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The virtue of plants is that they take time. That is also generally people’s chief problem with them. Gardens attract us because they promise a slowed-down version of reality, where we can literally stop and smell the roses. But we also tend to want them right away. This paradoxical relationship with garden spaces arises, probably, from the blistering pace our highly consumerist society has reached. I say this at the risk of sounding glib, but I still think it’s more than generally true. It is mostly true. Like addicts whose rising alcohol tolerance compels us to drink always more and faster, we’ve been conditioned by the pace of a world built by megalithic companies to want things immediately, even when the very essence of the things we most desire is to be slow.
A scroll through your Substack feeds will highlight this tension: the platform is full of people advocating for longform writing, slow food, handcrafts, pilgrimages, unplugging. And yet, of course, Substack is funneling hundreds of such articles toward you at a time, and sending you notifications about them, and inviting you to spend more of your leisure time engaging with them. I’m not actually certain that Substack can survive this inner tension. At the moment, it’s keeping the difficult balance of being a better sort of Internet—one that resists reducing discourse to memes and advocates for viewing human-generated writing as a valuable commodity. But for how long? Who knows? For the moment, I’m content to ride the wave and hope for the best. Heck, it’s certainly better than gargling the bilgewater of Instagram.
To return to my point, people like the idea of gardens but want them fast instead of on their own time. The reason why wealthy people hire landscaping companies to transform their outdoor spaces is that those companies can leverage their resources and expertise to make gardens happen wholesale, hauling in ten-foot Japanese maple trees, laying miles of brick pathways, and unrolling truckloads of pre-grown grass so that when the dust of the job site clears, the garden is simply there, telling the almost-convincing lie that it has been growing for years. Yet those same wealthy people tend to ask landscape companies for “low-maintenance” plants or “easy to care for” trees. Thus the ubiquity of yew shrubberies (I actually like yew), burning bush planted in front of windows, and sprinkler systems that click up from underground at five am every summer morning, blasting thousands of gallons of potable water onto grass that is fertilized with cancer-inducing toxins and mowed by robots.
But, of course, what those people want isn’t actually a garden at all, it is a background. They want to look at something pretty, an echo of a fantasized bucolic past that will register as wholesome or aesthetic or what have you without actually requiring anything of them. Yet the nature of a garden—in fact, the whole virtue and value of having one—is that it requires us to work in it. Presumably, God didn’t place Adam and Eve in a garden so they could have something to look at over a glass of wine in the evening. He did it because the endless tending of creation, the bringing of things into order and using sweat to bring them into a state of flourishing, has a net positive effect on humans. If we really think about it, we’ll realize that an instant garden isn’t just financially expensive, it costs us almost the entire value of the whole proposition. Gardens are about beauty, yes, but they are also about the human dignity and edification of tending them.
I’ve had no end of confidence placed in me by the administration here at CCA when it comes to planting gardens on our campus. But I’ve also had no end of conversations in which I had to justify planting small things: small trees, small hedges, small specimens of flowers, things that will take years or decades to fulfill their potential. Things that will outlast us, that might not even be fully grown until we are read. I would need to grow four extra hands to be able to count on my fingers how many times I’ve been asked when the apple trees in our orchard will start growing apples, or why the orchard “looks so dead in winter.” The apples, of course, will arrive when it wouldn’t break the tree for it to bear them. The orchard looks scraggly and brown in December because, in New England, everything that isn’t being artificially warmed and fertilized is dormant or dead at that time of year.
These conversations can be exasperating, but I have to remind myself that, even more than the gardens—whatever the gardens become—our school’s conversations about them are the point. After thirteen years in Classical education, I’ve started to believe—started to realize—that we cannot really build or perfect a Classical educational program if we begin by accepting the premises of your average College Preparatory program. Those premises, whose ultimate telos is success, are inimical to the Classical ones, which assume that the point of school is not to succeed but to learn. And, in the Classical mind, what we learn is always in service not of how well we’ll do in the economic world but in service of the kind of person we want to become. The telos of Classical education is to create spiritually living human beings.
Gardens can help us do that, because they make us slow down and pay attention. They demand sweat and patience, and reward us with nourishment and beauty. As we cultivate them, we fund the best and most humane parts of ourselves cultivated. It’s not just about “getting back” to some imagined, ideal agricultural life where people didn’t have smartphones and knew the value of a good day’s work. It’s not about returning to some sham Classical ideal that we dress up in the clothes of whatever values we feel like America is missing at the moment. It’s about working, and waiting, and seeing what comes of it. It’s about gardening as spiritual education, about developing the deepest and most productive form of attention, an attention that is almost synonymous with prayer. This potential for education is what Simone Veil pinpointed in her essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”:
“The highest part of the attention only makes contact with God, when prayer is intense and pure enough for such a contact to be established; but the whole attention is turned toward God…Of course school exercises only develop a lower kind of attention. Nevenheless, they are extremely effective in increasing the power of attention that will be available at the time of prayer, on condition that they are carried out with a view to this purpose and this purpose alone.”
It’s in that state of silent attention, an awareness that ignites the intellect and the spirit, that we are able to relate to ourselves, to others, and to God. Our capacity for such relatedness is how Warren Brown of Fuller Theological Seminary defines the soul. And I’m comfortable with that definition. I feel it to be true when I’m out in my ugly orchard or fledgling vegetable patch, digging away in the mud, imagining what the place will look like, not yet, but soon enough, in its own time.
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“Plant small things” is an excellent motto.
I really enjoyed the discussion of how the gardener is cultivated by the process! We are being constantly taught to expect instant results, and it's often uncomfortable to not receive that. Which is also wonderful!