Garden Pieces

 Over the covid time, I wrote a couple of pieces inspired by the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden for a parish magazine. These are they.

Garden pieces

 

Peter Shea

April 22, 2022

 

“For having hitherto made many strange variations in the chorale, mixing many outlandish tones in it so that the congregation has become confused thereby.” From a letter from the Church Council of Arnstadt to Johann Sebastian Bach, complaining about his work as music director.

 

Close to opening day, I went on the daily 11 am nature walk through the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden with Susan Wilkins and some of her education staff, looking at early spring plants, especially some “spring ephemerals” that do all their aboveground tricks in a brief period, then die back. It’s a good time for garden tours: new things emerge every day, plants change every day. The birds are back. 

 

Susan has been gardener since 2004. She explained the idea of a garden, and the role of a gardener. Her garden is like a zoo, a collection of Minnesota plants that would never naturally grow in one fifteen acre plot, brought together by decades of Eloise Butler’s work, expanded by later gardeners over a hundred years. Susan has to keep replacing plants that don’t like the garden very well, to keep some on display, and, working the opposite way, to constantly cut out and pull up plants that like the garden too much and keep trying to take over (buckthorn and mustard garlic are among the worst villains, but basswood also has to be watched, given its success in co-opting the squirrels). All this behind-the-scenes work produces an environment where people come and say, “This is just like walking through a natural woods and swamp and meadow, right here in the city.” But Susan knows that every square foot of the place is the product of a hundred years of thoughtful work, knows the garden likely the same way she knows her living room. Yet, for lots of people, the garden is the closest they’ll get to understanding plants and insects and animals and how they all work together. So, as an educator, Susan has the problem like what the  zookeeper in the African animals section has: to use this unnatural space to give people a glimpse of – the diversity of Africa. Susan is giving Minnesotans a glimpse of – the diversity of Minnesota. 

 

I went back for a second tour later in the week (I plan to keep going back) and one question kept insisting itself: why isn’t the world uglier and more ordinary than it is? Buckthorn and basswood are good at taking over. They have a nice, simple reproductive or spreading formula, they’re robust, and their roots go deep. So, why isn’t every natural space that doesn’t have a full-time gardener, with a staff and a budget, just a mass of buckthorn and basswood, off to the horizon? And why aren’t all the towns, everywhere, just strip malls portioned out among Dennys and Arbys and Home Depot? Why aren’t schools just divided-up bully territories, mini-ganglands? Why isn’t literature all James Paterson and Tom Clancy? Why isn’t Christianity just various sizes of mega-church? We’ve been worried about diversity for a long time, with good reason, but it isn’t dead, yet. The anti-diversity principle is quite general; everywhere, odd little things with strange habits are getting shaded out. Yet they persist.

 

There’s a sort of person that’s on the side of buckthorn, so long as it’s OUR buckthorn. Let’s drive out all the other stuff and take over. Then we can establish our own, regulated, sort of diversity.

 

I’m into something different than that.

 

There’s a guy I take inspiration from, Vaughn Kelly. He clean carpets and learns languages, compulsively. He’s got 8 solid ones down, and about 24 he can do something interesting with. School didn’t work out for him, so he doesn’t have any professional use for his talent. He just likes the “splash of happiness” people get when they hear someone speaking their language. He likes that look on people’s faces.

 

I take inspiration also from Dan Everett, who trained as missionary and went out to convert the Piraha, a tribe in Brazil not much visited by westerners. Missionary work for such small tribes is labor intensive: you have to learn the language, produce writing for them, translate the bible, and then get them all to believe the bible. Dan got as far as the translating part, but the Piraha aren’t very interested in abstractions or in the future, so lots of biblical ideas have no Piraha equivalents. All the time he was realizing this, Dan was getting fond of the Piraha – about the happiest and most decent people he’d met. So, eventually, he abandoned Christianity,  his marriage fell apart, and he went on to a distinguished career in linguistics. The point is: although he was sent out to conquer diversity, to rout out a little pocket of individuality in the Brazilian jungle, something made it possible for him to let things be, and, more than that, to take these people seriously, even though in every global game, they are destined to lose.

 

Iris Murdoch put words to the fundamental attitude I’m admiring here: Art and morals are… one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. From “The Sublime and the Good” by Iris Murdoch (echoing Simone Weil, from whom she got central ideas).

 

“The perception of individuals” – There’s so much research work to be done about that. Gardening in all its forms is vital: to maintain spaces for difference and variety and peculiarity. Also, mercifully, not every diverse and vibrant and interesting community needs a gardener, to keep the invasives in their place, to keep replanting the strange and interesting specimens. Sometimes, things work out so that the participants self-limit, or limit each other, and mutually promote an extremely rich world. That’s the story Wes Jackson tells about the natural prairie, in Becoming Native to this Place.

 

So, if we want love -- that is, for Murdoch, a whole bunch of beings who mutually recognize that they are not everything, and are glad about that -- we have to, in the first instance, learn something from gardeners – from those people who keep cutting back the invasives and replanting the strange stuff. But then, also, we have to find those places where individuals are “perceived” and welcomed naturally, regularly, without strain. We need to figure out how that happens. There are clues all over the place: in natural prairie restoration, in the patchwork history of small-scale democracy, in the ecosystems and natural balances established at many biological levels.

 

I think the most dangerous idea right now, the one that will decisively kill us, is the idea that we know what we are doing, that we somehow have a handle on love, already. That idea, which drives science and church apart, has been doing us mischief for a long time. 

 

It goes along with the idea of Jesus as the great Know-It-All, which we’d also be well rid of. 

 

There was a garden…

Peter Shea

October 15, 2022

 

I want to tell a story about trying out a new attitude, over the covid pause, and what came of that.

 

In my grade school and high school, teachers were always starting over from the beginning, as if they expected that we wouldn’t remember last week or last year. (“We probably failed to get you to remember this last year, so we’re going to try again.”) We never got very far. That made me hostile to repetition: I wanted to learn new things, to make progress.

 

I also scorned introductions – the settled lead-ins to geometry or the stock market crash or the castles of Germany. I didn’t want my information pre-chewed, at least if these people were doing the chewing. There’s an old television ad with the punchline: “mother, please, I’d rather do it myself.” I felt that way about learning things. 

 

Then, in April, I had a problem: all the things I wanted to do were under roofs, and I wanted to actually avoid covid, not just gesture at safety, so I went to the safest social thing I could find, the inaugural tour of the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary, just after it opened for the season. 

 

I had, just then, one of THOSE ideas (I’ve had about six, in my life, all causing endless trouble.): what if I go on almost all the tours, through the whole season. What if I listen to the introductory spiel about the founding of the garden (“Eloise was a plucky lady who found a way to work in botany when women were usually excluded”), the special fun facts (“if you touch these seed pods, they explode!”) and the ecological take-aways (“you too can preserve diversity, where your lawn used to be”) – lots of times, noticing how the garden changes, incrementally, how the story changes, maybe, how I change.

 

I had never studied anything incrementally. I’d been going to the garden for thirty years, but only in seasonal spurts. What would I see, if I went every day?

 

It was a big shift: lots of repetition, and lots of introductions.

 

I tried a few visits, got to know the naturalists, and, quite soon, I was watching the naturalists as closely as the plants and birds. The guides started off rehearsing their college botany, got gradually up to speed on a particular season of the garden, then re-tooled, several times, as the garden changed. They developed, as the garden matured. The surface theme of the tours was identifying flowering plants, and sometimes insects and birds, but aps (Seek and Merlin) have taken over the ID-game pretty much, and so the real center of gravity for tours has shifted; they are about attitudes, and noticing things. These people like plants -- and birds and insects. A frog on a cup plant leaf makes their day. They stop to pet the bees. They cheer when the chicory hangs on through the whole season, when some long-gone flower reblooms in the late fall, when the berries look perfectly the way they are supposed to look. I told the head gardener, “I come on these tours so often because I don’t like plants” – meaning, ‘I don’t like plants the way your naturalists like plants.’

 

I sometimes got tired of hearing the same garden-story, over and over. But, the 90^th time I heard something, it changed. I heard different meanings and saw beyond the party line to the questions that weren’t answered yet. My habit, touring the garden before, had been to think my ordinary thoughts with the garden for stage-setting. On a tour, the patter helped me keep focused on things along the path. It was more fun to have someone tell me things, usually, than to just walk. Sometimes, I’d get the guide all to myself, and we could admire our favorite plants.

 

When I was growing in Forest City, my mother maintained several sorts of garden – some for market, some just for fun – in large plots on the farm. I helped out, but I was always impatient. I never saw the point of tracking a plant, day by day, through its growing season. Now, when she isn’t here to explain why that was important, I find myself trying to retrace her project and to understand what she got out of it, why she kept doing gardens, all those years.

 

One thing I have come to: a garden is a summary of how living things work, in this universe, of all the possible universes. It is partly a giant clock: this is how time moves, how one thing succeeds another – and partly a design laboratory: here are lots of ways that different beings solve their basic problems of maintenance and growth and reproduction. And that has a consequence: if you don’t like gardens, you probably don’t like the predicament of being a living thing in this universe, because a garden shows how it goes, how fast it goes, what kinds of possibilities open up for you, in this universe.

 

I am always puzzled by the way that the psalms are so effusively pro-God. I am not up to that, but I do think it is important to give life a chance to show us what it’s up to. It is not ok not to like plants, if one can like plants, because plants show us the basic story of life and maturity and death and renewal without any sentimental frills. At the end of the season, there’s no renewal of baptismal vows, no altar call: one likes the whole thing exactly as much as one does, one wants the story to continue, or not so much. One comes back the next season, or one moves on.

 

The story in Genesis is that humans’ interaction with the source of life begins in a garden, in a tamed piece of nature, and that the first action of humans is to name the various things. This must track the evolutionary account pretty well: after humans got this extra jolt of intelligence and clarity, for thousands of years they became gradually more familiar with some stretch of land, tracking the changes, getting to know the variety of things, and coming to some attitude or other about whether it was, all in all, good. These repeated tours through the same landscape of growth and flourishing and decline are the early stories of human thought – long before most of what we call science.

 

When I was 23, I went to Münster, Germany on a scholarship. The first weeks I was there, in September, I stayed with Ernst Niesert and his wife, Marianne. Ernst was the age I am now, about 70. He had lived in Münster much of his life, taking the same walk through the little cemetery, along the green belt circling the town, to the market square. Every market day while I was there, he went to the square to buy flowers for Marianne. I remember him saying, “Walking through the fallen leaves makes me sad because it reminds me that I am going to die before long.” Then, it seemed like an ordinary sentiment; hundreds of poems say that. But it is, I now think, what every conscious person bumps up against: the same universal way things go that is obvious in the gardens and the forests is obvious in our own bodies, only on a slightly different clock – slower than daisies, faster than oaks. And there’s a question you don’t avoid whatever religion or non-religion you adopt: how ok are you with all that? Does this venture of life in time seem beautiful, or stupid?

 

I spend a lot of time these days thinking about basic education, what one generation can offer the next without foreclosing their options or ignoring their obvious freedom. We can’t save our kids. We aren’t likely to be able to hold them in our own community, or protect them from scandal as they watch adults behaving very badly. But – how about this: we give them a reasonably clean experience of how the universe tends, how it keeps wanting to do things, so they have a clean and a clear choice.