The Philosophical Gardener
Or, the lessons of dirt
I earn my living sitting at a computer writing code, a job that, since the pandemic, I have conducted from my home in the Dandenong Ranges. Outside my window a little feijoa bush is growing. Further up the hill young citrus, plum, nectarine and peach trees are, at this time of year, putting forth their first buds. My mind, strained by the rigid, implacable logic of code, finds an ease in the sight of them, in the birdsong, the moods of sun and cloud on the hill. Occasionally, bothered by some trouble in my nascent orchard, I will sneak away from my programming duties to attend to the problem, cutting back an errant branch, yanking out a weed, feeding seaweed solution to an ailing sapling. It sometimes takes a powerful act of will to drag my attention away from the seduction of the garden to the bits and bytes it is my daily duty to wrangle.
All this is fairly new for me. Only a few years back I lived in the city, in a cramped townhouse behind a main road, with hardly a tree to be found within a kilometre. I crammed my balconies with pot plants so that I would have something green and alive to look at from my window. Yet it was not enough; my soul whispered to me of hills, and trees, of bracing winds and rain and morning mist. And so, three years ago now, I finally moved here, a three-quarter acre block on a hillside where I have started a veggie patch, filled a courtyard with flowers and fruiting bushes, and planted my small orchard. As many others have found, gardening has proved a profoundly therapeutic pastime.
It has also turned out to be surprisingly fruitful intellectually. The quiet, humble rituals of watering, weeding and planting soothe the mind into a creatively fertile state where ideas easily germinate and grow. I have slowly come to see the garden as a philosophical teacher, instructing me in a new way of being and thinking.
The garden as teacher
The lessons of the garden are especially salient in this age of haste and disembodied intellect. Gardening teaches patience and simple bodily presence. There is no hurrying the slow pace of the plant world, or the year-long turn of seasons. A bare-root peach sapling planted today might not reward you with fruit for years. Impatience is, literally, fruitless, so you learn to lean into the nowness of the days and forget about results. You delight as spring elicits the first pink efflorescence from the sleeping wood. You watch the young tree’s leaves for signs of ill-health, fuss over its soil, sweetening it with a little lime, a little compost from your lovingly tended heap. You carefully keep the throng of weeds at bay. In summer you’re up before the heat sets in with a watering can to wet its thirsty roots.
Then autumn comes, the leaves fall, the tree sleeps again, still little more than a coat hanger of wood. Maybe next year, if you are lucky, or the year after that, you’ll get to enjoy the sight of its first blooms setting into fruit. If everything goes well, in high summer you’ll finally get to pick a home-grown peach, and delight in the first bite through the bitter sherbet fuzz to the burst of juice: fragrant, acid, honeyed. And consumed in a minute.
Or perhaps, instead, the tree will die, despite your best efforts. I’ve had fruit trees gnawed in half by stray deer, crushed by a storm-felled eucalypt, deracinated by my dog, killed by leaf curl fungus, ring-barked by cockatoos, and just mysteriously up and die. There are no guarantees. Such experiences bring one eventually to a different kind of accounting from the one our society of entitlement promotes, according to which the value of an activity is measured by the personal profit it reaps, and loss without compensation is intolerable. In the garden there is no entitlement. You plant seeds, you attend and you tend. All this has value in itself. It gently eases out the aches of mind and heart. While you water, your soul too is being refreshed. While you weed and prune, something inside you is also being cared for.
Gardening also enacts the cycles of death and rebirth again and again, helping to assuage the death anxiety that is endemic to a materialistic and personalistic culture that elevates the ego above all else and reads death as nothing other than catastrophic. Involvement in the garden teaches a very different lesson. Everything is part of a unity that is cyclical and indivisible. Life and growth in the garden are impossible without death and decay. Indeed death is the service of each generation to the next, each plant eventually returning its nutrients to the soil so that the next seed may germinate and be nourished.
It is difficult to be a gardener and not recognise oneself in this cycle, to watch the effects of time on one’s own body and be reminded of the seasons and the cycles one has witnessed in the garden a thousand times. And to think that to lie down in the garden and to rest within it, truly a part of it at last, might not be so terrible after all.
Gardening as therapy
Sue Stuart-Smith’s wonderful book “The Well Gardened Mind” has documented the powerful therapeutic value gardening can have, confirmed in myriad studies which have shown its effectiveness in improving self-esteem, reducing anxiety and depression, treating PTSD, and even preventing recidivism among offenders. How do these benefits come about? In part there is a physiological component: numerous studies have shown how natural settings have positive physiological effects, soothing autonomic arousal and reducing harmful stress hormones such as cortisol. Other benefits seem to flow from inhaling beneficial bacteria in soil. Yet Stuart-Smith makes a powerful case that it is the metaphorical resonances of work in the garden that are central to its therapeutic potency.
The human psyche is fundamentally metaphorical in its functioning. This is evident in our dreams, where symbolic visions of our core predicaments are distilled from the prosaic events of the day — it seems some deep part of the mind is continually parsing experience for its symbolic content. To garden is to participate in a symbolic drama as much as in literal, earthy toil. When seeds germinate and green shoots emerge and put forth flowers, we become psychologically part of a cycle of regeneration and rebirth. Stuart-Smith sees this symbolism as particularly powerful for those devastated by grief or trauma, who have lost the ability to believe in the possibility of transformation or personal redemption. In the garden, a simple ritual of regeneration is re-enacted over and over, and the wounded psyche receives the message: you are part of this regenerative cycle. This life is your life.
Gardening as love
I believe in the sentience of plants. Indeed there is more and more evidence that plants possess senses of a sort, though the mechanisms are not well understood. Some plants can, for example, “hear” and respond to the munching sounds made by caterpillars, and produce protective chemicals in their leaves. Through a similar mechanism they can locate underground water sources by responding to vibrations in the earth. It’s not a mode of consciousness readily grasped by humans, who operate on a completely different time scale. I am sure it contains no notion of an “I” or self, probably nothing that could be called an emotion exactly, but there is some conscious presence there. In his book “The Hidden Life of Trees”, Peter Wohlleben has documented the complex social life of trees, the remarkable pathways of communication and cooperation they exhibit, and he is equally sure of their sentience.
It is, perhaps, the presence of this Other that imbues gardening with its particular joy and mystery, and that can, in certain moments, elevate into the realm of the spiritual. Gardening is healing because gardening is an act of love for other beings, and to give love is also, in some strange way, to receive it. Stuart-Smith records in The Well Gardened Mind how a patient of hers stated that gardening was the only time she felt herself to be truly good. Seeing that one can nurture a plant and help it to grow teaches a simple but powerful lesson: you are capable of goodness.
Gardening is a not only an act of love, but also a metaphor for it, a teacher of how to love. Our society’s notion of love has been distorted by romanticism and sentimentality. It was Eric Fromm, the great German psychiatrist, who, in his 1952 classic The Art of Loving pointed this out and re-visioned love as first and foremost an art and a way of being rather than an emotion. According to Fromm, to see love purely as an emotion is to put the cart before the horse. To fall in love is easy, he says; it is “standing in love” that is hard: continuing to act from a place of love even under the stresses of daily intimacy and life’s vicissitudes.
Fromm’s wisdom in that book led me to my own formulation of love as ‘attending and tending’ — in that order. Attention is the first act of love, a state of concentrated receptivity towards another being that eventually leads to understanding. With understanding comes the possibility of tending, that is to say of meeting the other’s needs, of being a nurturer of the other’s unfolding life. This, essentially, is the meaning of love: to be committed to nurturing the living essence of another. Or indeed of oneself, for the two cannot be separated. To love other beings is to love oneself, and vice versa.
Caring for people is remarkably similar to caring for plants in many respects. Our relationships need seeding, feeding, and weeding just like our garden beds. We must plant and nurture plans and dreams, apply the daily nourishment of affection and care, and weed out the negative interactions and resentments that spring up in every relationship and that, without dedicated attention, can come to strangle everything that is healthy in a relationship.
This is a very different way of looking at love from the romantic view, with its mythic narratives and high drama. It is love expressed in humble acts of kindness rather than grand gestures, love cultivated rather than presented complete by a lightning bolt of fate.
The garden as paradise
Paradise has always been imagined as a garden. The word paradise itself originally means “park” or “enclosure”. In Christian and Jewish theology, the original heaven is the Garden of Eden. In Islam, heaven is Jannah, which also translates as “garden”. Why is heaven so often imagined as a garden and not as, say, a city, or a wilderness?
Perhaps it is because the garden represents a space in between wild nature and the constructed human world, embodying (from the human perspective anyway) the best of both. The garden is a place of mildness, plenty and ease, enclosed against the hazards of the wild, yet filled with nature’s bounty. It is nature shaped and remade to resemble the idyll that our nomadic ancestors must perpetually have sought: a green, gentle, sheltered place promising nourishment, safety and repose.
The most beautiful gardens are neither too wild nor too manicured. They are a living conversation between the human soul and nature in which neither interlocutor dominates. The gardener walks through her garden attending and tending: trimming, watering, feeding, planting, attuned to the ebb and flow of seasons, to the wind, sun and rain. She guides the tendrils of a vine here, prunes back the unruly branches of an apple tree there, rebalances and re-calibrates, but if she is wise she will resist the temptation to try to control too much.
Perhaps this hints at an untold end of the Garden of Eden story. Adam and Eve awaken to knowledge of good and evil and are cast out of the garden. But the call is not for humanity to regain admittance to the lost paradise through atonement for the original sin. Instead it is for us to learn to become gardeners ourselves, to become tenders. To become tender. This is how we remake the garden. Which is the same as saying that the return to paradise comes when Adam and Eve learn to love, where love is not first and foremost the feeling of affection, still less romantic intoxication, but is, rather, the devoted act of caring for beings other than oneself, for life itself.
The need for wild places beyond the province of human intervention remains, of course. Wildernesses must exist beyond the garden wall. Yet imagine if we treated the land that humans do inhabit as a garden, to be treated with the attention and tenderness that a gardener brings. The ugliness of many human environments is a product of over-extension without devotion. An exploitative approach to the environment, in which people seek to extract maximal resources from nature for minimum effort is the antithesis of love, and leaves wastelands in its wake. Drive through any carelessly slapped down outer suburban “growth corridor” and you see the consequences of this approach in the drab, uniform, unloved sprawl.
A philosophy of gardening
I have not thus far spoken of a philosophy of gardening, so much as of the philosophy that gardening has inspired in me, the garden bed of ideas that I’ve tended while tending to plants. But this philosophy should point us back towards a way of gardening too. Gardening as a form of therapy for self and land must be practiced sustainably, with a fundamental respect for all forms of life. Methodologies such as permaculture, regenerative agriculture and the minimalistic approach of Masanobu Fukuoka point the way, and share many commonalities: all emphasise organic methods and a fundamentally relational philopsophy. Introducing a chemical agent to control an infestation treats the pests as an isolated phenomenon, without taking into account either the environmental imbalance which may have given rise to the problem in the first place, or the effects of the pesticide on the entire network of relationships between birds, insects, spiders, plants and fungi that constitute the local ecosystem. As Fukuoka notes, such interventions tend to bring new problems, which require further interventions, in a cascade of damage and remediation which ends up leaving a fragile, denuded ecosystem stripped of biodiversity.
All this stems from a problematic Western philosophy which thinks in terms of isolated things rather than systems of relationships, artificially divides subject from object, and imagines nature as fundamentally composed of inanimate particles of matter. The garden teaches a very different way of thinking, if we’re prepared to listen.
An ontology of relationships
To be a gardener is to be part of a web of a relationships. Nothing stands alone. The seed falls into the earth, the seed becomes the plant, making itself out of sun, wind and water. The plant puts forth flowers. The bees carry the flowers’ pollen. The flowers become fruit. The fruit is eaten by the bird. The bird’s droppings encase the seed as it falls back into the earth. The plant dies, the bird dies, the bee dies, and their bodies fall and are eaten by the worms and passed out again to nourish the seeds as they burgeon into life again. The living become the dead and the dead become the living. What is this web made of, in the end? Atoms, or the relationships themselves?
I no longer believe in “things”. I don’t think you get to the heart of being when you drill down to atoms, or further: into the elusive, paradoxical froth of quarks and mesons. Democritus got it wrong with his atoms. There is no thing of things, upon which all others stand, no “thing” in things at all, but only an unending web of relationships, with each part borrowing its being from its participation in the totality. Democritus sought the foundation of being in the particle: an absolute, eternal and indivisible cornerstone. But that cornerstone only ever existed in the human mind. Quantum physicists have seen this, but steeped in centuries of material thinking rarely reach the Buddhist conclusion: reality is relations and only relations, all the way down.
This idea illuminates my mind as I weed, knees in the dirt. The Buddhists teach that all this — the trees, the soil, the birdsong, the sun in my eyes — is maya, illusion. My skin too, my blood vessels, nerves, brain. The very sentience which reaches out of the strange no-thing-ness at its core, the soul that loves, hopes, and sorrows, is also maya, empty of intrinsic existence. The “thing” behind appearances, Immanuel Kant’s Ding an Sich (thing-in-itself), is a phantom. In some strange way this world is all surface, beautiful surface.
Gardening is the humblest of occupations. It holds little glamour, and its quiet teachings run counter to an Icarus-like culture obsessed with speed, power and transcendence of all limits. Yet these teachings — about the simplicity of caring, about the world as a network of relationships, about regeneration and the oneness of life and death — may be the lessons we most urgently need to learn. Perhaps we… but wait. I will have to put my grand speculations on hold. I have zucchinis in need of harvesting.