It is a place of brilliant connectivity where we are intertwined within the human community as well as the natural world of which we are a part. Here we encounter a landscape seething with vital energies: trees, stones, springs, soil itself—all are fully alive and animated, possessed of something our ancestors identified as soul. And our inner landscape too is an element of that harmony. Our longings and memories, our dreams and fears, our love for the other, these too flow through us and into the good earth and into the food we harvest and share. All of it—the sowing of seed, the tending of plants, the harvesting of crops —holds the astonishing possibility of transforming our lives and our society.
A tad grandiose, you might be thinking, but no less an authority than Thomas Jefferson said much the same thing two centuries ago: “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.” Revolutionaries of the spirit, that’s what true gardeners are, and if the world’s to become a better place, they shall have some part in its transformation.
The pieces assembled in this little book represent a decade’s worth of reflecting on the unexpected gift I was somehow given: to have the freedom, good health, loving relationship and wherewithal to devote myself, among other adventures, to life in a garden. Early versions of a majority of the selections first appeared in my EarthWords column in GardenWise magazine, and about a dozen others as articles in the Globe and Mail. Freed from the constraints of column inches, most have been expanded and amended. They do not constitute a training manual for transformative gardening, being in places insufficiently solemn, if not outright frivolous. But they do attempt to collectively reflect upon gardening as an active engagement of the human spirit with the natural world.
I am particularly indebted to my current editor and former GardenWise editor, Carol Pope, for her wise guidance over the years and for encouraging me to assemble these pieces into this volume.
IN THE BEGINNING
Green-Fingered Grannies and Ancient Gentlemen
The first small hints that spring is icumen in—the sweet scent of sarcococca by the doorway on a sunny afternoon, the thrilling shoots of stinging nettles in a sheltered corner—reawaken a great illusion: that springtime is the childhood of the year, the beginning of new life, a time of freshness, beauty and innocence, leading to long seasons of growth and fruitfulness. Late autumn and winter are seen as the seasons of age, spring the time for the lusty young blood of youth.
Poets have been dining out on this metaphor for centuries and, poets being what they are, insisting that youth is not only the first of life’s seasons, but also the best. “That age is best which is the first,” wrote Elizabethan Robert Herrick, “when youth and blood are warmer.” Victorian Edward Fitzgerald was still plucking the same lyre three centuries later: “Yet Ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose! / That Youth’s sweet-scented manuscript should close!”
Having already received a gold card from the government, and thereby taken a considerable leap into the wisdom of age, I’m more inclined than ever to take issue with this infernal glorification of vernal youth. It’s certainly true that, like the garden in springtime, youth’s a lot of bloody muddling around in the muck. Sure, it involves great hot rushes of enthusiasm, considerable dreaming of impossible dreams and much swooning over objects of affection that will soon enough prove themselves more appealing in imagination than in reality. Youth’s sweet-scented manuscript, much like a gullible gardener’s order form for springtime seeds, all too often turns out to be a work of romantic fantasy.
Here’s the bold counter-stroke I’m prepared to propose: that spring is at its pith the great season of our elders. Any thoughtful sounding of spring’s resonances confirms that this is so. Even the most poetical gardener would hesitate to characterize the first growth of spring as new birth. The emergence of annuals planted from seed (indoors and often far earlier than required) does have this quality of the entirely new, but it pales in significance compared with the real growth happening at this earliest time of the year, the wonderful earth-surge trembling all around us. This isn’t birth, it’s rebirth, a stirring of ancient forces. The exotic spathes of swamp lanterns, the primeval flowering stalks of petasites, the jubilant nubs of crocus and snowdrops emerging from frosty ground—these are not birthings, nor the noisy exuberances of youth; these are the reawakening of old friends we have known forever.
Our culture at large, devoted as it is to the frenzied movement of merchandise, is unabashed in its obsession with the new and the hip and the hot and the flash. Dizzy crowds mill for hours through shopping malls, seeking articles of transformation, greying oldsters search for the fountain of youth. The glitter of illusions and delusions may be tastefully gift-wrapped for any occasion. Nature knows better; the garden knows better. In its depths, the old is new again and spring is its season of renewal.
Gardening is above all else an experiential undertaking. The longer you stay at it, the more you come to appreciate its complexities and depths. The true gardening community, unlike market demographers in cheap suits, holds in highest regard its elders, those who have had their hands in earth for half a century or more. I’m thinking of many remarkable sexagenarians and octogenarians whose gardens I’ve been privileged to visit. Of all our green-fingered grannies and aunties and mums, and of some ancient gentlemen too.
I don’t know quite why, but so many of them are tiny wee people with impish grins and sprightly energy. Their eyes seem to twinkle with mischief; the lines on their faces are the outlines of smiles. Their minds are sharp as new secateurs, their enthusiasm high and their spirits still willing even though the flesh may have weakened just a titch over time. Make no mistake: these are the children of Pan, the true sprites of spring.
Were I to select a plant to symbolize them, I should choose the winter aconite, Eranthis. These are among the very first flowers to show themselves at our place, earlier than snowdrops or snow crocus. Their bloom is a miniature golden orb held above the frigid soil on a Tudor-style ruff of ornately cut leaves. They grow from small tuberous roots planted shallow. A day or two of sunny weather will coax them into bloom and if the weather turns filthy again, they simply huddle within their enfolding leaves and wait for conditions to improve. They are survivors, tiny but tough as nails and, once established, spread persistently through favourable places in the garden. Their hardy perseverance, their cheerful radiance during times too challenging for most other spring bloomers—these are the very qualities we admire in our gardening veterans.
So, by all means, let’s join the poets in celebrating the warm blood of youth, but do so at the appropriate moment, as during the softer charms of May. For the true spirit of spring, the abiding strength of resurgent earth, I say let’s look to the more tenacious beauty of our elders.
Fiddling on the Roof
“Getting a jump on spring” is a fixation with certain gardeners of unstable temperament. Great lengths are gone to and fantastic technologies applied—grow lamps, heaters, hot frames, cloches and acres of floating row cover—all in the name of cajoling a few scrawny plants out of the earth slightly earlier than nature herself intended. “Forcing” is the term generally applied, suggesting images of horticultural thugs threatening plants with violence if they don’t cooperate.
But serendipity sometimes arranges a less aggressive approach to hastening spring’s arrival—perhaps simply a sheltered niche beneath a south-facing wall where a Christmas rose or snow crocuses bloom while all else remains a dreary smear of late winter.
Thus it was—unexpectedly but gloriously—with the sod roof on our woodshed. One might not normally associate sod roofs with harbingers of spring and, truth to tell, our first stab at sod roofing was more a harbinger of disaster. A stout little timbered building