While tending to some young lettuce seedlings on a particularly sanguine, sunny spring day, a light intellectual synergy settled into my middle-aged brain -- a synergy that, for whatever reason, stuck. Maybe I’m a lightweight, merely an expedient vehicle for amusing philosophical meditations; I plead guilty. Whatever the reasons, the spirit that poked me that day was bemused by my willingness to lend an ear, and it refused to go away. Each day that I returned to the garden, the same elfin thought interrupted my peaceful communing with the soil. I would order it to depart; it would not budge. I would turn up the music; it sang louder. I would jump in the pool; it could swim better than I. I finally gave up and confronted the Idea:
Idea, if I start writing a book about you, will you leave me alone?
And the Idea agreed. And so I found myself committed to writing this book, lest this Idea torture me for the rest of my garden days. Since that day, the Idea has been my faithful muse, gently offering its simple wisdom in digestible bits, insisting that I run indoors to document each one before it passed through my mind and into the void. Regrettably, a few of the early bits did not survive, and the Idea was not pleased, sometimes even abandoning me for a time, in apparent retribution (which by then had, ironically, emerged as punishment rather than the sweet freedom I sought earlier). But I became a better scribe. In due time I became a nimble bit catcher, an indentured servant to this Idea that captured my consciousness on that fine spring day.
Gardening is more than flowers and vegetables and landscapes; it is a way of thinking about the world. If we can avoid the disinformation, it grounds us, revealing dependable lessons that pay no mind to groupthink, mercantile rabbit trails or empty influencers. It compels us to appreciate the value of simplicity, the beauty of creation, and the wonder of unknowable complexity. It demands respect but wants to be our friend, advisor and confidante.
I realized these things early in life, at some level, long before the stresses of puberty and algebra polluted my consciousness. Humans have an instinct for “fit” – that state of being when an activity or circle of friends or lifestyle seems natural, when decisions seem easy, problems easy to solve, controversies not so important. We know this as children, but many of us spend a lifetime trying to defy this truth, over-complicating our lives with things and ideas that don’t fit very well -- mostly because other people can never know who we are, and instead offer direction based on who they are.
Plants fascinated me. My father, whose skills leaned more toward plumbing than gardening, would find young trees in the woods to transplant to the yard, in lieu of trading hard currency for them at a nursery. A few of those trees survive, five decades later – ironically, gardening and plumbing are not as unrelated as one might surmise. I was transfixed by the idea of trees emerging on their own, patiently waiting to be plucked. It seemed so natural, so miraculous. It fit. And I wanted more.
Like my Idea, gardening can be “lightweight” too. It eases our burdens, it frees our minds to think without baggage. Plants are incredibly complex living organisms, but the process of growing and caring for them is basic. A successful garden is four things: soil, water, sun and timing. If you get those things right, all the complicated ideas and merchandise that Big Gardening wants to send your way matter very little. No, you don’t need to measure off your plot with strings arranged in one-foot squares (although it doesn’t hurt). No, you don’t need to stress over the wisdom du jour about whether to till your soil or leave it alone (both methods work). No, you don’t need to bury a large plastic contraption in the ground to make compost. You don’t need any of those things. All you need is soil, water, sun and timing. And some seeds.
Ah, seeds. Did you know that the watermelon seeds that, as a kid, you casually spit to the ground at picnics are actually miracles of information processing, more sophisticated than the most complex hard drive or cloud storage location? (yes Virginia, real watermelons have seeds…) Inside that watermelon seed is the full instruction set for making a ten-pound watermelon in about a hundred days (which itself will contain a few hundred reasonable facsimiles of those instructions buried securely within). Those instructions include the whole lifecycle – from what to do when moisture enters the hull of the seed, to developing a tiny root and stem (including which direction each should grow), to all the short-term metabolism required to kick start that whole procedure.
From there it knows how to shut down all those early processes and quickly transition to a photosynthetic system – itself an encyclopedia of chemical complexity – all while the root system supplies just what is needed, at exactly the right time, to support the requisite plumbing. It can then go into cruise control for a couple months, somehow knowing that it isn’t time to make any watermelons just yet. Of course, “cruise control” includes all the knowledge needed to build an exquisitely engineered root and stem substructure, magically designed for growing watermelons. And, on cue, somewhere along the way the “I feel like a grown up” gene kicks in and, presto, all the instructions for building a flower activate.
Have you ever tried to build a flower from water, carbon, nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus and some trace minerals? Don’t feel bad. Nobody on earth knows how to make a flower from scratch, let alone one that is precisely engineered to appear at exactly the right time, uniquely equipped to attract insects, able to ensure that the plant can regenerate in roughly the same shape, size and chemical composition next year. But why should a watermelon plant care if it produces a watermelon? Would a pepper not do? Or an eggplant? Somehow it only knows how to make watermelons. And an eggplant plant only knows how to make eggplants.
And of course, at some point that flower gives way, almost in a flash, to a small green berry thing, attached to the plant by a little stem that somehow knows how to bulk up to support what that tiny berry will become in a few short weeks. And the berry has an incredible containment and home defense system that manages to keep itself intact while expanding from a BB to a basketball. And, finally, having reached a certain size through the wonders of chemistry and extraordinary plumbing, and having built a few hundred information bombs nestled safely within, each with an information density far beyond any computer’s, each capable of repeating the whole process anytime in the next few years, the finished watermelon knows that it must transform itself into something appetizing, both for its own good and for the good of everything around it.
All of that know-how is locked within that tiny seed. And, not surprisingly. nobody has the first clue how to build one.
But gardening hides all of that complexity from us. You can be a great gardener without knowing the first thing about complex biochemistry, or how seeds really work. You just need to understand soil, water, sun and timing. Of course, we instinctively know there is more to the story. Part of it indeed is the complexity that nature so magnanimously hides from us. Seeds know how to be seeds, and we need not bother ourselves with the details. Good soil is a complex ecosystem unto itself, which we do well to leave alone, resisting the urge to optimize toward the human will and human distortions of reality. These and other self-balancing systems do much of the heavy lifting for a gardener who understands and respects their roles. But lurking beyond all of those physical, chemical and informational marvels, existing in its own realm of importance, acting as a kind of transformational glue that binds nature’s miracles into something resembling a garden, is a necessary, separate and exclusively human gift. And that gift is wisdom.
Basic schooling teaches us that knowledge and wisdom are not the same thing. Intelligence and wisdom are not the same thing. Knowledge combined with intelligence is still not wisdom. You can add more to the list, like “communication skills” and “generosity” and “courage”. All are wonderful human attributes and abilities, but they will never add up to wisdom. Wisdom is its own thing. This is a book about garden wisdom, which, as the Idea revealed to me from the outset, translates remarkably and consistently to life wisdom. Sure, we will acquire some knowledge about gardening along the way. And we will also have a few laughs (the Idea has a deep and twisted sense of humor, and would accept no less). But you can find a lot more of those kinds of things elsewhere. This is an opportunity to seek the deep-rooted truths, the enduring principles -- the life lessons – that make gardens succeed and human lives prosper.
A few notes, before we embark on the journey: This is not an intellectual treatise. There are no references – I have nothing to prove and no desire to offer any proof. It is a light read that touches on many subjects. Chapters tend to be brief, except for the first, which tells my origin story as a gardener and sets the stage. Please read that first. The rest of the chapters can stand on their own, so feel free to skip around as the spirit leads. Finally, I do not work with a proofreader or editor, so the responsibility for all technical mistakes, grammatical atrocities, spelling embarrassments, awkward constructions, typos, stylistic faux pas, factual errors, excessive spaces after periods, Oxford commas (or lack thereof), split infinitives (hey, this is English, not Latin – so there), dad jokes, and any other shortcomings rests entirely on my shoulders. I hope you can find it within your heart to forgive such failings and simply enjoy the content. For what it’s worth, I find no dishonor in a good dad joke.
I am deeply honored and grateful for whatever time you might spend sharing this space with me. So let’s get started.