1 of 5
|
|
|
|
A giant jalapeño sprouted from a patch of urban dirt next to our patio in Jakarta. There was little to see and less to hope for when my wife rescued this reject seedling—like Christ's mustard seed—from my potted pepper garden and propped it up with a dollop of potting soil. Four inches beneath the dark humus, we both knew, lay a hardpan of red clay that bent our spades and twisted our gardening forks. Two papaya trees in succession had died near this spot, stifled by concrete, impermeable soil, and a hidden drainpipe. Amidst these enemies, surely sheer survival was a miracle to be hoped for—our piquant fantasy salsas would have to get their zing from my pampered and potted jalapeño in the driveway. As the weeks proceeded, however, my own precious plant gradually wilted while its rejected brother thrived, throwing out thick shoots of leaves and reminding me uncomfortably of the parable's mustard tree. Such is gardening.
Like most of my American friends, I did not grow up a gardener. Unlike them, I grew up in God's own garden, a shadowy and solemn rainforest cathedral choired by birds of paradise and guarded by poisonous vines, stink bugs, and death adders. Power chainsaws have desecrated most of the world's rainforest temples during my own short youth, opening earth-wounds upon which farmers or palm oil companies smear the fertilizers and pesticides of agroscience, hoping to scab off fuel or a little food, survival or bio-profits, before the hard red clay puckers into dusty, sterile scars. Though many of my friends and acquaintances in Manila and Jakarta were exposed to third-eye levels of farming chemicals in childhood, few are interested in sacrificing the enticements of quick 'n easy flower boxes for the perilous joy of a garden.
In the midst of a concrete jungle, Tim Stark and Robert Pogue Harrison have been helpful guides as I begin to discover the relationships between my dinner table, my soul, and the soil. Harrison, a professor of Italian literature at Stanford, has written the philosophical Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Stark, a failed freelance writer from New York City, has penned Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer, a juicily written tale of his mad affair with the tomato.
For a still-raw gardener, the particularity of Stark's Lancaster County tomato patch roots Harrison's ethereal speculations about Versailles, Zen gardens, and Boccaccio's Decameron, reminding me that the human condition must be lived amongst my own derelict pots and peppers. Yet without Harrison's breadth of vision, I would have struggled to articulate the philosophical underpinnings of my own half-understood gardening commitment. Along the way, Harrision introduced me to places like the homeless gardens of New York City, careful arrangements of green plastic, teddy bears, cast-off tires, and water that link a hard-luck man or woman to a particular place, opening a small and personal world for the soul that seems to trump considerations of shelter.
Early in the book, Harrison muses convincingly that gardening must prefigure farming just as poetry precedes prose in human history. He suspects that the enchantment of the garden began with the promise of aesthetic or spiritual refuge for our forebears. Because the success of wheat and the development of garlic, say, could not have been surmised ahead of time, perhaps our meditative ancestors cultivated gardens first and foremost for their own delight, preparing communal and ritual spaces for dreaming, thinking, and worshiping.
share this page
RSS Feed
