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4.5
With some books, it’s learning about new facts or new theories. With others, it’s the chance to think about something. The book gives you an environment — some prompts, some thoughts — to spur your own thinking. That’s what this book was for me.I’ll say upfront that I’m a very specific (make that, limited) type of gardener — urban vegetable gardening, and I’m pretty relaxed about it. It’s a pastime, nothing more. But I enjoy growing vegetables from seeds, harvesting them, eating them, giving away the extras.I found my attitude fit with some if not all of the contributors to this collection of 14 essays on gardening, the culture of gardening, the experience of urban gardening, and the place of gardening in the larger community.I especially identified with Brunhild Bross-Burkhardt’s dismissal of “anal-retentive gardeners,” gardeners who cannot allow a weed to stand. In fact, several of the essays discuss weeds. Why are they weeds? It’s not as if they are a special class of plants in and of themselves. They are weeds because we don’t like them growing where they are growing. Growing someplace else, they might be wildflowers or ground cover . . . Is “man” really “the measure of all things?”With that thought, I especially resonated with Sarah Thelen’s essay, invoking Kant’s categorical imperative, of all things! Kant claims the grounding principle of morality to be respect for others as “ends in themselves” and “never solely as means.” Kant meant to extend the principle only to our behavior towards other “rational beings,” but gardening calls our tended plants (and nature altogether) into the picture. Providing for the garden’s growth while not controlling it respects the garden’s autonomy, its status as an “end in itself” with something akin to a will of its own. You plant and tend, but the plant does the growing.You could think of this as the difference between “agriculture” (in the industrialized sense) and gardening — in the one we control growth and maximize yield, while in the other we plant and care for what we’ve planted as it grows in its own time and own way. Heidegger is also in on this one, with his distinction between technology and “letting Being be.”You never thought we would be talking Kant and Heidegger together with gardening, did you?There’s more. Many of the essays discuss community gardens, especially in the context of Germany (the book was originally written and published in German). The Allmende-Kontor, a Berlin-based citizen-participation organization that addresses urban/nature concerns, climate protection, and others, as well as gardening, produces the quote, “We have to professionalize unprofessionalism.”Gardening in this way of thinking is not to be treated like other “industries,” left to those who have jobs in that industry. It’s something anyone can be involved in, via anything from large home gardens where lot sizes permit it to balcony gardens and even window boxes. Doing so brings us closer to our food, closer to that experience of the autonomy of living, growing things — an experience of “the tension between nature and design” (Deter Wandschneider) and an antidote to alienation and industrialization.Farther on the advocacy side, Annette Holländer raises concerns about modern agricultural methods in which seed diversity is not just diminished but actively opposed through the dominance of seed licensing and the desire to reproduce the same varieties of plants, especially fruits and vegetables, with the same characteristics year over year over year. Where change takes place, it is intentional breeding or hybridization rather than natural adaptation. A full-on challenge to natural autonomy.Also on the advocacy side, Judith Henning gives a brief on “permaculture” — gardening as a cultural and political movement. The spirit of her essay provoked reflections on the community project in my own hometown in Santa Cruz, California, where the Homeless Garden Project has used gardening for more than thirty years as a way not only to employ the homeless and volunteers in growing food, but also to provide job training and a greater sense of involvement and integration between the homeless community and the rest of the city.So, lots of viewpoints, all taking the “unprofessional” gardener as a distinctive and fertile (sorry) perspective. Like I said, it’s a chance to reflect on your own experience of gardening and its place in your life, and maybe in your community as well.
