A Bountiful Tree Hints at Life’s Sweet Secret
It was just after first light, and I was squatting in front of the Mexican lime tree, thinking about Albert the Great.
What’s the connection between a fruit tree and medieval philosopher and theologian? Well, to start with, Albert is the patron saint of natural scientists, and the lime tree has been a mystery virtually from the moment I planted it. It is one of four fruit trees espaliered on the walls of my small vegetable garden. While the others--nectarine, Mission Fig and lemon--prospered from the start, the lime had been--to put it more gently than it deserves--a disappointment.
From the day I cut it from its can and put it in the ground, it was a sickly tree. Over the years, it suffered every disease known to citrus, and at least two that made the nurseryman scratch his chin and incisively observe, “Well, I dunno.”
Season after season, the lime tree sent up branches whose leaves were curled and twisted. While it never bore fruit, it did produce abundant quantities of inch-long thorns. They turned the task of pruning it to the appropriate fan-shaped espalier into real torture. Literally bloodied--but unswervingly stubborn--I emerged from each of our encounters determined to make the damn thing give me limes.
Then, suddenly and inexplicably, the lime was healthy. It threw up branches in exuberant abandon. Their leaves were glossy and lush. There were tiny white flowers and, then, miraculously, limes--dozens upon dozens of them.
A simpler--one might say steadier--soul probably would have accepted this bounty as the reward for work well done. I wanted to know why. But, unlike people, trees do not easily give up their secrets. So, there I was, crouched in front of that obdurate tree, my hand around a coffee cup and my head full of questions. Year after year, I’d fed and watered in much the same way. I’d treated its afflictions with the same insecticidal soaps and organic fungicides. The light hadn’t changed and, quite obviously, neither had the climate. But one month it was sick and the next it wasn’t.
That’s when I thought of Albert. He was the foremost intellectual of his age, the first whose interests extended beyond theology and philosophy to firsthand observation of the natural world. He was a formidable teacher who once said his greatest joy was “seeking the truth in the pleasure of companionship.” One of his pupils was Thomas Aquinas. Another recorded that Albert concluded a lecture at the University of Paris by saying, “We know all this, but only in the way in which we know things. And we know so very little.”
In other words, “Well, I dunno.”
In Albert’s day, what he did was called not natural science, but natural philosophy, a distinction I find not only pleasing, but also fitting.
For every gardener knows how essential it is to tease the meaning from what he or she sees. To garden is to pursue philosophia-- a love of wisdom--in one place. It takes patience, time and, even, the unfashionable virtue of humility. It is the work of a lifetime to apprehend the special meaning of things in just one small patch of ground.
My own vegetable garden, for example, is less than 500 square feet. Yet I only have begun to understand how various it really is.
In every season, it is not one, but many gardens, each of whose particular qualities must be understood if they are to be used. Soil can be improved, water can be regulated, pests can be controlled. Other things--as I have learned from the lime--simply must be understood and accepted for what they are.
This is a particularly lovely time in a Southern California garden. The colors of the lettuce and salad greens are softer and their flavors sweeter. The raucous, sprawling vitality of colorful tomatoes, peppers and eggplants with their vibrant colors have given way to the compact, gray austerity of broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage and cauliflower.
There is a great deal of bare soil--not an unpleasant sight for those of us who have labored over it--punctuated by the first tentative green of sprouting onions, carrots, beets and peas.
Mornings are damp and misty, afternoons hazy. Evening is red and darkness is early. And over everything, hangs a kind of deep and fruitful melancholy.
It seems especially so this autumn, because this is the last fall garden I will plant in this place. My wife and I have purchased another old house a few blocks away, and when the formalities are concluded, we’ll begin restoring it. There is, of course, space for a garden. I’ve already begun sketching it out on paper.
I know, however, how different the reality of a place is from anything you imagine about it. So, I find myself spending a lot of time in the garden I have, remembering things about it and wondering what will become not only of this place, but of what I know about it. That’s the thing about loss. When places or people pass out of our lives, we lose not only them, but also the use of those special and particular things we know about them.
That useful knowledge we used to have becomes a memory, comforting but not quite the same. What once was active and continually freshened by sight and touch becomes passive, softens and, finally, fades. We miss that kind of knowledge when it’s gone, because, as Albert said, “We know so very little.”
