The Romance of the Garden

For three years now, my partner Jen and I have been helping our friends Liz and Kevin build a pretty respectable vegetable garden at their house a little ways outside downtown Ann

Arbor. Kevin just wrote a great article about it, mostly dealing with the economics, health benefits, and effect on the community. I want to share two other sides of the story: the sheer joy and naively romantic allure of gardening, and the environmental benefits. First, the joy: the fresh air and exercise, the delicious food (oh my god, the food), and the feeling of accomplishment watching the garden come alive all come together to make vegetable gardening the most gratifying hobby I've ever taken up, by far. Afternoons of friends, music, beers and meandering conversations yield a basket of fresh, almost peppery basil and juicy, purple, lusty tomatoes: did I mention oh my god, the food?

Boom

Gardening solo, by contrast, is a deeply meditative time to slow down, unplug from modern life and gain a respect for the pace and ways of plants growing and reacting to their environment. We get so caught up in the noise of human society, we forget that for most of time (well, since the Ordovician period), and on most of the planet, this is and has been the ur story of earth: plants capture the energy of the sun and produce the sugars, starches, fats, and proteins on which we all depend, and the tastes, smells and drugs in which we all delight. If this story goes too far off track, none of our other tales are going to have a happy ending. Obviously, our garden makes an infinitesimally small contribution to food production, but it did open my eyes to the problems in the food system. Without environmental justice, there can be no justice of any kind: to distribute fairly, there must be something to distribute.

Deep thoughts, dill pickles

A lot of people use their land to grow grass, and that can be great, too. Badminton, barbeques, outdoor parties, little kids running around: all immensely improved by a well-tended lawn. However, we now use three times more land in the U.S. for lawns than for corn, and lawns have an environmental cost of decreased biodiversity and increased use of pesticides and fertilizers. The aesthetic of a closely-cropped lawn, whatever its origins (probably European aristocracy showing off how much land they could not grow food on), became firmly fixed in the '50s as a symbol of America: everyone tends their own yard, and you have a nice, tidy, orderly neighborhood. I can see why people are into that, and I don't want to add to the culture war or suggest that you're single-handedly destroying the planet if you love your lawn. But if you don't care that much one way or another, you should consider a vegetable garden, a native flower garden, or even mulch and trees. And no matter what you do, please don't change your neighborhood bylaws or call the cops to report a vegetable garden, as has happened three times to us.

Mine is bigger than yours
photo: Aesthetic Effect

Gardening is a botanical, sensual pleasure that reminds you that you are an embodied human with needs (for sustenance, for vitamins), and that you can meet those needs by meeting the needs of some very different embodied organisms, your plants. It's a miracle so fundamental that, as Michael Pollan points out, it is deeply subversive: the Tree of Knowledge is just that. Gardening is a deeply romantic endeavor, and forces you to see a little patch of the world in a slow, deliberate way that is sorely lacking in 2013. As the (admittedly whimsical) saying goes, a bad farmer grows weeds, a good farmer grows crops, and a great farmer grows soil. You don't hear much about growing soil these days, actually or metaphorically.

P.S: If you are interested in growing your own vegetable garden, buy this book.