bombs in bottles
People like warm and fuzzy garden writing for one reason: People like stories that paint people as the heroes and that offer heroes with which we feel good identifying.
We like garden writing in which the narrator is the awed student, or patient cultivator, or humble acolyte, because we like to imagine that we would ourselves be those things in the face of a garden (or a god). We don't like to hear about how much of gardening is cold, deliberate destruction, because we don't like to think of ourselves as belonging to a species capable of calculated murder. We want planting to be portrayed only as "good" and weeding only as "removing the bad" because that's simple. It puts us on the right side of gardening history. It does not require us to ask: "good" or "bad" *for what*? *For whom*?
But life, whether plant or human, isn't that simple.
I belong to one of those religions whose favorite book claims our God exhorted His people not to commit murder, then shortly thereafter exhorted them to enter the land they saw before them and slaughter not only every human, but the livestock as well. The hell are we supposed to do with that? It is, as the youths say, not a good look.
I chose one of the denominations within said religion that both allows and encourages us to ask that and other thorny questions. Like: Does this mean God's love or care for creation is somehow conditional? Or: Is God not only no respecter of persons, but no respecter of *species*? Or: Is the book of Joshua not God speaking at all, but the work of humans who needed a version of the story in which they are the heroes and God is on their side, even when they make what *they themselves recognize* are reprehensible choices?
These are not easy questions. I hestiate to say they have answers at all. Certainly they do not have easy ones. I understand why so many people throw up their hands and proclaim God does not exist rather than commit to a lifetime of wrestling with such questions. I've tried that one myself. (It didn't take.)
A garden presents such questions, daily, hourly. When I tear out invading quackgrass, am I a benevolent protector, guarding the land for its "good" inhabitants? Or am I a petty tyrant thwarting the divine will or the natural order? When I decide to hoe up an entire patch of herbs to get at the weeds growing within it, am I committing the horticultural equivalent of a war crime? Or am I restoring the good and right and correct order to my patch of the Earth? The Khmer Rouge starving millions of Cambodians was "not a good look" (to understate the case), but is my method of expanding a garden by smothering every living thing under layers of cardboard and grass clippings any better? If so, why? Better for what? Better *for whom*?
In our passion to see ourselves always as the heroes, we tend to forget that every person we meet sees themself as the hero, too. We forget that stories are just that: stories. Make-believes. A construction. We fight and die and kill over stories, forgetting that life-as-life exists independently of our tellings.
The garden does not care what stories I tell about it. The garden does not care how you feel about them. Garden gonna garden.
Plants do not share our self-obsession. Any attempts to assign our moral values to them are only make-believe. I don't think that makes the plants wiser than we are. Yet sometimes I wonder if they are closer to God for it.
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