Saturday, April 16, 2005

Gardens are Teachers

How does anyone live without a garden?
My garden doesn't give much produce, because of the amount of attention I give it - or the depth and consistency of that attention - and because of our shorter growing year, but oh! what it gives me in pleasure and in understanding.
Today I saw how closely balanced the forces in nature of growth and decay are. Everything in my garden seems bent on tearing things back down to soil. The sowbugs are hard at work digesting plant bits on the surface of the earth, and ejecting tiny bits of excrement/fertilizer. The long oregano "branches", bent over by the snow, are layered with dropped pine needles, into which fall seeds from nearby lemon balm, and up through which grow strawberries from the runners that have stretched into the oregano bed. Old decay; new growth. A never-ending pattern; and so well-balanced that things in nature don't get out of control.
Wall Street's stock market seems to think the only reasonable pattern is up up up! How foolish. The only natural pattern is in waves or cycles.
My strawberries hardly produced last year; the apricot tree was bent with its fruit. This year I have strawberry blossoms already in April despite last week's snow. But the apricot tree is bare. They know the law of ebb and flow.
My peaches ignore this law and produce bountifully every year - enough to eat them fresh on my cereal, make peach cobbler, and dry the rest to nibble at work during the winter. My apples seem to know the peach has forgotten the law, and hardly ever produce. Although this year my youngest apple tree - where I hired someone to clear off the lower fir branches which shaded them - looks like a bridal bower. Portent of fresh crisp apples to come.
More than anything, gardens feel like Hope. Many years dashed, as something or other fails. But Hope renewed every spring.
My tomato plants - purchased and dug in just before the snow, covered in mad haste when it began to fall - are tucked into their little beds, in a lazy row. New blossoms are sprouting. One tiny tomato peeks out of its cap. Hope of fresh tomatoes to slice and eat; hope of dried tomato slices for cooking later. Just Hope.
I look at the row, contoured to the slope of the garden....and they look like sleeping children to me....snug in their beds of straw (to keep them from drying out,) the soil surrounding their roots full of all the nutrients they need. Cared for, content, growing.
It makes me hum inside.
So how do people live without this evidence of the natural order of things? Without this evidence of the neverending cycle of life? How do they live without these teachings, this sense of hope, providence, contentment?
I don't know. That's why I live here.