The Garden is Dead

Long live the garden

Exactly 15 years ago I announced my resignation from the ministry position I had animated for almost 20 years in order to accept a new calling. This new one felt every bit as compelling and divine as the one that had beckoned me to this position I would shortly depart. Even more surprising than moving from Texas to Iowa, this one was nudging me from the city to the country; from an office to an acreage; from a community of faith to a community of vegetables and fruit trees, chickens and bees. I was leaving in order to join the community of experience and memory who know how to grow food simply and sustainably. I, of course, had neither experience nor memory. Those who knew me couldn’t stop laughing.

Over the ensuing 15 years, however, I learned. I read, I listened, I questioned, I planted. As I mentioned, there were wider endeavors - the fruit trees, the chickens, the prairie, the bees. We were curious, we loved new possibilities. But always the nexus of that work was the garden, a third of an acre plot that anchored the farmstead. Those furrows were where we sent down our taproot. And so it was that Taproot Garden became our home. And our identity. And our work. Sacred work. “By sacred,” Daniel Cooperrider notes in his new book, “I mean that which is most dear, inestimable, unconditional, enlivening, desirous, and holy to life” (Live Each Season as it Passes). “Holy to life” it was.

And so when it came to pass, a few months ago, that we determined the time had come to simplify our lives and narrow the scope of our endeavors, my head was in full alignment while my heart retained some ambivalence. An identity, after all, is not easily left behind. And we had lived at the farm longer than I had lived anywhere. I had become a part of the farm, and it had become part of me.

The transition became even more poignant with the turning of the seasons which, for all those years, had shaped my focus and endeavors. Winter was for resting and browsing seed catalogs. Spring was for seeding in the greenhouse, prepping garden beds, and eventually planting. Summer was for weeding and watering and eventually harvesting through autumn, which gently shifted the focus to cleaning up and closing down and readying for the next cycle. In our new home we were unpacking boxes and hanging pictures and acclimating to a whole new life. But an idea lingered. A seed took root.

Of a garden. Sized for an urban backyard instead of a rural acreage. Compact, lean and constrained; protected and hopefully productive. Capacity, circumscribed. One of our problems at the farmstead was editing. When space is not an issue, you tend to use it. There was a kind of agricultural flabbiness to our work there. It’s what led to perennial over-planting. Like 200 tomato plants, started from seed in the greenhouse. Like 60 feet each of peppers and chard and okra and kale. Like 240 feet of garlic. Just to sample a few. Year after year. The absurdity of it never led to the curtailment of it. It all led to an inventory of freezers and jars and crocks and dehydrators. Here, by contrast, any garden would necessarily be confined. Like painting inside of a frame.

Our “frame” would become a raised bed installation that would sharpen and narrow our imagination. In the cultivational conversation, “what can’t be” would necessarily be an equal voice alongside “what can be.” Dreams and realities would constructively arm-wrestle. There would be possibilities, but limits, as well, of equal force and volume.

And this week it happened. The garden was built, the boxes were filled with soil, the first seeds were pushed in, and the first plants - cold hardy greens - were nestled into place. More will follow in time - a few tomatoes, a few peppers. Some beets and carrots and leeks. It is, after all, Minnesota, and it is yet chilly at night. And already the editing. Evaluating the limited space remaining, and budgeting what can go where. And how many. And what will lose its place altogether. That, too, I think, is holy.

It is a valuable tension, this creative dialogue between push and pull, yes and no. Because every yes implies a no. Every no permits a yes.

The garden isn’t the only field where that applies. If it’s true that every writer needs an editor, and every garden needs priorities, life, itself benefits from an editorial red pen. Perhaps practicing there in the dirt, within the raised bed constraints, will develop a habit.

In the meantime, the garden is enough. The holy fertility. The attention to growth. Focused, edited, framed. It feels like prayer.