Gardeners are ever keen to discuss the “how” of our curious obsession. Tell me you have a new strategy for slugs or any story with compost in the lead and I’m all in. One bonus in joining a community garden with people from everywhere is seeing generosity become the language of communication, not just through extra armloads of zucchini but also in shared tips and tricks, tries and fails. I like to think I add to my personal knowledge bank every growing season with what I do and see but also what I learn from my garden neighbours.
For some reason we spend much less time discussing what may be an even more intriguing feature of the gardening experience: not how to garden but why we do it.
Why spend so much time, energy, money and thought on this quest to convince plants to behave?
You might think the question would come up at the most obvious times. When weevils have turned your veggie plot into a smorgasbord or the weeds you only noticed a few days ago are now waist high. But even then, gardeners aren’t the kind to give up. We know we’ve signed on to a lifetime of challenges, one disappointment after another, perfection eternally out of reach. We don’t despair because we also know the rewards are just as reliable and may be earned as soon as we step outside and pick up a shovel. A bad mood indoors can fester for days but take it outside for garden chores and see how quickly it vanishes.
We garden for countless reasons, perhaps as many as there are gardeners, but some seem general. They come from and continue to inform our history.
Humans have forever lived in deep relations with plants. Our survival as a species has been guided by our ability to immerse into the living world. We grow or gather plants as food, medicine, shelter, tools and more. Our bodies themselves, built by everything we eat, are plant-based, even if that means we eat the animals, birds or fish that eat plants first.
But plants throughout our modern evolution have been about more than just sustenance or utility. This is most evident when it comes to gardening, the practice of tending plants in a defined space.
Ancient Persians developed gardens as walled enclosures, bringing water and plants into spaces they called “paridaeza,” the root of our word “paradise.” Is there any better way to describe that charmed patch of earth you have the good fortune to tend?
Gardens in ancient China were made as sanctuaries. They were opportunities to withdraw from the stresses of urban life into serene moments of contemplation. Later this idea flourished in Japan where Zen monks treated garden design as a way to express the inexpressible. They understood that a garden exists in two places, the site itself and the mind of the visitor. These original Japanese garden designers, called “ishitate-so” or “stone-placing monks,” used materials from nature to create spaces that can evoke profound notions such as interdependence based on emptiness. This key to Buddhist thought holds that all things are empty of solid, separate, permanent existence. Everything, including ourselves, is made “real” only by relationship.
This is one thing to get as a concept but difficult to achieve as a realization, a life journey typically requiring much mental effort through meditation. Zen gardens were created as spaces where the environment itself, the stones, water, trees and plants, as well as the harmony between them, all contribute to the pursuit. One measure of the success of these master works is their longevity. Most artists we admire today will be forgotten along with their art in a matter of years. A few, like Shakespeare or Beethoven, produced art so compelling it can last centuries. In Japan there are gardens more than 700 years old where visitors can experience the same effect the original designers intended.
Zen in the West now gets marketed into everything from soap to resort hotels. Today even in Japan historic Zen temples are more like museums than refuges for enlightenment. But there is one Zen monk keeping the stone-laying tradition alive. Shunmyo Masuno is head of the 450-year-old Kenkoji Temple in Yokohama. He’s also a landscape designer sought by clients worldwide who want his contemporary Zen take on creating garden spaces with meaning.
Masuno’s method calls back to an earlier age when artists and craftsmen poured themselves into their work. He says he begins each new garden project by first meditating on the site. This calms his mind and enables him to “become totally absorbed in the dialogue taking place between the elements.”
The idea, he explains, is to discover the essence of every material in the garden, then place it to its advantage. “Just as every person has his own face and his own character, every tree and every stone is also unique. The question is how to extract the essence of a thing to make it fit properly.” He advises gardeners to “talk” to the stones and plants to hear what they have to say about the right way to be placed. A garden creator must understand the heart or essence of any site they hope to reshape, not simply through data collection but by experiencing it as a whole.
Tying one’s work to the spirit of a place calls for something we’ve largely lost since the Industrial Era, a kinship with all living things. This thinking erases the border between nature and us. With this we can see the parallels between ancient wisdom traditions of the East and Indigenous ways of knowing from Turtle Island. Both can be seen as rooted in ecology, the study of the relationships between living things and their environment. Powatani botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in “Braiding Sweetgrass” of the “honorable harvest,” a set of guidelines based on the notion of plants as kin. Before gathering in the wild, we are to introduce ourselves and ask permission. We never take the first plant we see, that way ensuring we won’t take the last. We offer thanks and a resolve to share. This counter to the capitalist notion of land as resource and plants as products also suggests a deeper relationship with the earth is possible, if one opens to the possibilities of connection. “One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random,” writes Kimmerer. “Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.”
We may not think of it often or try to capture it with words but I believe we garden to feel alive. We know in our hearts we are a part of all things. Sometimes it takes being in the garden to prove it.
If all that isn’t enough, science has recently uncovered another explanation for why many of us find respite in our green growing spaces. Put your bare hands into the soil or breathe deeply while working the ground and you will absorb Mycobacterium vaccae, a soil-derived bacterium. First isolated in Uganda where locals reported the mud seemed to help them recover from sickness, M. vaccae has been clinically tested for properties that appear to boost immunity, reduce stress and increase our production of serotonin, a chemical that helps fight off depression.
More trials are being conducted to look for connections between working with the living soil and reducing asthma, countering inflammation, combatting cancer and improving cognitive function. Results so far seem impressive. They would mean the practice of gardening not only makes us physically better, it makes us feel better at the same time.
Yes, something you knew already and didn’t need lab results to confirm. But it can be comforting to see the list of reasons why we garden get longer. There must be others. Feel free to share yours in the comments below.
Garden tips to be drawn from all this are many. Offhand I can think of three.
- Try groundtruthing. Like the monk Masuno, before creating a garden take the time to truly know it, not just biologically or chemically, but as an experience. A slow breathing exercise, four beats in and six beats out, may ease you through the transition from a stressful normal life to magical garden time.
- Mind the connections. Ecology is a modern study that tells us what Indigenous wisdom holders have always known. Everything is connected, also known as “all my relations.” Use this to help with all kinds of decisions through every stage of the gardening process from planning to overwintering.
- Add life. There are plenty of excellent articles and books on gardening techniques; one day I hope to read them. Meanwhile I prefer the simple route. I know there’s a continuum from weak to strong - monoculture to biodiversity, so I choose whatever will add the most life. This includes work below ground where my default strategy – add more organics – is based on the fact soil is alive.
Submitted by David Tracey. David is writer, designer and community ecologist who works to connect people with nature. You can learn more about his work on his website.
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