Solace Found in the Good Earth
In Southern California, November tends to be a kind month, not like the wind-whipped, cold-rattled time it is in other zones, where winter comes early. Here, in the garden behind my house, the pomegranate still has its flame-like blooms, the rosemary and westringia are flowering purple and the bougainvillea heaped on the garage is a blaze of gold.
More and more lately, I find myself drifting out there when there are other things I should be doing--to clip the rosemary hedges, feed the citrus trees, rake sycamore leaves, pull weeds. There is an order and a logic to gardening that soothes the spirit when the world seems to be falling apart. Prune a hedge, you put a picture to rights. Yank the weeds and mulch the beds, you vanquish the invaders and make the realm richer and safer for those you love.
These are small things, but they loom large to a gardener, one who spends hours sketching lines on the ground, crawling through dirt, digging in seeds and seedlings and steering by the seasons in an effort to call imagined scenes to life. To feel the Earth’s life through cramped hands.
It’s nothing new, this gardening urge: distraction, affirmation, spiritual refuge, self-therapy. Throughout history, gardens have been all these things to the people who have worked in them. As far back as the 5th century BC, Persian gardens, with their enclosed walks, flowering trees and bubbling fountains, symbolized paradise on Earth. For medieval Europeans, walled, orderly gardens providing sustenance and medicinal herbs meant safety and security from human and animal threats.
In more modern times, the healing aspects of gardening itself have been explored through horticultural therapy, which uses hands-on planting and tending to help rehabilitate patients with a range of complaints, from addiction to Alzheimer’s. Then, of course, there is the historically patriotic aspect of home-food plots, dubbed “Victory Gardens” during World War II, when they helped feed the nation and boost its overall morale.
It could be that in Los Angeles, where we can garden so much of the year, we rely even more than most on the solace we find outside. Like me, since mid-September, film producer Eva Strickland has been gardening with a vengeance, calling it, “My own form of therapy; a good friend in a time of grief.”
Six years ago when her mother died, Strickland cleared a piece of her Kagel Canyon hillside and planted roses and azaleas. “I needed a place to be alone and sad,” says Strickland, who, with her husband, Richard, owns the Hollywood-based company Blue Canyon Productions. True, the demands of her busy job slowly edged out the nurturing impulse. But since Sept. 11, she has gone back outside, this time to grow edibles.
“Again, my garden’s vital to me,” she reflects. “It’s where I go out under the sky, feel my body, plunge my hands into the dirt.”
In West Hollywood, Michael Hauser has had a similar impulse. An office manager who lives in an apartment, he spent the equivalent of several days holed up with his TV, watching endlessly repeated clips of planes crashing into buildings as commentators tried to sort out what had happened.
Then, one morning, he had a revelation. A few weeks earlier, he had rented a plot in a nearby community garden, one of several around L.A. where, for a nominal fee, and until space runs out, local residents can have a piece of ground for growing vegetables and other plants. “That plot was sitting idle,” Hauser recalls. “I suddenly thought, ‘Go. Get out there. Reconnect with the earth.”’
Since mid-October, Hauser, whose gardening efforts have been limited for years to potted plants, has started lettuce, broccoli and cauliflower seedlings, edging these with fragrant herbs and digging bulbs in for the spring. “Gardening,” he says, “helps me keep fear at a distance. Instead of worrying about anthrax, I’m in the moment, watching plants grow.”
Hauser is not alone. At the Outdoor Room, a Pacific Palisades nursery, customers have been snapping up blooming annuals--pansies, primroses, sweet alyssum--faster than owner Sandy Kennedy can keep them stocked. And twice since mid-September, a time of year she describes as “normally quiet,” the nursery has sold out its inventory of bulbs, especially daffodils and tulips. “A lot of customers are planting these themselves,” she says, “which isn’t usual for this neighborhood. I think they’re buying plants to feel better--flowers for instant cheer, bulbs as a sign of hope: that something good lies ahead.”
Which is what Van Nuys garden guru Lili Singer expresses in the current issue of her bimonthly newsletter, the Gardener’s Companion: “Every time we sow a seed, it is an act of faith, and each time we water a plant, we ... exhibit confidence in the future.”
Tending plants in a time of crisis can seem especially precious if they’re edible--the basil and sage grown for sauces, the squash for soup. When I pick lettuce, which I grow in pots, for dinner, I’ve somehow closed a circle, and I feel, absurdly, self-reliant. But I also like the fact that I don’t have to leave home to feed myself. And this, too, reflects the tenor of the times, according to Jimmy Williams, owner of HayGround, a Los Angeles mail-order supplier of heirloom vegetable seedlings.
“People are looking for reasons to stay home and enjoy the comforts of home, which include gardening and cooking,” says Williams, who, like Kennedy, has seen business boom since mid-September. Fears of terrorism and war along with economic woes contribute, he believes, to the cocooning urge. “And,” he says, “home-grown food tastes better.”
*
Strickland, who buys Williams’ plants and has hired him to help design her garden, agrees. “But I also want to know, especially right now, what’s in my food,” she adds. “If I grow it, I know.”
Naturally, growing food, like tending any garden, takes time. But in recent weeks, many gardeners, such as Pasadena landscape contractor Robert Cornell, have been reevaluating how they spend their time. “My garden was quite neglected and overgrown,” he admits. “I’ve been cleaning it up, replanting, renewing my bond with it.”
For Cornell, a longtime meditator who began gardening as a Buddhist monk during the 1970s, digging and planting are part of spiritual practice.
Moreover, he says, just being in the garden “reminds me that I’m connected to a loving center. I call it God, but the name doesn’t matter.”
Citing Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, he observes, “The spiritual journey is all about finding our way back to where we’re from. With so much hatred in the world, we need to remember that we’re part of a whole, all of us, and not meant to feel separate or afraid.”
In the next breath, he quotes the 13th century Afghan-born poet Rumi: “Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Where to Find Community Plots, Classes
Community plots abound in the area, from Santa Monica to Echo Park and beyond. For information, call the Common Ground Garden Program, (323) 838-4543, or ask your local nursery or cooperative extension office.
Gardening classes, beginning at the novice level, are widely offered for children and adults. Some of the best known are run by UCLA Extension, (310) 825-7093, and the Arboretum of Los Angeles County in Arcadia, (626) 821-4623, but check other area botanic gardens and libraries for workshop and lecture information.
