden?

Days gone by

It’s not just about watching things grow. For one thing, with the exception of weeds, the plants in my garden don’t grow all that fast. Believe me, with the exception of peonies in late April, paint dries faster. And you wouldn’t form an obsession for watching that. Plus, if you really want to watch things grow, you could go for walks out there in Nature and save yourself the grunt work.

The answer to Why Garden was clearer in my grandparents’ day. My grandfather-of-the-green-thumb maintained a huge vegetable garden during the Depression and World War II. Even after he and my grandmother retired to a tiny cottage, he cultivated a seriously large veggie patch and several fruit trees. Although he undoubtedly enjoyed puttering outside, this was mostly an economizing measure. First he had a family of seven to feed, and later, hordes of grandchildren descending like hungry locusts.

He may have kept his earlier garden organic by default. Those fertilizers and insecticides cost money the family didn’t have. But by the time his Social Security kicked in, I recall his resorting to some of that better living through chemistry, if only for fertilizer. The grandchildren obviated some of the need for insecticide; we came in right handy for picking the Japanese beetles off.

Paradise?

In my childhood memories, that stretch of beans and corn and tomatoes and greens remains an Elysium of green abundance bound up with grandfatherly affection, with shelling peas on the back porch with my grandmother, and with feeling on  my palm the scritch of the Japanese beetles’ feet. My memory has conveniently erased whatever happened to the bugs once they left my grasp. All is sweet and peaceful in my memorymovie of that backyard. The crops sprang up and prospered under my grandfather’s loving touch.

Is it that sensation I’m trying to recapture? Maybe that’s part of it: the serenity that steals over me as I dig and weed and tie up the pea vines and deadhead the beardtongue. The zing of joy I feel when I round the corner of the garage and see that the cactus (yes, Virginia, there’s a native cactus in Massachusetts!) has produced several raving yellow flowers. Or the silly bliss that freezes me staring as a bumbling bee plods with clumsy grace from one to another to yet another dozen of the snowy flowers clustering on the elderberry bush, or among the buttery trumpets on the Diervilla. She always seems on the verge of tumbling off, but invariably recovers and buzzes on.

That all sounds idyllic, so why wonder why I garden?

A little dose of reality

Let me introduce the cold hard facts. I doubt that I’m saving any money with this gardening gig. If I haven’t sat down and added up the cost—the composted cow manure, the fencing, the cedar raised beds, the assistance for the grunt work, the seeds, the plants, the digging knives and pruning shears and digging fork and spade and wagon, etc. etc. ad walletum emptium—it’s because I’m too busy during the growing season and too lazy in the winter. But I guarantee that the total would far exceed the value of the peas, lettuce, kale, and sundry other veggies I’ve managed to harvest.

The monetary value, that is. Clearly I value the harvest beyond price tags. I Grew It Myself! How do you put that into dollars and cents? Still, this obviously ain’t my grandfather’s penny-pincher’s patch.

Taking charge?

I sometimes suspect that many people turn to gardening because they like the feeling of exerting control over nature. I used to aspire to such control. To establish a flower garden the likes of Gertrude Jekyll’s, with the perennials and shrubs placed just so, producing a well-composed symphony of color and shape and scent. My results seem more like the cacophony of a long pre-concert orchestral warmup. Elegant instruments bleating away at each other while you wonder why the hell the conductor hasn’t shown up yet. If you add in that the French horns have sprouted an aphid infestation and downy mildew has started to carpet undersides of the first-row violins.

No, control is not my forte. Truth be told, those most controlled of gardens, like the gardens you’ll find abutting Loire Valley châteaux, all rectangles and triangles and perfect circles and shrubs with French poodle cuts, have never appealed to me one whit. I get glimpses of one such garden, on a far smaller scale, as I pass a neighbor’s place one street over, mostly hidden behind fences. It has stark white stone pathways and geometric shapes in stone, and no weeds. In fact, almost no plants at all. Everything under control. I feel just a tinge of envy, but mostly sorrow, at the sight.

Surrender does not mean giving up

In fact, if you want total control, you’d have to get rid of all the plants. Which finally gets us to some glimmer of an explanation for why I garden: because I can’t control it. I can prepare the soil and put in seeds or starts or already flourishing plants in the location best suited to their needs for light. I can make sure they’re at the right depth, with seeds or roots nestled in according to specifications, and then water them as directed. I can come back and water as needed. I can prune or pinch back where necessary. I can (and often do) even talk to them in honeyed, encouraging tones, and sing to them when the mood hits.

But plants gonna do what plants gonna do.

Unless, of course, insects or marauding rodents or fungi do what they gonna do.

I’m there rooting (rah rah) for the plants, but then, I also root for the native pollinators, who sometimes lay eggs that turn into very hungry caterpillars, which eat the plants and are in turn eaten, sometimes, by birds. Here and there, I may give a nudge to offer a little boost to the plants, and I do try to uproot pesky weeds, but I have long since abandoned the fantasy that I have control over the outcomes. I’m there to try things out, to help a bit, to observe, and as I do so, to feel germinating within myself the seeds of humility.

Surrendering the illusion of control isn’t always easy, but eventually, it’s liberating. I’m just out there figuring out what humans gonna do in the garden. Sometimes that helps me realize that control outside the garden is a chimera too.

Control? Why fuss? Sufficient unto the day is the weevil thereof.

Meanwhile, your turn!

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2 Responses to Why I Garden

  1. Teri says:

    Yes, why do we garden. It’s not about economizing: each tomato costs ~$25. I love composting, creating rich soil, growing things…which I then battle ground hogs over.

  2. Corky says:

    Oh I love the pun on weevils – and on to “do no weevil”…
    Can’t wait for the growing season, though I have a completely shaded tiny backyard. You’ll provide the stuff of dreams for the rest of us.
    Thank you!

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