“We are stardust, we are golden….And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”
Joni Mitchell - “Woodstock”
In spring, 2020, the midst of the lockdown, I was driving to the nursery, ready to start my fiftieth gardening season. “Twentieth Century Fox” from The Doors’ first album was on the CD player. In the parking lot I saw a line of those foxes, masked, looking (as I did) like people who had lived through some intense parts of two millennia. But there were also many folks of all ages. Young, essential workers were rapidly unloading trucks full of plants and garden supplies, then taking them to sales areas, where we were just as quickly buying them. In the pandemic, gardening has become more popular than it has been in years—since times when America was trying to end a tragically useless war, overcome a sick, unfair economy, and get rid of a corrupt president.…Thanks to COVID-19, Americans have caught the gardening bug again—the real thing.
I caught the bug in the seventies, the heyday of the counter-culture, when quite a few of us boomers took an interest in, among other things, food. News revealed that industrial production was not the miracle of progress we had heard about as children. With war, pollution, and political corruption rampant, we began seriously questioning every aspect of modern American life. Some of us answered many questions by getting into the dirt, planting crops, and harvesting food. Early on I was fortunate to learn gardening basics from a lifelong old farmer who taught me, in a no-nonsense way, how to work with nature, to coax her to bring forth something to eat. Still, there is always more to learn. Season after season, new challenges and new opportunities appear. I get to practice patience, accept letdowns, and often, reap wondrous rewards. Happily for me, gardening is a way of life.
Though I love this way of life, there is no money in it. I might save a little, but Industrial agriculture still produces vegetables much cheaper than I can, and backyards are not that big. I still buy a lot of food. If I add the labor involved, I would do better financially to get a second job, although I am retired. The garden gives forth other rewards, essential to the human spirit in a world of hyper materialism, especially at the apparent start of another revolution. Foremost, vegetables and fruits from my “farm” taste wonderful. I enjoy sharing a small surplus with friends and relations—at least I did, when we could get together in halcyon days. There is an unexplainable sense of gratification that comes from working in the earth, from following the seasons, from sowing and reaping, from planting and hoping. The list goes on, but material gain is not on it. Yet in this time of economic severity, people of all ages, many for the first time, many after a long layoff, are getting dirty—one of the few silver linings in this disastrous storm called coronavirus pandemic. I am especially gratified to see young people taking up this new/old trend, because we aging hippies are not going to be around forever. I see people getting in touch with their roots. As any gardener knows, healthy crops depend on strong roots. So it is with nations. Getting deep into the earth on a personal level is a reliable and satisfying way to strengthen our individual, therefore societal, roots.
It is heartening to know that young people will be carrying on a vital tradition. Here is a reawakening of the human spirit, a spirit that can weather social and political storms, that recognizes fertilizer and puts it to good use. During the last revolution we were bound to stand up to the dishonesty and cruelty of our country’s tragic misdirection. We won some confrontations, lost many, but as current events reveal, the roots held strong. Society survived and is standing up against recent threats to sustainable civilization. We can share our knowledge, just as the old timers passed what they had learned down to us. Whether or not the new gardeners keep getting their hands dirty, the strong roots are being re-established, enhancing society’s health. Actually, gardening is but part of the greater garden: maintaining the sound, lucid, wholesome society we sought half a century ago, based on reverence for humanity and for natural laws. Being human, we fell short, but we are still seeking. Others, also human, tried to find shortcuts by using the same technics of lying and manipulation that had gotten us into the mess we found ourselves in when the sixties arrived. Some of them achieved superficial success. But humanity is relearning two facts: true success is not material; and “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”
Widespread disobedience of natural laws brings harsh penalties, as we learned in the sixties and seventies, as we are witnessing now. The corporate power structure, which we opposed, has kept and increased its power, with a tiny minority living in extreme splendor, while most others struggle to survive. Having to wait in line while wearing masks at the garden shop is but a minor symptom of the deadly disease threatening our race. But throngs at nurseries signify that humans have realized the immensity of our national malaise, and are seeking treatment. Though we must deal with the symptoms, true recovery means changing the way we live, beginning with basic needs, like food.
Starting with food, we still see the strong roots of a more humane society that we made in the seventies. Anyone who remembers supermarket produce aisles in the sixties can attest to that. After WWII, produce was farmed for shelf life rather than flavor. Planting gardens, growing our own food, made us boomers picky; a trend taken up by our elders, who actually remembered getting quality produce from grocery stores in bygone times. Buyers for market chains, large and small, responded by seeking, and finding, produce to meet the demand. Many farmers, taking pride in their work, were glad to cooperate. In today’s religiously capitalistic economy, supermarkets still carry better food than we found there half a century ago—not as good as what we grow ourselves, and there are still “food deserts”—but people are awakening to question the status quo again, and the revived trend could have sufficient energy to bring quality edibles—along with other necessities of life—to all. We can hope for a society wherein people matter, which was the main crop we began cultivating back in the seventies: hope.
When COVID-19 effectively shut down the capitalist market economy, people of all generations began questioning how we got here, and are once more looking at basic human needs. By taking responsibility for the universal necessity of food, we question the unspoken precept in our culture that we must succumb to the demands of the corporate state. Gardening is a first step in resistance, reminding us we can resist. We have reached the end of the line with our present way of doing things, and now it is obvious to everyone who is paying attention, the depth of the hole we are in. The old saying goes “If you’re in a hole, stop digging.” But maybe we actually need to redirect our digging, start cultivating the garden. It is a pleasant place to be. Welcome to those who are getting in, and those who are getting back.