The garden is a
savage place. Here in the Piedmont it's spring. But such a strange
spring it is that even in mid-April we were running outside at dusk, arms laden with any sheets not covering mattresses to shield the tender plants against
the freeze. In times of global warming, my daily battle in the garden is how I, middle-aged now, face my fear of the future.
The morning
is bright but cold. As I pull the soaked and dirty sheets off the vegetable garden,
I see that all the tender sprouts have survived. Indeed, the crisp
but moist air seems to have given an added brilliance to the green
buds, the just-opened azalea blossoms, and the fleshy white flowers
of the dogwood. The tomato seedlings appear to have doubled in size.
But with radical global temperature and weather shifts, the battle
for survival and species perpetuation becomes more pitched, more
ferocious. Who knows if we'll be so lucky next April?
Now in
mid-life, I don't want to be a fatalist. I want to have hope, to
believe. Investing in my garden is my most material expression of
hope. But, as my horticultural zone continues a slow creep into the lower and
colder numbers, I find that I am battening down the hatches, thinking
about retraction into a tinier home, a smaller garden. As I watch the
tremulous job market totter and the tech and real estate bubbles
inflate, I look for signs and wonders in May hail.
What will live
will live, I say to myself. What will die will die. That goes for
everything and everyone, trees and people alike. This is the way of
nature, says my husband. Let it be. But human beings have so significantly altered the way of
nature that these bromides are of little comfort to me. These
transitional times seem to signal a scarcer and less comfortable
future for all of us, and they call for practical decision-making. I
try to not let my mind wander in circular hypotheticals like, "What
if the plants cannot adapt to the reality of global warming fast
enough?" Or, "What if the bees die off and pollination
doesn't happen this year?" Or, "What if my husband dies all
of a sudden, like the people in that German plane?" What if?
What would I do? What would happen?
Should continue
to support the unsupportable with bedsheets?
Disaster
thinking comes naturally to me. As the gifted younger child of a brilliant but moody mother, I developed a razor-sharp radar system to protect me
against the dramatic emotional ground shifts in my household. I
developed an uncanny sensitivity to the needs of others and learned
to be like bamboo, bending in the wind. Know what the big animal
needs you to say and do and comply in order to avoid pain. Survival in the plant kingdom or animal kingdom comes
down to the same commandment: adapt or die.
Will the skills
I learned as a child help or hinder me to adapt to global economic
and ecological change? Will my garden adapt with me?
Adaptation causes
its own problems. The self-obliterating empathy I developed in order
to survive my childhood developed into a disconnect between me and my
real feelings that endured well into adulthood. It took working with
a therapist for six years to untangle that mess. The good doctor and
I penetrated the emotional labyrinth in which little
me became lost so many years ago, and together we dragged that little
girl out into the light of the present day, scarred but
functioning. The process was like carefully
unravelling a lovely sweater and then trying to knit it back together again with the same wool: evidence of the destruction remains and the sweater never looks like
new again –- but you can wear it. Innocence is not recoverable, and
you have to be content with that damaged but serviceable sweater that
is your actual life. Everyone does it.
My garden needs
a therapist, too, and I have tried my best to fulfill that role.
Beset by an increasingly dense human population here in the Piedmont, the introduction of invasive plant species, and rapid weather and
temperature shifts, my garden was in a bad state when we bought this
gracious home on its acre of abused soil. The first
two years were mostly occupied with killing invaders and making dirt.
The first day I
went out to survey my domain after we bought this house, the trees seemed to call
to me weakly for help. So I began by ripping english ivy off the bark of a single loblolly pine with my fingernails. “Get help,” my husband said weeks
later as he surveyed the bruises, scratches, mosquito bites and
the third onset of poison ivy rash that covered half my body. I hired
help. And with the might and persistence of six people, including a
remarkable man with a machete named Carlos who was later deported
back to Mexico for his own inability to adapt to the ways of American
women and police, we reclaimed our patch of forest.
We massacred
wisteria, bamboo, English ivy and other invasive species that had colonized
the woods with their stoloniferous highways, strangled
trees and bushes, and had created habitat for voracious rats, voles,
snakes and mosquitos. We kept most of our land's organic waste,
churning it up into mulch instead of putting it out on the corner to
be carted away by the city. The piles of leaves and sticks weren't
pretty, but then therapy rarely is. A couple of winters and a lawn
mower ground the waste down in fine mulch which I deposited into the
stripes of clay and sand as I planted native bushes and flowers,
cooking up a topsoil that could support life again. Tree bark is scarred, a
holly tree trunk still seems to have scoliosis, and a 100-year-old
pine was too far gone to save and had to be cut down. But we've
basically restored our little bit of Piedmont woodland. I want it to
survive after me. But will it?
Human beings do speedy damage to the land that takes years of labor and treasure to
fix. Humans brought non-native invasive plants and put them into this
garden. Humans seek to frack the gas out of the very ground under our
feet without putting anything good back. Humans fight light surface
transit in favor of the almighty automobile. And as I continue to
spray vinegar and salt on the wilting survivors of the wisteria colony,
I am sometimes chased indoors by the percussive onslaught of damaging hail
and Biblical-level flash floods. In light of the bigger picture, my forest
restoration project is like bailing the Titanic with a tea spoon.
But I still do it. Often working silently and alone outside, I get into my "zone" and experience the meditative feeling that gardening is for me. I generate with my hard, dirty labor the
quiet prayer of hope that my garden is. Someday,
someone else will live in this gracious house and, I hope, will care
as much for this tiny patch of forest and garden as I do now. Leaving
the land in good health is my love letter to unknown people living in
an unknown and unknowable future. Working the land, I battle my anxiety about
what may come, and leave my mark. Service to the soil is how I repent for the sins of my species, and help the garden adapt to conditions that are both unjust and unnatural. It is how I have hope.
