Why make a garden?
There's one overriding reason to garden. And it's not the economy, though pole beans make a great hedge fund and basil seedlings have a price-to-eatings ratio that Ben Bernanke could only dream about. It's not the exercise either, though a single year of growing anything in Colorado soil will give you a bumper crop of biceps. It's not even the bragging rights you'll earn wresting food from the ground during weather that barely tempts others to venture outside.
It's because from the moment you plant that first seed, you claim a relationship with the planet - and it claims you fiercely in return. The way you see the wheeling sun and stars, the birds, bees, worms and wasps, changes forever. Even the weather shatters into a million pieces of new beauty: frost on borage blossoms, evening light on a swallowtail's wings, the smell of a weed's roots as you pull them from damp soil. The slow, almost silent song of water trickling through a rock face pocked with blooms.
A garden stops you, shuts you up. It turns you under to its own purposes, sows its own gift: the knowledge that we are small and our seasons are brief. But if we harvest generosity and beauty, they will somehow, almost always, be enough.
Susan Clotfelter: (writing for the Denver Post)
For centuries the significance of gardening was that it appealed to some fundamental spiritual need of humans, whose religions traditionally depicted a garden as the ideal abode for mankind on this earth and beyond. The ordered garden was, after all, Everyman's refuge from the terrifying unknown, and certain evils, known and unknown. In a garden one could order a small corner of the world and each spring begin life all over again.
In history, the garden offered sanctuary from the threat of wild nature and escape from barbarian outsiders. This is illustrated by attitudes towards the vast American frontier that held some frightening connotations for many early colonists. New Englander Michael Wigglesworth wrote of it in 1662,
A waste and howling wilderness,
where none inhabited
But hellish fiends, and brutish men
That devils worshipped.
The evils of avarice and the injustices of power politics drove even wealthy North American colonists to seek spiritual refuge in an ordered nature with which they surrounded themselves. This highlights the kind of significance relevant to the 'fundamental question' of 'Why make a garden?' David Cooper's philosophical answer it that it is the significance gardens have for people: for Sir Francis Bacon, say, when judging the garden to be 'the purest of human pleasures', or for the broadcaster Alan Titchmarsh when remarking that gardenÂing is, apart from having children, 'the most rewarding thing in life', or for Roy Strong, former director of two of Britain's national museums, for whom making a garden was "the most important thing he had done with his life?"
Along these lines of thinking, Cooper believes that the garden's significance must be available to people. There has to be something recognisable for them as individuals. This something is a reason for them to make, appreciate, and be attracted to gardens and gardening as they do. Historical, anthropological, and biological significance does not fall into this category of highly personal pleasures, which are exemplified by R S Thomas' poem called 'The Garden';
It is a gesture against the wild,
The ungovernable sea of grass;
A place to remember love in,
To be lonely for a while;
To forget the voices of children
Calling from a locked room;
To substitute for the care
Of one querulous human
Hundreds of dumb needs.
It is the old kingdom of man.
Answering to their names,
Out of the soil the buds come,
The silent detonations
Of power wielded without sin.
In a garden, things come into their true being and the gardener responds by letting them be and so taps into the unique strength of gardens as generators of happiness. They become objects of appreciation because they induce virtues of care, humility and hope through their co dependence with humanity and their seamless blend of culture and ecology. Thereby gardens initiate and support a process of unselfing, which Iris Murdoch describes as the connection of goodness with the attempt to see the 'unself,' to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. She defines, good as a transcendent reality, which means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world virtuously as it really is. Here we have the garden as an epiphany centred on the mysterious ground of the world where humans act by releasing features of the planet to which the gardener must attend to let things come into their true being. This is why Susan Clotfelter says a garden stops you, shuts you up and turns you under to its own purposes.
The happiness of a garden maker is the serenity, peace of mind and satisfaction of living in truth. These are the ingredients of the good life where there is a shift in the cognitive patterns of belief; gardeners stop living a lie and come to repossess their humanity.