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INTRODUCTION

It’s a delicious paradox really: that gardening, which may seem from a distance the mildest and most innocuous of activities, can be at heart a revolutionary act. But so it seems to me, as to various guerrilla and renegade gardeners loose upon the landscape. Revolutionary in the sense of precipitating a fundamental alteration of affairs, as well as the overthrow of tyranny. The notion conjures images of wild-eyed gardeners massed in their thousands, brandishing hoes and manure forks as they march up Parliament Hill to oust the scoundrels.

I wish. But, of course, that’s not the gardener’s way. The uprising that begins down among the roots and rhizomes is first of all a transformation of perception. Of how we see the earth, how it feels to our touch, of how showers and breezes and sunshine form the backdrop of our days. We are earthstruck people and that makes all the difference. Seeing the earth for what it is, we are moved to treat it, always, with affectionate attention. We may or may not choose to struggle directly against the forces of uglification and pollution and oppression, but our primary purpose is to go the next step, to help in the work—alongside artists, healers, mystics and others—of creating inspired environments and opportunities for enlightenment.

Up to our gumboots in that process, we come to realize that working with plants in the creation of beauty and the production of food is, in its most highly evolved forms, just what our beleaguered planet needs most urgently: an exercise in harmony. Harmony: the combining of parts, elements or related things, so as to form a consistent and orderly whole, likely to produce an esthetically pleasing effect.

Extracting genetic material from an Arctic flounder and embedding it in the genetic makeup of a strawberry in order to enhance the fruit’s tolerance to cold is not an act of harmony. Consuming forty-five thousand fossil-fuel calories to produce a one-pound steak containing less than a thousand calories is not an act of harmony. Roundup Ready terminator seeds are, at their kernel, tiny packets of profound disharmony.

All of that’s old hat to seasoned gardeners. We have moved beyond identifying and lamenting the problems associated with dominance-driven strategies like genetic engineering and chemical pesticides, not to mention the overarching issue of climate change. And there’s where the true revolution begins: looking instead to develop strategies and solutions based on harmony with the natural world and the human community. That’s our endgame, building communities aligned with nature’s wisdom, places of true beauty, places that provide healthful and abundant food for everyone.

Components of that revolution, although perhaps not reported amid the deluge of mayhem in the daily news, are arising in many places and many people working all over the globe. And the coalescing of those efforts—encompassing farmer activists in Bangladesh and Kenya’s greenbelt tree planters and community-garden participants helping to transform inner-city neighbourhoods and schools—the combining of these parts into a whole, begins to trace the outlines of a sublime and hopeful harmony.

It is a place of brilliant connectivity where we are intertwined within the human community as well as the natural world of which we are a part. Here we encounter a landscape seething with vital energies: trees, stones, springs, soil itself—all are fully alive and animated, possessed of something our ancestors identified as soul. And our inner landscape too is an element of that harmony. Our longings and memories, our dreams and fears, our love for the other, these too flow through us and into the good earth and into the food we harvest and share. All of it—the sowing of seed, the tending of plants, the harvesting of crops —holds the astonishing possibility of transforming our lives and our society.

A tad grandiose, you might be thinking, but no less an authority than Thomas Jefferson said much the same thing two centuries ago: “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.” Revolutionaries of the spirit, that’s what true gardeners are, and if the world’s to become a better place, they shall have some part in its transformation.

The pieces assembled in this little book represent a decade’s worth of reflecting on the unexpected gift I was somehow given: to have the freedom, good health, loving relationship and wherewithal to devote myself, among other adventures, to life in a garden. Early versions of a majority of the selections first appeared in my EarthWords column in GardenWise magazine, and about a dozen others as articles in the Globe and Mail. Freed from the constraints of column inches, most have been expanded and amended. They do not constitute a training manual for transformative gardening, being in places insufficiently solemn, if not outright frivolous. But they do attempt to collectively reflect upon gardening as an active engagement of the human spirit with the natural world.

I am particularly indebted to my current editor and former GardenWise editor, Carol Pope, for her wise guidance over the years and for encouraging me to assemble these pieces into this volume.