The need to write has started to consume me, starting with a couple of toes, and I think I should get to work on it before it reaches my ankles. I'm told it is wise to stick to topics that I know something about so gardening is the only place I can start. Having reached the age of sixty and having been a gardener my entire adult life this should be easy, right?
I'll begin near the end, so to speak, with recent questions of why I garden at all. This question used to be easy to answer: I garden because I love the soil. If pressed or even gently nudged, I am capable of discourse on all manner of garden theories from the role of mycorrhizal fungi to the influence of the outer planets on the quality of cow manure. But about a month ago while I was using a machete to chop plants on the compost pile I found my self asking "Why am I doing this?" My thought was that at my age the whole endeavor was rather a waste of time if nobody was with me learning how and why I do what I do in the garden. Given the state of the world, surely my time could be better spent in other endeavors. I should broaden my horizons and hone new skills to support an important public good, surely. But my mind dwelt on my village garden that will likely be torn up by the roots fairly soon after I die and in just a couple of years there will be no trace of it. I hope and pray that some greater or lesser parts of it may survive, but it doesn't seem likely. Or at least it did not seem likely on that day.
I should tell you, dear reader, that this nasty business of mortality has become personal, shall we say. I will leave the particulars to another essay, or two or three, but for now please understand that for the first time in my life I am faced with mortality in the most intimate terms. So there I was in the garden, light rain falling on me and the soil and the plants and the compost, wondering what the hell I was doing.
Thankfully I kept chopping at the compost that day and have just kept at it and I've experienced the benefit of that advice to "give time time". You will have guessed that gardening and gardeners and a couple of dear friends have reminded me why I garden. By coincidence my funk came while the Burlington Film Festival was in full swing and at the invitation of the Northeast Organic Farmers Association, NOFA, I was invited to a free screening of the film 'Modified', produced and directed (and starring) Aube Giroux. It is nominally a film about "A food lover's journey into GMOs", but is really an observation about corporate and governmental malfeasance and, for me, an homage to the film maker's mother, an exceptional gardener and cook named Jali Giroux. Jali died of cancer in 2009. One scene struck me; as Jali was bundled under covers on her couch, suffering from chemotherapy treatment, Aube asks her why she loves gardening. I'll have to paraphrase her answer, but it went something like this. "When I am in the garden doing just one thing, something wonderful is always nearby and makes itself known. Perhaps it is birdsong or sunlight falling just so on a flower. Perhaps there is a bee on the flower. And I am renewed."
This renewal is the essence of gardening and all gardeners are aware of it. It did not take long for me to be reminded in my own garden. Just yesterday I was about to iron a shirt before I left for a trip. The ironing board in my wife's sewing room is in front of a window and just below is a small sunflower with a brown and tattered seed head. A cardinal was perched on the seed head, straining over the edge to harvest a seed and of course that caught my attention and I put the iron down. I raised my gaze to see another cardinal nearby, fluttering in place like a hummingbird using its wings to dislodge seeds from a russian sage, then dropping to the ground to eat them. I have never seen that in thirty eight years of gardening. As I surveyed the yard and garden from the window I think I saw at least two dozen birds and a couple of squirrels eating in my yard and I don't think I've ever seen that, either. (I have seen nine or ten goldfinches perched on a grape trellis in October flitting back and forth to sunflowers and that was very special, too, and I was happily reminded of it.)
I'll close with a quote from my daughter Margaret. When I described all of this to her today she replied "If you find wonder in nature then you will never be bored". And that is just about all there is to it. For now.
