65 bar steady 29.78 0mph E dew-point 64 sunrise 6:11 sunset 8:24 Lughnasa
Waxing Gibbous Corn Moon moonrise 1816 moonset 0130
Rain all night. After a night of moisture the air is cool and the garden looks replenished. The lily bubils I set out in their soil plugs yesterday got a good drenching. Forgot to mention yesterday that I also planted a stem with the bubils on it, apparently this was the old method of regeneration. It makes sense because it’s what the plant intends. After die back the stem and its bubils would fall to the ground and sprout from there.
While looking at the tomatoes yesterday, I had a realization, one you’ve probably made already. When the tomato fruits are not ripe, they blend in with the bushy plant and its leaves. Once they are ripe, that is, ready for distribution by hungry critters, they turn red. Then, they stand out against the green. Mother nature reverses the human traffic light, for her green means stop and red means go.
When I set aside a book review to purchase the book The Brother Gardeners, it made me think about gardening from a different perspective. That is, why does gardening inspire us, over and over again? We do not write books of a philosophical bent about agriculture, at least not many. I can’t recall any, but there must be some. So why does gardening get so much ink; it is an act usually irrelevant to economic fortunes.
Here’s one answer. Gardening is a unique experience for each one who engages it. The topography of your land, its winter and summer extremes, annual rainfall, the microclimates, the amount of work you put in to the soil, your ability to match plants with all these variables, the time you can devote, all these factors plus many more make certain that even the person gardening next door has a different experience than you do.
Within that unique experience though, there is a universal moment, an archetypal moment. Each time we provide support and care to a plant, any plant, we relive a defining event in all human history, the neo-lithic revolution. Somewhere, around 10,000 years ago or so, somebody, probably a woman, noticed that plants grew from seeds. Little by little this led to tending the first gardens, a bulwark against the vagaries of hunting and gathering.
This changed the world.
Gardening, too, remains the most common activity, perhaps after parenting, that gives us the sense of co-creation with the forces of life. In each unique experience, from tending African Violets in a windowsill to tomato plants and corn outside, we have to live on plant time. We wait for the seeds to sprout. We wait for the leaves to grow. We wait for the blooms. We wait for the fruits to set. We wait for the fruit to mature. Though we can, and do, fiddle with these factors most of us allow the plant to lead us.
In this cycle, as old as plant life itself, older than the animals, is the paradigm for our own lives. Thus, when we weed or harvest, prune or feed we know ourselves part of the vitality of mother earth. That’s key, we know ourselves as part, not the whole, not the most important part, only a part.