When I was in graduate school I spent an entire semester investigating the idea of urban gardening. At that point Alicia and I had planted a few gardens, but I was really just dabbling in planting seeds and seeing what would grow. It took me an entire semester’s of thinking and experimenting to arrive at the notion that our conception of “nature” as city people is a complicated bag of paradoxes. One of my main conclusions is that nature must be controlled to be pleasurable. Nature in an urban setting left to its own devices will not result in the grandeur of an unspoiled wilderness.
Second Nature by Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan, in his first book from 1991, wrote the book that I should have read first while I was working on that project. It would have saved me a lot of trouble and thinking. His thoughts on the relationship between people and nature, people and plants, and people and land helped me see what it is that I am doing with this “project”.
When we first bought the house a couple years ago, we immediately did some terracing and reworking of the front yard so we could use the space more efficiently (i.e. make more garden beds). At one point I got tired of all the weeds I was removing and decided to leave a “natural garden” – just let whatever was growing, a mix of poppies and weeds, keep on growing. It only lasted a week or two, at which point the entire thing looked terrible, and I gave up on “nature”. Pollan talks about the exact same thing in his book, where he tried to let native plants grow into one of his flower beds, temporarily putting aside the idea that anything you haven’t planted is a weed. He lasted a little bit longer, but ended up realizing that the weeds had completely taken over and eliminated what little order he had set out to establish.
I still let sunflowers pop up wherever they will, and there are these stunning red poppies that show up everywhere in the late spring, but besides that I keep things pretty tame around here. The way Pollan writes about all the functions of our relationship to a garden, from the productivity of vegetables to the beauty of a composed set of plants, I began to realize that plants are one of the primary metaphors I’m looking at my life through these days. In many ways the entire project is out of my control, dependent on so many factors that have nothing do do with my efforts. On the other hand, the deep satisfaction that comes from seeing what happens when I put in a little bit of sweat and set the conditions right for something to grow… it always gives me hope that life isn’t necessarily a zero-sum equation. That in fact you might be able to reap far more from it than you deserve based on what you’ve contributed.
There is a story in the book about a scientist who planted a tree in 100 pounds of dirt, and only watered it for years. At a certain point, after the tree had grown to a significant size, the tree was removed and weighed and the dirt was also weighed. Only 4 oz had been lost from the dirt, and from that, a 120 lb. plant had grown. Water, sun, time. Somehow, these base elements produce far more than they should, year after year, and I in turn am fed and watered in watching it happen.
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