10. Let's Get Small
Life Lessons of a Backyard Gardener
NOTE: This is Chapter 10 of my online book, which is a work in progress. Enjoy.
The gardener’s world is framed by choice. Though bound at a glance by climate and geography, all gardens cast a spell of creative liberty upon their masters, luring them into carnal floral indulgences via the siren song of the seed packet. In a fiendish system of positive reinforcement, seed hucksters hone their craft to Condé Nast city slicker chic standards, perfecting folksy, honest-farmer illusions that tempt gardeners’ souls. And I suppose this is only fitting, as seeds are literally the sexiest products you can buy. For their part, gardeners cannot resist the visual pheromones. And so this ritual dance of vendor and gardener develops the plumage and complexity of exotic tropical birds, ensuring the survival of a most curious ecosystem, if one that mostly produces the doom and failure of self-delusion.
Perhaps yearning for lost simplicity, or called by an organic epiphany with a tech-addicted family, the casual seed gawker is seduced by this conspiracy of soily sincerity and mercantile guile. It’s an unlikely marriage, of the sort once forged by Orrin Hatch and Teddy Kennedy -- philosophical and cultural opposites, perhaps finding initial kinship in necessity, but then discovering comfort in paradox and shared royalty. But such comfort breeds peril, both politically and agriculturally. Simple aspirations seem harmless at conception -- familial connection, the primitive pleasure of a vine-ripened August tomato, or maybe just some fresh cilantro – all wholesome and harmless, benign as June freckles on a young girl’s cheek. Yet, as June freckles can harbor menace in the September of our years, early garden aspirations can transubstantiate into the ugly realm of the Big Picture Thinker, a Platonic form whose malignant perfection is found not in a higher realm but in plush corner offices with windows.
Big Picture Thinking festers at the root of failed gardens, failed businesses and failed civilizations, incubated in the nexus of ignorance and arrogance. The truly infamous grand thinkers – successful in their own minds, their own career paths, their own philosophies – catch the disease early. They toil in their first entry-level professional appointments, or with their first philosophy book. They quickly assess the unseemly state of affairs in the workplace or the human condition, then begin to devise remedies based on their incomplete and superficial observations. Nascent big picture thinkers learn to see only the future, a future where their simplified ideals will thrive, one day to reveal the genius of their Creator.
Those insulated within this playground of pseudo-educated arrogance fancy themselves kingly creators of context. My idea is a superset of yours. If yours envelops mine, well, then, I will dream up an even bigger picture! In this arms race of ideological scale, you must interpret things within the framework that I provide. Nothing less will do.
Like all things economic, gardens must genuflect to the rules of scarcity and survival. Gardens must thrive within the constraints of space and time; they know nothing of head-strong idealism. The indignant perish, much like civilizations that begin to practice their own mythology. A backyard garden has only so much space, and a backyard gardener has only so much time. But Big Picture Thinking leads the confident novice to believe otherwise, to know that more is better. The Big Picture gardener sees only that reality where a 50’ by 25’ plot of grass suddenly bursts with crops and colors. Big Picture Thinking can bring this into existence through the power of advanced will and observation alone. Soil prep, planting, sequencing, timing, replenishment, weeding – all details for the small-minded in less sophisticated realities.
And so, with the siren song blaring loudly in his head, the Big Picture gardener marches off to the local big box store, fully confident of his grand ideas without a plan. He buys dozens of seed packets, packages of bulbs with fabulous cardboard floral displays, stakes, fencing, chemical-infused bags of soil, seed starting kits, “plant food”, hoses, timers, and whatever else seems part of a respectable Big Picture garden.
Most Big Picture gardens -- like most Big Picture anythings -- fail. Like the mustard seed of parable fame, success in most of life’s challenges starts very small, and proceeds in layers. Moisture enters the seed, the hull splits, and a simple root descends. If the seed cannot succeed at this, it may not proceed. Then a pair of leaves appears – but not real leaves yet. Always the empiricist, Mother Nature tests and feeds the system with prototype leaves first, as the root system begins to develop. With just the right sunlight, warmth and moisture, the plant can begin the journey to its adult shape.
The plant sees no Big Picture, and harbors no false assumptions about perfect pH, ideal filtered light, and excellent drainage. There is a blueprint of course -- the DNA inside the seed, exquisitely refined to handle contingencies. But, at any given time, most of the genius locked within the DNA hibernates, hopelessly impotent, awaiting its moment in the sun, while sibling instructions execute the details of the here and now. That here and now – what the seedling does – controls survival to the next step, without which there can be no step after that. The young plant must succeed in the real world, overcoming real obstacles and real inefficiencies, most of them painfully mundane. It does this by mastering baby steps, skipping none on the way to a full sprint. Without the baby steps, the attentiveness to detail, and the humility to recognize their core value, the Big Picture is just the foolish, unattainable ideal of a self-conceived legend. The successful, long-term garden almost always starts humbly, perhaps with a few herbs, or a box full of lettuce, or a couple tomato plants. The novice must master basic skills, understand the subtleties of water, soil and sun, and synchronize to the rhythms of the annual cycle within a microclimate. Without these skills and insights, there is no Big Picture.
I was a software developer for a long time. It has taken decades and billions of dollars of wasted effort for the software profession to understand the perils of Big Picture Thinking. Software requires perfection. Perfect syntax. Perfect logic. Perfect synergy between parts of a system. Strategy does indeed matter, but it is an empty shell without the logistics that give it life. For years, companies led by Big Egos harboring Big Pictures tried to merge and acquire and grow, assuming that all the gears under the hood — the technology — could be made to mesh. In the end, they were grafting tomato plants to apple trees. Tomatoes might be called “love apples”, but it just doesn’t work.
In some cultures throughout history, people examined hands to parse royalty from subject, overseer from laborer. It is an empty, backward paradigm, steeped in pre-enlightened notions of power, rights and entitlement. To paraphrase a famous comedy, “Who elected you king? A farcical aquatic ceremony is no basis for a system of government!” Indeed, nobody elects kings. Kings, like all self-appointed Big Picture Thinkers, tend to emerge and self-perpetuate through the engine of unsubstantiated self-importance. In the real world, I prefer the counsel of the unassuming serf with the weathered hands, the person who understands that the edifice of success ultimately emerges one brick at a time, not through the magical incantations of large-minded fools. If you want to grow a garden, seek those folks. It’s not a bad way to grow a life either.
Sweat the details -- they’re what’s real.