IN THE GARDEN

Anna Maria Johnson

Iam far from an expert gardener. I am, in all honesty, a fairly lousy gardener. But I do spend a great deal of time working at it. I am an idealistic gardener. If my garden fails to measure up to the orderly, thriving, weed-free, well-mulched cornucopia of abundance in my head, there is a good lesson in that somewhere.

These are my five reasons for gardening.

I garden because it is my favorite form of peaceful protest. It is my response to all that is ugly in the world, all that is cheap and easy and manufactured and gas-guzzling, all that comes wrapped up in a box after being shipped 5,000 miles across the planet, and all that causes cancer and social injustice and oppression.

I am powerless to end these bad things on a global scale, or even on a local scale. But when I set my shovel down on my small plot of earth, I declare, "In God’s name, not here." I claim these few square feet of my back yard for the kingdom of God. "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." I smell this earth, I allow it to collect under my nails, discoloring my hands. It is my prayer for the will of God to be done, right here under my nails. Thy will be done on earth, in the earth, through the earth.

I garden because it keeps me hoping. My mom used to call me a "hopeless romantic," and my husband might describe me as exorbitantly idealistic. I cannot deny that it is a function of my personality, and some people would say it is a beautiful thing to be this way. It can also be very disappointing when reality doesn’t match up to my expectations.

Gardening, however, delivers on its promises. Last summer our white-seeded Tarahumara sunflowers reached mythological heights. During the autumn we feasted on butternut squashes and late-harvested vegetables, and in winter my 15 quarts of salsa nourished us and warmed our tongues.

I garden because it keeps me grounded—literally and spiritually. There is nothing like good, hard, physical work with our hands to bring comfort in times of disappointment. I have found that when I am angry, it can be used as a force for good. My anger gives my measly 102-pound frame an extra punch as I throw my weight upon my shovel and churn up the dirt.

Digging is hard. But after a good couple of hours with my shovel, now dirty, sweat-soaked, and stinky, I feel cleansed. Catharsis. Afterward, I ache with a good kind of ache.

The Genesis story is powerful in the way it reveals human beings and our connection to the earth, to gardening. Adam and Eve were given a beautiful home in a garden, and we are told that they walked there with God in the cool of the evening. In a garden, remnants still linger of that human-divine relationship, of right relationship, of care-taking.

During a severe time of wilderness in my life, some friends and I were not attending regular church. We met sometimes on Sunday mornings to cultivate a shared garden. We called it "the garden church." There was something profound about those work celebrations, those active prayers, those times of productive gathering of the community of believers.

The three-year-old son of our friends would run up and down the raised beds, naked, laughing. One time he peed in the garden and proudly proclaimed to his dad, "Look! I am watering the garden." I suppose there are all manner of spiritual parallels to this boy’s action, but I will leave that to you, dear reader, to mull over. The Garden Church was a spiritual place, a place of community and of communion with the created and the Creator.

I garden because this is good in itself. I grow weary of feeling guilty about things, tired of saying no—but organic gardening is not simply a negative action of not buying pesticides, not purchasing plastic-wrapped produce, not supporting agri-business and factory farming. Rather, it is a positive act. To grow a garden is to marvel at creation.

I drop tiny, brown, wrinkled things in the ground. Every time, I feel surprised when something eventually sprouts up. I get so excited that I call my children and point to the tiny little dicot leaves, "Look! our food is growing." And we stoop down to admire its tiny new life, its persistence at pushing up through the brown earth, its stamina, its goodness.

My friend Molly, who lived in Afghanistan for many years and now lives in Jerusalem, once told me she valued my flower garden. I was humbled because I had felt that I was unable to make an impact for good on earth, instead spending all my time at home caring for babies and flowers while she was translating Farsi for the UN and working for peace. She told me that my roses and lilies were doing as much good as the work she was doing on the other side of the earth. I chose to believe her.

Most important, I garden for love of the earth and those it nourishes. I love the act of gardening. I enjoy digging. I like the smell of rich, dark dirt. I get a kick out of compost; nothing is wasted—it just gets re-allocated, renewed, regenerated. No death is so great that it cannot serve yet another life, another body. I am forgiven for letting those vegetables sit in the fridge too long until they rotted.

Compost is the perfect object lesson for God’s words, "Behold, I make all things new," and a good illustration of the concept that all things work together for the good of those who love God. Worms, dirt, detritus—they all work together to make yummy veggies and beautiful flowers. Resurrection.

Gardening makes me strong, makes me healthy, makes me whole, and it is a relationship of reciprocity: I feed the garden and the garden feeds me. The food that the garden gives to me is physical, tangible, tasty, but it is also spiritual. Gardening helps me to love God, who becomes less abstract and more the Vibrant, Surprising, Creating, Sustaining force I really do believe in.

The fruits of the garden nourish my family, our house guests, our neighbors, our friends. The eating together of home-grown produce is love in tangible form.

In closing, I borrow from "Beauty in the Garden," a chapter in The Fragrance of God (Eerdmans, 2006), by Orthodox priest Vigen Guroian.

In my garden, I take hope from Jesus’ promise to the repentant thief on the cross that he will be with his Lord in Paradise. I know that the sweat and tears of penance bring Paradise near in my backyard. For a garden is a profound sign and deep symbol of salvation, like none other, precisely because a garden was our first habitation, and God has deemed it to be our final home. Beauty is the aim of life. God imagined it so. God spoke the Word, and his invisible Image of Beauty became a visible garden. . . . (84-85)

—Anna Maria Johnson makes her home in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley with her photographer-husband and their two young daughters. Her main pursuits include writing, making visual art, and cultivating beauty in the forms of food, flowers, and relationships. She places special emphasis on observing the light falling through her kitchen windows.