Category: Gardening

Metaphysical realism and the first rose

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The first rose to bloom after an unusually harsh winter was ‘Alexander Mackenzie,’ one of the Canadian explorer series of roses. It thrives in Zone 3 and colder. My Zone 5 roses all died.

My car thermometer registered 33 degrees below zero as I crossed the bridge over Post Creek one morning last winter.  When the trees and shrubs began coming out of dormancy this spring, I wasn’t surprised that most of the Zone 5 roses I had planted over the past few years were dead. Not long ago I never planted roses that weren’t at least Zone 4 hardy, because though they might survive a mild winter or two or three, I continued to know that a February that would kill them lay in the not distant future.

I stopped by Caras Nursery in Missoula to see what they had for replacements, and I was surprised that they had almost no roses—they’d sold out. They assured me plenty were on the way. Lots of us had been caught pretending.

Northern gardeners face the constant temptation to try some of the gorgeous plants that thrive just a few hundred miles south, or a couple of thousand feet lower in the mountains. There are many more Zone 5 roses for sale in nurseries here than other roses, because there are so many more stunningly beautiful roses that thrive in more moderate climates, and dreams drive lots of garden purchases. Besides, the authorities tell us the earth is getting warmer. According to many maps, I do now live in Zone 5.

But still, 33 below. Gardening well depends on, and so teaches, metaphysical realism. So do all disciplines that thrive or fail based on occurrences outside our minds.

This is good, because humans flourish by conforming themselves to reality. Much of the brilliance of the Jewish faith is found in the unification of wisdom and righteousness. The Bible is mainly history because it is in seeing clearly what happens that we see things as they are and thus are more able to follow our telos, our purpose, which is to live well.

It is true that we need to see with more than our eyes. Gravity is invisible, though we can see its effect and figure out the rules it imposes on reality. Things fall down is one of the rules of life—also invisible, but discernible to the intellect.

The philosopher Alvin Plantinga quoted Frederick Buechner, who pointed out:

The Bible is not first of all a book of moral truth. I would call it instead a book of truth about the way life is. Those strange old scriptures present life as having been ordered in a certain way, with certain laws as inextricably built into it as the law of gravity is built into the physical universe. When Jesus says that whoever would save his life will lose it and whoever loses his life will save it, surely he is not making a statement about how, morally speaking, life ought to be. Rather, he is making a statement about how life is.

Wisdom, says Plantinga, is a reality-based phenomenon. “The wise accommodate themselves to reality. They go with the flow. They tear along the perforated line. They attempt their harvests in season.” We learn to see the invisible world by recognizing patterns which serve as the rules of life. Treat roses that can’t survive 20 or 30 below as annuals, if you garden in the mountains of Montana. Not enough water falls out of the sky in July and August to keep most plants alive, so figure out how to store water and irrigate. Most plants do better with more sunshine. Never plant violas unless you want them everywhere.

And as a person pays attention to life, his discernment grows. “He notices the difference between tolerance and forgiveness, pleasure and joy, sentimentality and compassion. Where high-profile athletes are concerned, he can tell the difference between celebrities and heroes. He can spot real humility and keep it distinct in his mind from its thinner cousin, unpretentiousness.”

Our main trouble with living well today may be the reality that our institutions have become so vast and so corrupted—by which I mean they no longer serve the telos for which they were created—that they have swapped “success” as they define it for a more primal “living well” which is what we want. It can be hard to notice the swindle, living as we do amid a noisy kaleidoscope simulacrum we have fashioned between us and reality.

People who work mainly inside institutions (where a lot that happens or doesn’t happen is due less to the forces of nature and more to the wills and intrigues of other people) can get quite far with imagining that they control reality through their decisions far more than they do.

I work in both education and medicine, and both have become targets of those who confuse monitoring and control with improvement (because they have begun to dream that announcing rules and issuing protocols is the way forward). They are easily fooled because they are proud, noticing what touches their advancement more than what supports human flourishing. We are cursed by careerists, focused on making their names, letting weeds go to seed everywhere.

I’m happy that so far we have little in the way of large-scale programs to improve our gardens. We thus far have no U.S. Department of Gardens, so I’ve received no memos that apples must now be considered and treated as pears. When the master holds up two fingers but says he is holding up three, and asks how many I see, it is still permissible to say “two.”

Gardens, in this age of ideology, are more likely to be regulated into irrelevance than improved, because they increase the gardener’s self-sufficiency, which is not the direction that excites the masters’ passion. Since gardens are at least implicated in discussions about both water and carbon, there will be ample occasions to organize them into the great tower that is being built.

But today, standing in the gardens, the peonies along the path a bounty of visual and olfactory delight, the finches and chickadees acrobatically alive amid the apple branches, the cumulus piling up overhead in a vastness of the blue beyond that goes forever, one can summon a proper regard for the state. It is merely creature, as dependent as the snail sliming along the path is upon its ability to fit itself into things as they are.

I suppose it’s possible that one could be a good gardener and a bad man, but I suspect that would be an unstable situation, unlikely to continue forever.

The killing frost

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The orchard has few apple blossoms this year. Late frost has done its damage.

The large McIntosh tree by the driveway has very few apple blossoms this year. Most of the trees in the orchard have few or no blossoms. Late frost has done its damage.

Meanwhile, the trees along the creek—ornamental crabs—are in full glory, ethereal pink and radiant red. The warm air flows downhill, so there’s often an invisible river of warm air flowing down the creek bed, just above the water.

Some years the apple trees are heavily flocked with blossoms—mostly white—and the entire place takes on a celestial ambiance for a few days. But in years like this one a killing frost comes after the trees have left dormancy and formed buds. Large orchardists sometimes try remedies such as hiring helicopters to hover over the trees, pushing a layer of warm air down lower, or lighting smudge pots under the trees to generate some heat.

I pass on the helicopters and smoke—I make no money on the crop, and I won’t be hungry even if there is no harvest, so I’d rather not pass my time in a re-creation of Vietnam. Still, even when times are easy we take joy from bounteous harvests.

When the gardens and orchards are producing well, we are flooded with more goodness than we have space to use or store. This year, though, most of the trees have only a dozen or so clusters of blossoms, and some have none at all. What to do? I suppose I could cut down the trees and replace them with something more reliable. I could sell the place and buy a condo full of climate-controlled rooms, populated by potted plants.

Actually, I couldn’t. A single blossom is quite a lot, after all—enough to remind us that the tree is here as primally as we are, a manifestation of being. It’s when things become scarce that we sometimes recognize their worth. A single blossom means the entire vast miracle of fruit that even in hard times will abide. Our best thoughts are but seeing what is here.

In What Is Called Thinking? Heidegger writes:

We stand outside of science. Instead, we stand before a tree in bloom, for example — and the tree stands before us. The tree faces us. The tree and we meet one another, as the tree stands there and we stand face to face with it. As we are in this relation of one to the other and before the other, the tree and we are. This face-to-face meeting is not, then, one of these ‘ideas’ buzzing about in our heads.

Heidegger wants us to awaken from the slumber of ideas that may distance us from existence. In the buzzing in my head, the tree has many aspects. It is part of my ongoing synethesis of scientific understanding, composed of objects and processes, involving vitamins, carbohydrates, and acids. It is part of the complex web of life I try to understand, relating bees hovering at the blossom to finches chirping in the branches to bacteria feeding at the roots. It is a part of my cultural heritage, stretching back to Eve and to the very different garden of the Hesperides, at the northern edge of the world.

And, leaving Heidegger, it is part of the voice of God, a silent music at once present in my mind and beyond my consciousness, the vehicle of a metaphor and somehow, also, the tenor.

Broken eggs

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Mallard-nests_0175ed

A nest of mallard eggs along Mission Creek, where no ducks have nested in the twenty years I’ve lived here. Like other forms of hope, they were fragile.

For years I’ve been planting berries and fruit trees, though I rarely harvest much. It’s a simple way to make the world better—the main payoff for me, beyond the elemental joy of fruit blossoms and plants taking root and unfolding into the sky, is that birds love it here. I watched a ruby-throated hummingbird this Sunday afternoon, sitting perched on a branch, grooming itself. It wasn’t hungry. It was at peace, amid bounty.

I get nostalgic for a world I’ve never seen, reading Lewis and Clark’s descriptions of the vast flocks of waterfowl along the Missouri River, or early descriptions of the enormous bison herds on the northern great plains or the salmon runs on the lower Columbia River between Portland and Astoria. I believe that sort of earthly abundance lies in our future as well as our past—it will be ours again as soon as we learn better how to live.

When a pair of mallards nested on Mission Creek where it flows through our place, I felt delight and surprise. My son had built a small dam to create little pool beside the sauna, to make a cooling dip a bit more graceful, and the mallards had begun frequenting the area. I was looking forward to watching the baby ducks make their way into the world, having a chance to observe them closeup. It seemed possible they would return as adults, since this place would also be “their” place in the world.

While I was working in the yard last week, getting caught up from spending a week in San Francisco, three boys came down the driveway and asked if they could walk through my yard to the creek. My policy is to say yes to such requests, glad to be asked, and to mainly ignore other kids who merely trespass, keeping a wary eye on me. It’s not their fault I own the creek, and I don’t think such resources should be walled off. Children in a well-ordered world will have wild places.

I forgot about them, and spent the next few hours on a lawnmower, turning an overgrown pasture into mulch for the garden. That evening, my son told me he came on the boys after they had removed most of the eggs from the nest—some were broken and they were carrying some. He put the three he salvaged back into the next, but the adult ducks didn’t return.

It’s not the first problem I’ve had with visitors. Usually, it’s small acts of vandalism such as throwing the Adirondack Chairs I leave down along the path for birdwatching into the creek. But I can buy another chair.

When we transgress the order of being we lose some of the richness of being. We cannot usually imagine the barrenness and sparseness of the lives we now live, or the earth we now inhabit, compared to what would be if we better controlled our urges to smash some things, or better honored our quite different instincts to make way for living realities that we did not plan, cannot own, and will not control. Much of the damage is invisible to our preferred mode of seeing, because it can only be seen in absences, such as the baby ducks that do not swim in the pool, the experience of which I cannot purchase.

We live in a world full of absences—millions of bison moving across arid, windswept prairies; millions of salmon surging up free-running rivers to spawn; nearly infinite flocks of wild fowl coming north to nest. Our families are small and fragile, our cities vast and fragile, with small gardens at the edges and in the margins.

Absences, too, contribute to our sense of disorder. A world without gardens might be clean and organized, like an army barracks or a workers’ neighborhood in a socialist regime, but organization is not order. I haven’t seen the boys since the event. I’ve been wondering what I could say to them. It would be nice if they could begin to see a way the world could be that they would like even more than the way it is now, and to think a little about how they could live to make that way real.

The birds are back

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black-capped chickadee

The chickadee wonderfully evokes the spirit of spring, with its lively, acrobatic, curious flitting and darting through the awakening world.

It was a harder winter than we’ve had in recent years, with late February storms well below zero. I’m at something of a “perfect storm” at the moment with work–senior research essays to read, a final deadline for a 166-yearbook to meet, and end of quarter grading to complete–so, no spring clean up and gardening chores. Just a wistful sense of release. For a time, life is easier–its beauty apparent as much to the senses as to the mind.

I’d put out a new bird feeder and sprinkled millet on the ground, impatiently awaiting the return of our neotropical birds. Though others reported robins at their places, here I had seen nothing. Noah came to mind, standing at the bow of the Ark, scanning the sky for any sign of the dove.

It’s not just the cold, dark weather. Our lives are inseparable from the lives of others, and sometimes we mistake hard weather for something more durably wrong with the world, acting as though we can force spring through willful moments of abandon, as if the world will warm if we take off our coats. We move when we need to wait, we look to the horizon when we need to look up, we leave when we need to return,

Hard times never last. The things that abide do so by returning, again and again. Spring is a time for returning.

Chaos and cosmos

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Grace recedes ever so slightly--less light and warmth--and chaos advances. The work of care includes long winter evenings when no labor can be performed.

Grace recedes ever so slightly–less light and warmth–and chaos advances. The work of care includes long winter evenings when no labor can be performed.

In winter, chaos overpowers our feebler efforts at creating cosmos. What defeats our efforts is cold, which is not itself anything. We have a tiny bit less grace, in the form of light and heat, and the garden fails, revealing the insufficiency of our best plans and our diligent labor.

Of course, winter is mild, as withdrawals of grace go. It’s a slight restraint–maybe no more than necessary to get us to contemplate where we are and how things are. Every day the sun returns, albeit more briefly than in June, low in cloud-covered southern sky. The spruce and fir that can survive -80 degrees are not stressed, so green life persists. The snow melts and recedes a bit in those moments above 32 degrees. A fire of dry larch in the basement stove is enough to keep the furnace from kicking on. Most plants are dormant rather than dead, and the annuals have scattered seeds that are several paradigms afield from being dead. It’s a meager time–less light and a subdued palette of pastels mixed with white and gray–a world turned quiet and clear.

In good years, it is no apocalypse–just a time of restraint and caution and respite from endless labor.  Outdoors is inhospitable, it’s true, and we would not survive naked for very long, so we carry fine chunks of wood we split and hauled in autumn from the shed to the stove, we find ample fresh produce at the market to add to a large Sunday pot of stew, and we start long books with the anticipation that there will be time.

After the equinox, our thoughts increasingly turn to the future–fruit trees we will prune in March, the Laburnum tree that might blossom for the first time this May, the best location to plant new mountain laurel shrubs. The real work of gardening is largely imagining–envisioning a potential order, down to the scents and colors, that would be good, that we choose from a plenitude.

The world tilts and turns and the light changes. We watch and let go and take hold. Creation is collaboration with what endures–a basic vocabulary that includes rocks and stars and music and number. If the universe is a theory of evolution, cosmos is a story of care. Creation is not a thing but a place.