Living: Of Apple Trees and Roses

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The first law of gardening is not speed or efficiency but patience. Everything will come in its own time; just as spring follows winter, the first ! crocuses the first thaw. This is not an easy law to learn for people who think that everything can be bought. In the garden, virtually nothing can be bought, except a good shovel and good seeds, and time follows its own imperative. The second law, more subtle but no less important, is the value of proportion, of balance, what the French call mesure. Ideally, any gardener would like to serve nature, to participate and share in her mysteries, but he soon learns that nature as such is a constant state of aggression and destruction. Each plant reseeds itself a hundred times too often, and each garden struggles to become a weed patch. When we first dig into a terrain that we plan to make a garden, we assume the role of philosopher-king. While we learn that we cannot conquer nature, we also learn that we must make decisions of life or death. In a row of unthinned carrots, none ever grows to full size. Weeding is what we call our choices, our caring for what we want to care for, our rule of law.

At the end of Voltaire's Candide, when the hero and heroine have both been brutally mistreated, all their dreams and ideals shattered, Candide declares that the only thing still worth doing is to live in peace and "cultiver notre jardin" (to cultivate our garden). There have been times in recent years when saviors of the world have decried this as a rejection of humanity, a rejection of all one's duties to that humanity. I think not. I think that cultivating a garden is one of the best and happiest things to do in life, and I like to think that Martin Luther thought so too. Let the end of the world take care of itself.