This summer, while gardening, I have been thinking a lot about gathering and gardening–specifically reflecting on how my experiences in the Alumni House’s English style ornamental flower garden compares with my vegetable garden near Wickiup Hill Outdoor Learning Center in the Iowa countryside. While I am also responsible for two other gardens–my front and back yard at our home in Cedar Rapids and the one-acre landscape at a small Methodist church near our home–the following observations will focus on the Coe and Wickiup gardens. There will be no orderly conclusions. These are just an inconsequential sequence of small sallies of the mind.
• In my home town there were two drug stores on opposite sides of Main Street. The drug store that everyone used was a full-service affair that included a pharmacy, a soda fountain, a magazine rack, school supplies, Mother’s Day gifts, etc. Across the street was a run-down drug store with empty shelves and no customers, only the elderly pharmacist and his wife sitting at one of the old wooden tables with black steel chairs, watching people walk by their store front. The few times I ever entered the store were when I accompanied my mother, who would stop by to chat for a few minutes with these old friends. Prior to her marriage, my mother had been a receptionist and secretary for the town’s physician, and I expect she then had frequent interactions with Dr. Hostetler when he was the only pharmacist in this small farm community. But those pre-war days were over, and now the pharmacist and wife sat in their dusty room, waiting for a few kind people, such as my mother, to come in and reassure them they were still alive.
I mention this memory because it was the image running through my mind a couple of days ago when I was picking green pole beans. With few exceptions, when I am gardening, I am by myself, and given the repetitive nature of many gardening tasks–such as harvesting green beans–the mind is free to reflect and dream and roam the past. What I don’t understand is why this memory. Out of the millions of experiences I’ve had in the past 70+ years, why do I have such a clear image of the Hostetler’s pharmacy in the early 1950s? In many respects, gardening often seems to offer the mind the same freedom as sleeping, inviting memories and the imagination to go hither, thither, and beyond, without any evident rhyme or reason. Even if I am often left confused and curious, these recurrent moments are for me one of the great attractions of gardening–and for some reason, the vegetable garden is the scene where the mind seems most free and unfettered. Perhaps the freedom comes from the fact that I first started working in a vegetable garden almost 70 years ago. The flower garden often feels like alien territory, unsure where I am or what I am doing; in contrast, the rhythms of the vegetable garden almost always feel like second nature.
• I like working alone. Growing up as an only child on a Kansas farm, I spent most of my summer days by myself, playing and working outside the farm house (which was very hot and uncomfortable in the summer months). Although I became an academic and would end up spending many hours each day looking at a computer screen, reading student papers, talking with students, meeting with faculty in committees–despite all those activities that I deeply enjoyed–it was also the case that my teaching and administrative work was often seeking ways to get students (and even faculty) out of the classroom. For many years I taught a class on walking where we spent many class periods walking around in various neighbors close to the campus. I taught a J-Term course on writing in the cold (where we did go outside in a blizzard and write about writing in the cold). I taught Winter Term courses that focused on Atlantic coast beach walks on Tybee Island. I taught various May Term travel writing courses that involved trips not only all over the U.S. but also overseas to England, New Zealand, China, and Inner Mongolia. For ten years I taught a nature writing course at the Wilderness Field Station. I organized many student and faculty off-campus retreats where we were often outdoors. And now, in my retirement, I work 8-10 hours a day, seven days a week, in gardens, rain or shine, trying to help certain plants thrive while attacking those plants and critters and diseases that interfere with that thriving.
Most gardening is killing. From May to October, my most common task in my gardens is killing plants that I don’t want growing where they have chosen to grow. Endless hours each summer on my hands and knees removing unwanted crabgrass and purslane from gravel walkways, pulling up foxtail and equisetum from flower beds, removing maple trees and mustard garlic from my backyard, pulling up pigweed and Peruvian daisies from the vegetable garden. But all of this killing makes possible new life, not only in the now but in the future. This summer I have been depositing “unwanted” vegetation in 17 compost bins, including five at Coe and four at the Wickiup garden. Without the weeds and grass and excess vegetables and dying flower foliage and fallen leaves, no compost. It’s a simple equation, making it easy to say “No” to Round-Up. There’s killing and there’s killing. I prefer the killing that makes a great home for earthworms.
[Further sallies will be posted, once I figure out what I want to say and how to say it.]