Why Garden?

It is not nice to garden anywhere.

-Henry Mitchell

Mitchell, who died in 1993, was my favorite garden writer. In The Essential Earthman, he wrote that there are no green thumbs or black thumbs, only gardeners and non-gardeners, and that defiance is what makes gardeners. Ruin, a perpetual theme of gardening (think ice storm, drought, hail and flood) doesn’t stop a gardener from thinking that where there once was a garden it can be again or if there never was, there can be.

But why do we (or some of us) garden as if our lives or our very souls depended on it? Some say that it is a biological imperative – it is in our species’ genes and we are only a few thousand years removed from those first humans who stopped wandering, took a cutting, a root or a seed, poked a stick in the ground and planted it. My dibble (I have two: a wooden and a stainless steel one) is just our recent version of a stick. Others say we are just trying to re-create those first four square, walled, Edenesque gardens of the desert, or that gardening is a compulsion to create some order in our messy, often incomprehensible world.

But I garden for the pure pleasure of grubbing around in the dirt. If I could stack all the pieces of sod that I have dug up to make gardens wherever I have lived in the last 35 years, (23 of them in the same garden) I could probably green roof an entire city. Whether I am digging, planting or weeding, gardening is almost the only time when I am truly present in exactly what I am doing. I am not thinking about what I should have said or done, I am not thinking about what I didn’t do or say, and I am not planning beyond the next patch of weeds. What I am doing is listening smelling, and watching: the changing light, the hum of insects, the way tall grass catches a breeze and dances, the feel of moist loam between my fingertips, the sweet, accidental crunch of a black fly. The danger is when I stop, and staring into the garden, start imagining what it would look like, or what else I could grow if I just…

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Kate Kerivan

June 09