“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.”
Audrey Hepburn
This year I begin my second half-century, planting a garden. The passage of time shows me I have been investing in the future for most of my past. Season after season I plant, irrigate, weed, fertilize and harvest, then the process starts over—justifying my faith in tomorrow, which so far, has always arrived. And while I am above ground, I will till a bit of it, if I can. Each day brings growth, each season something different in the air, and the work I do keeps me in touch with our planet’s cycles. And of course, I reap some wonderful rewards at harvest time. Every harvest is different, some years are better than others, but if I trust nature and do what needs doing, the future becomes the present, and rewards me with a crop. It is a living, active, meaningful faith: what we sow, shall we reap. And although sometimes the world looks grim, as it did the past year, I plant a garden, and tomorrow becomes today.
Last year and this year, more people have taken up gardening than I can remember since the seventies. A trip to the nursery used to be a quiet outing, but now it’s a little crazy. People are buying plants, seeds, and supplies as quickly as workers can take the stuff off the truck and put it on the sales floor. As happened in this country’s last existential crisis, during the sixties and seventies, Americans are literally returning to their roots in hope of finding the knowledge and skills needed to navigate into an uncertain tomorrow. I look on this trend as a hopeful sign, but if we are to realize the hope, we must keep at it.
Gardening went more or less out of style once the eighties rolled around. With the end of the revolutionary fervor of the sixties and seventies, the victorious ruling elites brooked no “nonsense” from hippies, peaceniks, or other nonconformists. The nation’s farmers produced plenty of food—in fact they produced so much that many of them went out of business. But according to the dominant wisdom of the time, corporate agriculture, like corporate everything else, would handle any and all problems of supply and demand, with bankrupt farmers set free to seek other jobs. The stock market would make us rich—not vegetables from the backyard.
Not that it was against the law (at any rate, concerning most crops) to plant a garden; but those of us who did were looked on as a bit strange…either old-fashioned or anti-establishment. And the establishment was determined not to let rule-breaking weirdos gum up the works of an orderly society. With the counterculture genie stuffed back into the bottle, the country was going back to “normalcy,” like it or not, which meant a general adherence to a button-down lifestyle that was based in the halcyon, orderly, fifties. In those days a neatly manicured lawn was considered a sign of prosperity, and prosperous Americans had no need to grow their own food.
The rebellious energy of the sixties was a reaction to the conformity of the fifties. The Vietnam War and racial upheavals glaringly revealed that our revered national purpose was not being respected, much less fulfilled. Air, water, and soil pollution, along with persistent poverty among many fellow countrymen, revealed serious flaws in our economics. Americans felt frustration, despair, and anger—symptoms of chronic anxiety and stress—in reaction to our daily living conditions. We youngsters were unsure about what was expected of us, and whether the expectations we could perceive were worthwhile. Americans disagreed heartily on the sources of and solutions to our malaise, but it was generally understood that something in the national psyche had gone awry.
Among the unforeseen, unwelcome challenges America faced in the sixties was the realization that something was seriously wrong with our food system. Too many Americans went hungry, while too many others were literally stuffing themselves to death. The government paid farmers not to grow certain crops, while that same government and the banks coerced them into using huge amounts of toxic chemicals to increase yields. Scientists began to question the sustainability of such a system. Consumers began to wonder if the food we ate so much of might not be as nutritious as the food our parents and grandparents ate. With doubts growing about something as basic as food, it was not surprising that people began to question everything else. National malaise had arrived.
Those of us who took up gardening began observing cyclical patterns in the process of getting food, which followed nature. Modern industry (including agriculture) is planned in a goal-oriented straight line: toward more food, faster planes, deadlier weapons; never mind the after-effects. It was pointed out that the industrial trajectory threatened humanity’s continued survival, and some scientists, followed by lay people, started asking questions that could not be immediately answered by the authorities. Why did a culture that paid farmers not to grow crops still have hungry people? Was increasingly unbreathable air, undrinkable water, infertile land the necessary price for plenty? How long could this worldwide pattern keep going? Not surprisingly, some of us started looking for answers.
We were young, not yet set in our ways, or knowingly indebted to the system. We were ready to challenge and change. Gardening was more than an attempt to supplement our food supplies. We wanted knowledge about how the system (earth’s system, not the national power structure’s system) worked. Knowledge is power, and power provides the key to making meaningful changes. The rich and powerful took that as a challenge to their power (which it was) and since absolute power tolerates no opposition, they fought it ruthlessly. Their most useful weapon being fear, the political and economic propaganda machines trashed anyone who questioned society’s prevailing system, anyone who proposed doing things differently. Into the minds of average Americans, who had everything to gain from a change in the way we did things, Madison Avenue and rightwing media funneled fear of change. The natural order, and real economic and social democracy, were shrewdly mixed with the Manson family, the Symbionese Liberation Front, and the violent side of the Black Panthers. The dishonest, cruel, winless war in Vietnam became a “noble cause.” Gardening, especially organic, was collateral damage in the scorched-earth campaign against the counterculture. Ronald Reagan came to power promising to restore the country to the happy days Americans thought they remembered from the 1950’s.
Rebellion, disobedience, and experimentation would be met with harsh punishment. Schools would replace critical thinking with test-taking, because the corporate rulers had fashioned the workplace into an ongoing test. The unquestioning corporate mindset triumphed in the eighties, but the genie never went completely back into the bottle. And some of us kept planting gardens, sowing the seeds of understanding how the world really works. With time, the irresistible supremacy of natural laws again became obvious. Corruption, inequality, pollution and decay are evident once more. The power structure must now rely on increasing brutality to retain power. All the hidden troubles of the fifties, that became obvious in the sixties, are again out of the shadows, as are the solutions: sizable, if not radical, realignment of the nation’s economic, social, and political structure. And young people are joining us old hippies, planting gardens, as a bet that tomorrow will come.