Why gardening is my religion

Mediations on the art as I build a garden fence

Tula enjoying a tomato. Photo by Joshua Doležal.

A favorite prompt for teachers in MFA programs is “Why I Write.” You’d think that writers would know the answer intuitively, particularly if they chose a graduate degree in writing, but sometimes our lives unfold and we find ourselves caught up in the what and the how, and it’s helpful to interrogate the purpose driving us. A solid “why” is an anchor when writing is difficult and a useful reference point in a world that blitzes us with the what, what, what of everyone’s private lives. 

I’ve been doing that lately with my garden project. Here’s the mowed plot. Here are the finished fenceposts. But it takes more words than a Facebook update to get at the reasons why gardening means so much to me. 

One of my favorite courses to teach used to be the first-year seminar. At the end of our opening unit, I’d ask students to meet me in the college garden, where I’d give them each two notecards. On one card they brainstormed four goals for the next four years that they were comfortable sharing publicly; on the other, they listed four obstacles to those goals. We’d go around the circle and share our goals and obstacles — I’d add my own — then we’d crumple the obstacles and burn them in an old enamel pot. A little kitschy, but there was some pedagogy behind it. Once our pile of notecards had burned down, I’d dump the ash on the compost pile and start our walk through the garden.

The college garden was a labor of love begun by my friend Louise and later stewarded by her husband, Jim. The plot was only half an acre, but when it was well tended it could yield more than a thousand pounds of produce in a summer. Most years, the harvest went to the Food Bank, but sometimes we convinced Dining Services to serve it. I enjoyed bringing students there in late August when there were still tomatoes and raspberries to sample. Later, during our sustainability unit, we’d make salsa together and talk about some of the myths about homegrown food. 

Canning salsa and hot sauce with students. Photos by Elizabeth Sheldon.

Students were typically surprised to learn that canning in bulk didn’t take more time, all told, than several separate trips to the supermarket for the same items. It might take a few hours to snap, pack, and pressure cook seven quarts of green beans, but once those jars were on the shelf, they were faster than fast food. Canning is an excellent way to salvage produce with cosmetic damage, like beets that have been nibbled by field mice. And growing food locally can go a long way to combat one of the absurdities in American life: that it takes about 7 calories of fossil fuel to produce 1 calorie of food. Not to mention the enormous energy costs associated with transportation and storage of produce. Barbara Kingsolver cites an eye-popping statistic in this Orion essay: “Transporting a single calorie of a perishable fresh fruit from California to New York takes about eighty-seven calories worth of fuel. That’s as efficient as driving from Philadelphia to Annapolis and back in order to walk three miles on a treadmill in a Maryland gym.” 

Sustainability pedagogy can get a little preachy, but I wasn’t kidding when I told my students that gardening was one of the closest things to religion in my life. In fact, I’d often recite this classic from Emily Dickinson during our first visit to the garden.

From Poetry Foundation

The last two lines say it all. As a humanist, I believe the world we have is all there is and that there are few things more sacred than harvesting food you have grown. I don’t garden to save money or time. I do it for the flavor, for the stories of heirloom vegetables, for an ongoing conversation with the place where I live. I’m even sentimental enough to have proposed our favorite tomato as our middle daughter’s first name. It’s always a great day when we get to taste the first Tula tomato.

My parents were influenced by the Back to the Land movement in the 1960s, and we lived a subsistence lifestyle with shelves packed with canned goods and freezers full of elk and venison. I spent hundreds of hours watering and pulling weeds, and I can say with confidence that I came back to gardening in adulthood despite those chores. It wasn’t chewing on a stem of grass while moving the hose from row to row that hooked me. It was the recognition of belonging when I’d feed myself straight from the raspberry bush or smuggle a few handfuls of sugar snap peas from the vines. Eating from a garden is like drinking from a mountain stream: as close to the source as you can get. It was a gift to grow up with that knowledge.

I was trying to get that feeling back when I planted my first garden. I had been living in Iowa for five years, working toward tenure, and every spring after turning in grades I hit the road west. They have fridge magnets in Montana that say “9 months winter, 3 months relatives.” My Iowa version would have said “9 months work, 3 months freedom.” It was a miniature version of how many Americans approach adulthood, grinding out the years to retirement and then — finally — living how they’ve always wanted to live. The academic year was my job, and I counted the summers I spent in the Idaho wilderness as my real life. 

That cycle was broken when I received a jury duty summons and had to stay in Iowa for the entire month of July. Planting a garden felt like a way to keep myself busy, but I think it was also an attempt to feel connected to home. I’d been able to revive that connection in the flesh every summer since I’d left Montana for college, and I even told friends without much irony that I’d been living for more than a decade in exile. Spading up a garden plot and sowing my first row of seeds brought back a flood of memories. But as the summer passed, I began to see my garden less as a reenactment of childhood and more as a ceremonial way to embrace the place I lived. 

Ever since then, planting a garden has been a ritual of homemaking. I don’t belong to the place and it does not belong to me until the beds are dug and planted. As I build my garden fence, I think about how many ancestors have done the same. My parents bought a twenty-acre plot on a mountainside and cleared more than an acre for gardens and orchards. My father did much of that work by hand in his old bell-bottom jeans, which he’d continue to wear for the next twenty years. Before him there were homesteads in Nebraska and North Dakota, and those grandfathers used methods they’d learned from their own forebears in Sweden, Moravia, England, and Germany.

I have broken ground for four gardens, only to move away, leaving my apple, peach, and plum trees to others. I’m hoping to tend this patch of ground for many years to come, but I have no illusions of permanence. As Alexandra Bergson says in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, “We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while.” Cather got the first part of that right, but I’d change “own” to “borrow.” The Iroquois famously base their decisions on the Seventh Generation Principle, imagining the impact on their descendants seven generations removed. Like them, I make no claim to owning the land I will plant. My garden will open a conversation with the place as long as I live here. If I’m lucky, that could be another thirty years.

The garden plot and fenceposts in various stages of construction. Photos by Joshua Doležal.

I come from several lines of restless settlers, and it is a melancholy thought to know that my children will likely sell our property when my wife and I are gone, just as the children of the previous owner sold it to us. Few of my ancestors since the late 1800s lived on family land. All that sod breaking, fence building, and plowing for no more than a generation or two. With that in mind, my overriding purpose is to do no harm. To leave the soil a little better than I found it. To plant flowering things for bees and butterflies. To give as much as I take. And to meditate on lines from Edwin Arlington Robinson that I found by way of Aldo Leopold’s “The Land Ethic”:

Whether you will or not 

You are a King,...for you are one 

Of the time-tested few that leave the world, 

When they are gone, not the same place it was. 

Mark what you leave. 

Yet I cannot surrender to melancholy in the garden. I plan to finish my fence before the snow flies, and I’m looking forward to gazing at it through the winter while I browse my seed catalogs. Gardeners are realists, but if they err it is on the side of hopefulness. A garden supercharges springtime with possibility. You never know when it’s going to be a banner year for butternut squash or when the cucumbers are going to crank out more gherkins than you thought possible from a handful of seeds. A walk through the garden nearly always turns up a surprise — the first potato blossoms or garlic scapes — and typically there is something to sample, even if it’s just a burst of volunteer chives. 

My children have a special relationship with garden plants, as if they trigger a buried hunter-gatherer impulse. My son would never touch kale in a soup or salad, but in the garden he’ll pick himself a leaf of Redbor and give it an exploratory nibble. Everyone loves the search for buried treasure that potato digging brings or the fanfare of pulling multicolored carrots from the ground. 

Linden near a forest of beans. Photo by Joshua Doležal.

Participation in the garden is strictly voluntary for my kids. It’s true that I often coax them to join me and that I hope to be planting memories that they’ll recognize as valuable later on. Few things make me happier than watching my kids noshing on cherry tomatoes straight from the vine or sneaking a cucumber from the trellis before I can pickle it. Maybe when they are tired of packing up apartments or moving from home to home, they’ll remember my garden as one way to recreate that feeling from childhood. A way to stay put for a decade or two. But if they never grow a garden themselves, I’d like them to think of it as something fun they did with Dad, not as the place I sent them to pull weeds.