I come to the garden

Rev. Katie Stein Sather, March 27, 2005

How many of you remember a particular garden? Maybe it was in literature. Perhaps you had that Secret Garden that Frances Hodgson Burnett described so well etched in your mind well before it made it to the big screen. She wrote:

"It was the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place any one could imagine. The high walls which shut it in were covered with the leafless stems of climbing roses which were so thick that they were matted together. Mary Lennox knew they were roses because she had seen a great many roses in India. All the ground was covered with grass of a wintry brown and out of it grew clumps of bushes which were surely rosebushes if they were alive. There were numbers of standard roses which had so spread their branches that they were like little trees. There were other trees in the garden, and one of the things which made the place look strangest and loveliest was that climbing roses had run all over them and swung down long tendrils which made light swaying curtains, and here and there they had caught at each other or at a far-reaching branch and had crept from one tree to another and made lovely bridges of themselves. There were neither leaves nor roses on them now and Mary did not know whether they were dead or alive, but their thin gray or brown branches and sprays looked like a sort of hazy mantle spreading over everything, walls, and trees, and even brown grass, where they had fallen from their fastenings and run along the ground. It was this hazy tangle from tree to tree which made it all look so mysterious."

Maybe the garden you bring to mind is real. We all know of famous gardens. Google gave me almost 3 million hits when I asked for "famous gardens." They are all around the world, and of course, reflect the climate and landscape of the their particular ecosystem. Let's name some famous gardens. The Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England. The Buchart Gardens. Van Dusen Garden. Central Park in New York City. Where else?

The particular garden we think of may be a personal garden. The one we patrol daily now that spring is arriving to see what's up, what's blooming, or the garden we toiled in as children, perhaps happily, perhaps not so willingly. My mother had what I thought was a huge garden. It had so many tomato plants that we canned tomatoes and tomato juice to last more than the year. A few potatoes. Some green peppers. Lots of peas and green beans and yellow beans, which we processed for the freezer. The sweet corn for the three families—my cousins and my grandparents as well as us—was planted by machine, off in a field somewhere. Yes, acres of corn. At nine, I started my own garden, and quickly decided that if I were going to spend time in a garden, it would be with flowers. No vegetables.

Al will confirm that while I occasionally do have a vegetable or two, I'm not at all serious about them. My flowers are not award winning or even slightly spectacular, but I enjoy working in my flowerbeds. I enjoy learning about what will grow here, and seeing flowers actually appear. I delight in the color and life after a long winter. I'm not alone. Gardens seem to have almost universal appeal.

Our cultural myth says we started in a garden, the Garden of Eden. It was a place where we didn't have to work; food was there for the plucking. It was, in short, Paradise. The desert oasis image of a well-watered and fruitful place set apart from the rest of the wilderness has prevailed in our culture as an ideal.

I can't help but muse on the how a garden differs from wilderness. Primarily, I think, it differs in that, we, the gardeners, have some control over that piece of land. Well, perhaps control is not quite the right word. Nature has a way of throwing something new at gardeners all the time. Perhaps a better word is relationship. Gardeners know their gardens—where the wet spot is, where the sunny spot is—and which plant will grow best in those places. Good gardeners have more than a nodding acquaintance with the individual plants in their care. They know them intimately. The proverbial green thumb is an indicator of someone who cares deeply for their garden, and all that lives within it.

Wilderness on the other hand, by definition, is a place where there are no people, and very little impact from people. I don't know if any such place really exists anymore, but that is the accepted representation. Wilderness is chaotic, uncontrollable. It is not fruitful. There are no rows of vegetables or trees with fruit all ripening at once. Wilderness by definition means an alien place. A place that is not home. We do not usually feel safe in wilderness, at least, not as safe as in a garden. We don't have an intimate relationship with wilderness. Here, you realize, I speak of our European heritage. A person of Native heritage might well understand wilderness differently.

Wilderness has been symbolic of pagan ways and pagan rites. They revered sacred groves of trees as their sanctuaries, so Christians cut them down. Figuratively, wilderness was symbolic of humanity's situation on earth. Chaotic. Untamed.

Once you call a place home, you have a relationship with it. Once you live in it, it cannot be wilderness, by definition. When you get to know a place, especially a place where you grow things, it is no longer alien. When you know a place, it feels safe. If there are threats about, we wall ourselves in, or fence out the hazard. So, gardens are safe places.

It seems to me that gardens are a place where we humans meet wildness. Gardens are our human effort at domesticating the plant world, at manipulating them to further our own ends. It's true, industrial farming does not foster the same kind of intimate relationship between humans and plants. But when I listen to my father's cousin—I think that makes him my second cousin—speak about the native plants, both wetland and dry land, that he grows on his quite large farm, I can't help but see the care he has for them. I know he spends hours on the phone making sure his customers get the right species for the place they have. It is through our gardens that many of us relate to the land, to our bio-region.

Without a garden, we have little reason to notice when the frost comes, or when the rain hasn't come. Without a garden,.we don't need to care about such things.

Perhaps you remember the story of The Secret Garden. Ten year old Mary Lennox, spoiled rotten, comes back from India to live with her uncle in England after the death of her parents. It is through her gardening efforts that she learns to be in relationship. She learns to care about the flowers sprouting up, and the roses greening after winter. She finds that secret garden, and starts right in to pull grass away from the spring bulbs poking through, and digs up the soil and plant seeds. Others help her, and she learns to be grateful for their knowledge and their assistance. Mary learns compassion for the long neglected garden, and for other people, in her pursuit of that Edenic garden.

Many of us might agree with author Richard Smoley writing in Parabola, (Vol 26, No 1, p 43) that Paradise is not a real place but an imagined one, a mythological ideal. That it was never anywhere in particular on earth, but exists only in our minds. Many peoples have such myths. The Greeks believed their Garden of Hesperides was a heavenly realm where the good enjoy a life free from sorrow, having the sun both day and night. The Tibetans have a realm called the Shambhala, a place on the threshold between this reality and another. It is impenetrable to all but the pure-hearted. And there's Avalon of the Arthurian tales, and others.

Smoley sees these tales as our wildest dreams of the best place in the world to live. No longer would there be cycles of feast and famine, but always enough to eat. Our hearts' desire is fulfilled. And so we are always delighted with such abundance. Of course we know that such a place is elusive, never to be found in real life. Yet we dream on, and keep on weeding.

Gardening can mean more than tilling soil and tending plants, too.

May Sarton wrote:

Help us to be always hopeful
gardeners of the spirit
who know that without darkness
nothing comes to birth
as without light
nothing flowers.

This poem expresses a another vision of what a gardener is: a gardener of the spirit. In a garden, we can rest and be tranquil, at least at times. We can focus on our inner lives rather than merely on survival. Mary Lennox was not only the gardener of her own spirit, but worked her green thumb miracle on her sickly cousin Colin, also spoiled rotten. Because they were so alike, like two peas in a pod, she knew how to reach him, to establish relationship, to engender care on his part for others.

We are all challenged by our relationships. Few of us are in such an anti-social place as these two children were initially, but the reality is that we must continually nurture the relationships around us. Boulders of differing values need to be accommodated. Weeds of misunderstandings crop up. Just this morning I received a nice note from an aunt I haven't heard from in quite some time. I feel like a neglected rose bush in my personal garden has been fertilized and tended, resurrected.

Gardens teach us about life, and they are life itself.