Rebecca Solnit, puzzling over George Orwell’s commitment to gardening in the midst of his war on politically repulsive words and ideas, considers: “If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it.”
Reading Margaret Renkl’s essay “Reading the New South,” I learn that there is a magazine called Garden and Gun, which she describes as “assiduously apolitical” and instead devoted to “sweet-tea-and- moonshine preconceptions” of the South.
Before checking out the Garden and Gun website, I wonder: does the title wish to signal that gardens and guns are as intimately aligned as house and garden in the U.K.’s House and Gardens or homes and gardens in the American Better Homes and Gardens? Is it a refutation of Solnit’s speculation and a gloss on Churchill’s pronouncement?
I go to the internet and type in “garden and gun” and learn that the “Garden and Gun magazine celebrates the modern South and features the best in Southern food, style, travel, music, art, literature, and sporting culture.”
No mention of gardens, interestingly enough. So I probe further. And learn that the name “comes from a now-defunct Charleston nightclub, popular in the 1970s.” President and CEO Rebecca Darwin says the name captures the spirit of the magazine. “The ‘garden’ is really a metaphor for the land,” she says, “which is really what’s at the heart of this whole magazine.”
As a gardener, with a strong sense of what is and is not a garden, this seems a bit of a stretch. Still, I can’t help but wonder if, in our current political climate, the “sweet-tea and moonshine” folks once again think a gun is required to defend the “garden.”
Since encountering these various positions on the relation of gardens and guns, I have pondered my own. Not surprisingly, in the past I have found myself aligned with Solnit’s premise and have considered my work as a gardener a form of peace-making.
These days, however, in the garden I feel at war. Indeed, were a gun to be handy and I skilled in using it and were deer to show up for further predation, I might just shoot them. I was only gone for a week, to the Cape and the sea for respite from gall bladder woes and back injuries, but a week was all it took for the four foots to devour every single one of my Hostas, leaving me nothing but clumps of bare stalks, chewed off at the top and stripped of leaves. My only option is to cut them back to the ground and pray for late season refoliation.
But I don’t have a gun and I don’t know how to shoot. And I have no desire to get a gun or learn to shoot. Besides, I am really at war with something far larger and harder to target than Bambi. A week away and the drought and heat have destroyed much of what the creatures left alone.
I have experienced drought in my garden before this season, but I have never experienced one this long-lasting. Combined with unprecedented heat, it is deadly. Today the heat is predicted to reach 100 degrees, a record for my town. I can’t begin to water enough to keep my plants alive. I look at my Astilbe and I want to weep. And then I am filled with rage and want to kill all those who have caused this climate change and all those who stand in the way of our saving what is left of our planet.
I doubt that the men who wrote the Hebrew bible were gardeners. If they had been gardeners, they would have known that no snake was needed to direct Eve to knowledge of the seven deadly sins.
With her first bloom Eve would have experienced pride. If Adam produced a bigger or better display, she would have experienced envy. Discovering in a remote corner of Eden a crabapple “sport,” a variety that she had not seen before, she would have experienced lust and cried out to the listening snake, “I must have that plant.” Unsatisfied until she had collected an orchard’s worth of “sports,” she would be still greedy for more.
I am fully acquainted with the many forms the seven deadlies take in the garden.
I know lust in the form of a new variety of Geum purchased this year and greed in the form of three adorable native Symphoricarpos (aka Snowberry, Coralberry, Waxberry, Ghostberry – see why you need the Latin name!) shrubs when acquiring just one would have answered perfectly well. I know envy in the form of a new Japanese garden that I do not have but a fellow gardener does.
Pride has been my constant companion, and particularly in August. Keeping a garden looking good in August is a challenge. In the past, hearing others complain of their August gardens looking like “the end of pea-time,” as we used to say in Indiana, I have swelled with pride. Despite the heat and dryness of the average August, my gardens look good in August, and I have happily hosted visits and fund-raisers during this difficult month.
Back from the Cape, I cancelled all invitations to visit my gardens this August. The month has barely begun and already my gardens look worse than the end of pea-time.
Lust, greed, envy, pride – they are my familiars in the garden. But only rarely have I felt wrath. These mornings, however, as I do my three-hour watering stint and try to keep some semblance of order in what is left of my garden, I am angry. I have come to loathe the phrase, “scattered thunderstorms,” and if I could get my hands around the neck of the weatherman who teases me with his “40% chance of rain,” I might close in. Yes, I think, gardening is a form of war and maybe one that I will lose.
Gardens rarely survive the gardener, but is it possible that the gardener won’t survive the garden?
If it ever rains again, I might, like my plants, calm down, perk up, and go back to being peaceful. Until then, it is “garden and gun” all the way.