Living: Of Apple Trees and Roses

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I say roses because I once had a passion to create a rose garden. I had a vision of something sheltered and beautiful and serene. I spent several years planting and nourishing these wonderfully named creatures -- Etoile de Hollande, Mister Lincoln, Duchesse de Brabant, Chrysler Imperial, Peace -- in a secluded spot among the oak trees that shadow the southern side of my house. I worked, I weeded, I watered, I fertilized, I pruned, I sprayed, I decaterpillarized, and I fondly admired what I had created (God and I). In 1971 I even wrote a little book, The Rose Garden. But to anyone who asks me now about my roses, I confess that the last relics stand out there under the oaks behind the rhododendrons.

I had committed the original sin of gardening, thinking I could impose my own will on my garden, thinking I could compel roses to grow in the shadows of oak trees. Believe me, you might more usefully invest your time in making water run uphill. Since I loved my oak trees and my roses equally -- and since only a large saw could give the roses their place in the sun -- I decided to let nature take its course, which is a political act. Charles de Gaulle once said that the secret of political success is to foresee what is going to happen and then to support it. That is why my splendid oak trees shed their leaves on the graveyard of my roses.

But that is no reason for sorrow. The wonder of gardening is not what is grown but the process of growing, being able to watch things growing and dying and being reborn. Perhaps the first real pleasure, though, is simply tactile -- the sense, when one bends on one's knees on a warm spring morning, of the vast solid mass under one's hands, the thick, flat rotundity of the earth. Or perhaps the first real pleasure is a vision of possibilities. Three yellow roses might look good here; there's room for some tomatoes over there, or perhaps a row of asters. People planting their first plots tend to be too practical, determined to labor over beans and carrots that the local supermarket provides just as well and far more cheaply (exceptions: peas and raspberries). It is undeniably fun to feed oneself from one's harvest, but remember that gardening is not supposed to be practical. If, on the other hand, you yearn to grow carrots (which do grow like weeds), then plant carrots. Plant whatever tastes good, whatever pleases you. Plant lawn grass. Plant garlic. Plant fig trees.

Remember, in short, that gardening is quite different from farming. The function of farming is to produce crops, food; the function of gardening, if it has one, is to delight the planter. Farming is essentially commerce; it exists for gain. Gardening is essentially art; it exists for itself. While the 20th century has turned farming into agribusiness, gardening rejects most of modernity's most cherished values. "More" and "faster" have little place in the garden, not to mention cost efficiency or the bottom line. It is to escape such things that one began digging.