Some of my patients who once had trouble relaxing, now look for ways to keep busy. It’s a remarkable turnaround, as if staying home – and relaxing non-stop with no purpose or structure – feels suddenly decadent. One of my patients, Andrea, formerly spent her days teaching music to children on the autism spectrum. It left her physically and emotionally exhausted, and she thought about trying deep breathing. But now since the pandemic, where her school is closed at least until fall, she needs something to do. “I find,” she said, “that I actually like feeling that I’ve accomplished something. Otherwise, I think about myself too much and I feel like a dud.”
But Andrea is a resourceful woman and, like several of my patients, she has taken up gardening. She bought tomato, pepper, zucchini, and eggplant seedlings at the local nursery (curbside pick-up, of course), which came with instructions on caring for them. “I’m growing all my own pizza toppings,” she announced. “Maybe I’ll even make room for some basil.” So, every week, we talk about the progress of her garden; the weather; mulching; the acidity of the soil. It’s an education for both of us as Andrea dives into what has become a challenge and, in fact, a time-consuming project as she reads up on each of the plants. “I don’t want to sound weird,” she said, “but they each have personalities.”
As I speak to Andrea and my other patients about gardening, I realize why it has become so popular now (Market Watch cites a gardening uptick, and a professor who opines that “plants are not judgmental” and are grounding in unstable times). But forget the unintended pun. People want to be outside, while still in a protected space not exposed to crowds. They want to pull off their masks and not feel guilty. For the more thoughtful, the real draw, I think, is that they want to produce something tangible. They want to make stuff with heft, that represents effort, and that other people can use. The pandemic has taught us to value certain types of workers – check-out clerks, package delivery guys, immigrants in meat-packing plants – whose vital functions once passed beneath our radar. But not anymore. These people keep us alive. We don’t do what they do, because we don’t have to; but we can’t just let them do it, while we look for ways to soak up the day. Growing a tomato (how elementary can you get?) is one way to deliberately share the burden.
Andrea told me that while it’s still too early in the season, she looks forward to bringing in her “harvest.” She’ll have to keep the bugs away, and maybe even the deer, but she thinks she can manage. One feature of gardening that appeals to her is that it softens the boundary between home and the outdoors. “If I cook with something I’ve grown,” she says, “I feel integrated with the world. I don’t feel like I’m just a post-industrial artifact.” Her thought is profoundly resonant – even if there is a whiff of ‘60s back-to-the-land utopianism. It’s so easy to feel we’ve literally been manufactured by offshore clothing makers, bottlers of ketchup, the conglomerate that sells us shoes, and the other conglomerate that sells deodorant, toothpaste, and skin emollient. Our sense of alienation from the natural world, and from the sources of everything that clothes and feeds us, is not unlike our sense that we’ve discounted the people who sustain us. Especially in this time when everything seems so precarious, we don’t want to feel alienated from what matters.
I don’t usually talk with my patients about their plans for bushels of vegetables, but Andrea has been thinking about tomato chutney. According to a recipe that she found online, it’s made with garlic, onions, ginger, vinegar, raisins, sugar, and lime. You boil it up, then you can it. It can keep for a couple of years. But you can also give it away. To Andrea, however, it represents not just an effort to integrate with nature, and a bid to be that much more self-sufficient, but also a gesture to beat post-industrialism at its own game. “If I am vertically integrated, and grow the stuff that I can and then consume, I am recreating industry on a human scale. I am not letting them manufacture me.” Her throw-back ‘60s utopia may be right at home, so to speak, in the world of COVID-19. We are rethinking our relation to globalism, which clearly has affected our health and our preparedness for the pandemic. We are bringing some vital industries home. On a human scale, so is Andrea.
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There is a long tradition of thinking about why we like to garden. We take pride in what we produce. The routine of the garden – keeping it watered, pulling out weeds, making sure that the grubs don’t eat it first – can give structure to our lives. A garden is a perpetual contest between us and nature, always calling us back to first principles: what is it like to try to survive, how much is luck and how much is work or brains or just timing? Gardens allow us to think about our place in the world, and in nature, without actually making us take risks. We can imagine the effort that’s required to survive without the large-scale effort actually required. In this sense, gardens are a great metaphor for the times that we live in. I think we are drawn to them because they force us back onto our own resources without posing the existential risks that we may easily encounter if we step outside them.
One of my patients said that “my garden makes me stronger.” I thought she meant that she was lifting bags of soil but, in fact, she meant that she was becoming resilient, quick-thinking, able to recover a situation when it defied expectations. “I think there is going to be a second wave,” she said, “and if I can raise a patch of cantaloupe, I will be better prepared.” There is this sense among my patients that they use this time that they are off from work to work to work at becoming prepared for what may result in the future. It’s funny to think of oneself as outwitting a cantaloupe but, in fact, the cantaloupe is part of the grand scheme of things of which we are a part. It’s like COVID-19. We will have to learn to live in the world where it lives too, ideally coming out ahead by dint of the skills we develop.
As I talk with patients, I think about how we create gardens in our own image, overflowing with flowers or mapped out in neat rows of melons. What’s the right kind of garden for right now? Either is fine. It’s okay to plant a gorgeous garden, just as a utilitarian one will also work. Just so long as we actively engage in gardening. In medieval times, people resorted to a hortus conclusus (a secluded garden) for privacy and contemplation. Maybe even a tryst. To have such a luxury now, however, would be unusual. For most of us in this moment, “to garden” – the verb form of the word – holds out real possibilities.
