For humility, there is nothing like gardening. Even simple plans rarely go according to plan—nature has other ideas, sprouting weeds right through the illusion that we have control over even a postage stamp of our surroundings. You also spend your time looking at what you’re made of, what you can’t live without, and what you’re destined to turn back into: dirt.
I try to imagine what my relation to dirt would be like in an unfallen world. I would still have come from it, but I wouldn’t be destined to turn back into it. I would be more aware of my dependence on it, but I would not take this dependence as an insult. St. Francis-wise, I would praise Sister Dirt. It can’t be an accident that the Fall of Man, in which man’s pristine humility was replaced with soiled pride, took place in a garden. If the devil could ruin Man’s relation to the garden he tended, the place where he is in closest contact with the earth that sustains his body, there is no human domain or endeavor beyond his grasp.
Despite our damaged relationship with dirt and its fruits, the garden is an eager teacher. Whether we are apt students is another matter. During in my twenty or so years of gardening, I’ve learned a lot about the moral life. Some of those lessons were learned in other arenas of life and reinforced by my experiences in the garden. Others grew directly out of the garden itself. There are many; here are three of them.
Perfectionistic Gardening and Scrupulosity: The perfectionistic gardener wants everything in the garden to be in his control. He knows better than nature: it is nature who ought to conform to his image of the garden. Moreover, he lacks the humility to acknowledge that he does not understand, and in fact has nothing to do with, many of the processes that make the garden what it is. When he learns this lesson, he either reimagines the role of the gardener, or he begins building model airplanes.
No garden will ever accord perfectly to the gardener’s image of perfection. (Even if it did, what are the odds that such an image would be right?) Unlike, say, a bookshelf, which can be imagined, drawn, built, and used indefinitely with little wear and tear, a garden is always changing. In Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder, echoing Newman, says that change is “the only evidence of life.” But change in this world entails both growth and decay—life and death. “Change and decay in all around I see,” the old hymn declares. Shakespeare reminds us that, “everything that grows/ Holds in perfection but a little moment.” And to Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Nature,” apart from the Resurrection, “is a Heraclitean Fire” in which change is constant and terrifyingly rapid.
Few of us, gardeners included, want to be reminded of these truths. Our post-Enlightenment, mechanistic mindset makes us unhappy people and unhappy gardeners. We struggle to come to grips with the fact that, despite the fantastic technological progress of the past few centuries, we are not in control because we cannot make things stop. My new car works assiduously at becoming junk as it sits in the carport. Even in gardens, those places where human endeavor and nature, with its secret power of renewal, meet, we seem to fare little better: today’s tidy and colorful flowerbed will be crispy and brown, or floppy and weed-ridden, in a couple of months. Even in the best cases, the garden will be and look different than we had imagined.
Naturalistic garden designers like Piet Oudolf have helped people see the beauty of natural decay: of dried seed heads, of withered grass, of bare branches. This is a step toward a right understanding of nature’s kind of beauty. There is a flower of wintry beauty in the bud of Spring. Extended to the rest of life, this insight can help us to see the beauty in a worn-out pair of boots, in a gnarled tree trunk, in an aged face, even, perhaps, in suffering.
So maybe perfection in the garden is possible after all, but if so, we must adjust our idea of perfection from something static and predictable to something in flux, something that needs not a tyrant but a caretaker—in a word, a gardener. No matter our skill level, a garden can and should surprise us. Some surprises bring easy delight: the sudden bloom of a wildflower that had been growing invisibly for months. Others—say, a fallen tree—fill us with dismay until we learn to see the good in it: firewood, a free jungle-gym for the kids, a new place to plant sun-loving flowers. We might come to think of ourselves as parents raising our gardens to maturity, a maturity that is only dimly imagined. As with children, there is a constant realigning of imagination and expectation with reality, a “redrawing of the map” as a friend’s dad puts it.
In the moral life, perfectionistic tendencies can lead to scrupulosity, “an unfounded apprehension and consequently unwarranted fear that something is a sin which, as a matter of fact, is not” (Catholic Encyclopedia). Like gardening, sanctification is a process, and here too, change is desirable (and inevitable). But it can also be unpredictable and frightening. An operative conscience is a necessary tool in evaluating moral progress; for some people though, an initially healthy conscience can become overactive. Obsession over one’s conduct leads not to moral perfection but to despair, much as perfectionistic gardening leads to former gardeners.
The scrupulous person believes that everything, including matters that are actually amoral, is—or ought to be—within his control. The despairing man thus postures himself as knowing more than God. Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t mean to criticize anyone who suffers in these ways. Instead, I want to point out that the garden, where one’s will meets natural limitations, can be a modest training ground for combating these tendencies.
Merely because the farmer lacks a PhD in soil chemistry and can’t perform photosynthesis, he shouldn’t decide that he cannot learn how to garden in harmony with nature. If nature can’t be dominated, it doesn’t follow that it can’t, with patience and humility, be cultivated. Similarly, it would be a mistake for someone trying to overcome scrupulosity to conclude that, because the formation of conscience and the cultivation of virtue are difficult, the desire for sanctification is futile. Gardening and moral formation are as worthwhile as they are difficult, and an abandoned garden and moral apathy look much the same: all nettle, briar, and bramble.
Plenitude and Virtue: Of all of Jesus’s parables, the one I think about the most is one that, as far as I know, has no popular title. I’ll call it the Parable of the Swept House, in which a cast-out demon, seeking some place to live, finds its old house (the formerly possessed person) swept clean and invites seven of its brother demons to come along and live there, leaving the possessed person worse off than before. Its an odd parable, only half a parable, really, since the house is a person, but the demons, are, well, demons (though possibly they represent vices). It’s less moving than the Prodigal Son, less intricate than the Sower, and less visually striking than the House Built Upon Sand. But I think about it a lot. It makes the point that if you want to vanquish demons, you’d better replace them with angels; if you want to rid yourself of a vice, you’d better replace it with a virtue. Creating a vacuum isn’t good enough and, in the long run, will be deadly.
It strikes me as maybe the most ecologically instructive of Christ’s parables: if you want to get rid of weeds, it just isn’t good enough to pull weeds. In fact, you will end up with more weeds than you started with. How can that be true? Not only have you provided light and air to weed seeds that were buried, you’ve bared and loosened the soil, providing the perfect nursery for baby demons—I mean weed seeds—to land in. If you really want to keep your garden from being overrun by weeds, you have to fill it with plants that you want, to the point that little of the soil is exposed at all. In such an environment, weeds can’t thrive, and when a few do appear here and there, they are easily exorcised.
I’m not sure whether Christ’s parable taught me about weeds or whether weeds brought the parable home to me. Maybe it doesn’t matter which direction the knowledge flows. Since unfallen human beings would have both virtuous characters and well-tended gardens, redeemed human beings ought to as well.
Related to the medieval Great Chain of Being, that unbroken continuum of beings from God to minerals, is the concept of Plenitude, the thought that every possible rung of the ladder of being is occupied by some creature. Though the Great Chain of Being belongs to the Discarded Image described by C.S. Lewis, Plenitude has a close analogue in contemporary ecology: as more and more ecological niches are identified and described, these niches are found to be occupied. One of the current gardening buzzwords is abundance. It is a good word, and I hope that it is able to resist the tendency of buzzwords to be composted. But I think plenitude is an equally worthy gardening word. It captures perfectly what many contemporary kinds of gardens—from permaculture gardens to naturalistic gardens—seek to create: a garden in which all the functions performed by nature in a healthy ecosystem are being performed by some plant (or animal or fungus) or other.
And wouldn’t plenitude accurately describe a healthy moral ecosystem, in which the cardinal and theological virtues grow together and reinforce one another, their subsidiary virtues filling in all the niches and leaving no room for moral weeds?
Weeds and the Examination of Conscience: There is a wrinkle in all of this: we need to carefully consider what we mean by weeds. There is a wonderful passage in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Helena (a book full of wonderful passages) concerning Macarius, Bishop of Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem). After the Edict of Milan, Macarius senses that Jerusalem—a neglected, suffragan see—might receive its due as the site of the most important events in history. By advocating for the See of Jerusalem, Macarius has aroused the zeal of Helena and Constantine, who not only grant his request, but, with mad speed, excavate Golgotha and the Holy Sepulcher so that the whole site can be enclosed within a magnificent church. Thus, Macarius has inadvertently upset the landscape, both physical and political, of the region, angering local officials who wrongly believe that he acted for personal gain:
When Macarius examined his conscience it was with the method and trained observation of a field naturalist in a later age studying the life of a pond. Less scientific penitents noted merely the few big fish; the squeamish recoiled from the weed and scum, and with closed eyes blurted out an emotional, inaccurate tale of self-reproach. But through all his long life the bishop had refined his knowledge of the soul until each opacity, each microscopic germ had a peculiar significance for him. He knew what was noxious, what was harmless, what was of value. So now, in the great matter of the Holy Sepulcher he gazed through fathoms of limpid sweet water and pronounced himself blameless.
When I first read this passage, I remember feeling overawed by the extent of Macarius’s self-knowledge and the discipline of his conscience, which is neither scrupulous nor presumptuous. In his self-examination there is no undue navel gazing, nor negligence, nor panic. Could I, I wondered, become similarly knowledgeable about my own moral life? Twelve or thirteen years later, I can say confidently that I still don’t know.
But during that time, I have learned to make distinctions of another kind: I can tell good weeds from bad ones. That is, I generally know whether or not a supposed weed will play nice. When I began gardening, I considered all of these uninvited guests unwelcome, especially in a vegetable bed. Since then I’ve learned that obsessively weeding a garden bed is not only back-breaking work, it can also be counterproductive for reasons explained above. Now I only remove the ones that will not live in balance with other plants. Even the bad weeds (provided that they haven’t gone to seed) have a role to play: they can be pulled and left in place as mulch. Which weeds are which will vary from place to place and even garden to garden. Each gardener must practice careful observation and discernment.
We are approaching the idea of plenitude again. Those good weeds left in place fill the void and keep bad weeds out. They also add to the life of the soil with roots that can move water and nutrients and supply food for creatures who will feast on them and then die, further enriching the soil. And they shade the soil, conserving moisture and helping block aggressive turfgrass. If they are long-lasting, they can be chopped back several times a year to produce a free mulch that further reinforces soil richness and moisture. In short, these weeds are anything but weeds.
Anyone who wants to think more carefully about which garden weeds might serve specific purposes should investigate the concept of fruit tree guilds, in which plants placed near fruit trees serve one or more of six functions that benefit the tree. Plants within each category tend to have certain structural features that make them fit for the purpose. Comparing the structures of weeds to the kinds of plants recommended in guilding would be a good starting place. Though I plan and plant guilds, in my experience many supposed weeds can also do their bit.
When I imagine Eden, I see a harmonious blend of trees, herbs, flowers, and vegetables, a quilt work of overlapping guilds and winding paths. Meanwhile, the weeds, the good and the bad, serve one last function, they remind me of Bishop Macarius and urge me to get on with the more difficult task of learning to examine my conscience.
Image Credit: Claude Monet, “The Artist’s Garden in Argenteuil (A Corner of the Garden with Dahlias)” (1873)
