A Gardener’s Education

by Molly Vetter

I’ve been on a bit of a Michael Pollan kick lately.  Enthused that his explorations of our food systems have helped make gardening hip (or, at least, have helped get Michelle and Barack to dig in), I keep going back for more.  Since first reading Omnivore’s Dilemma, I have delighted that his work has given me conversation partners and a common vocabulary for speaking of ethical eating and real food security.

Stretching back to the backyard garden of my childhood — with ample space for experimentation and bountiful seeds from a relative’s hardware store — gardens have been places of great, hopeful possibility.  Something about their demands on my patience, trust and wonder make gardening work worth doing on my days off; the delights of dinner picked from within feet of my door add delicious reward.  Compelled by the ideas of gardening as a moral and theological statement, my vision has grown generous enough to see beauty in my front yard attempt at growing vegetables, even when others see disaster.

I mean this to be a review of Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education, Michael Pollan’s earlier (2002) exploration of gardening, not merely a memoir of his garden experience (or mine). This book weaves his explorations of garden ideas into a tour of our American thought on wilderness, nature and humanity. Digging into our romanticized notions of “wildness” as a place apart from human interventions and refusing to see the natural world as commodity for our exploitation, he explores and advocates for ethics and practices that let us inhabit the world as garden: tended space, required ongoing and careful intervention that seeks after possibilities that generate life for human and non-human alike.

The work is a delightful read.  Pollan brings together amusing, confessional tales of his own gardening attempts; big, ethical ideas that shape our dominant cultural attitudes; critiques of the sexism and classism embedded in garden catalogues and rose descriptions; and stories of real, American landscapes.

Though the “Two Gardens” described in the first chapter aren’t Eden and the New Jerusalem, I did find in his explorations rich fodder for theological ponderings.  (Or, should I say, rich humus in which to grow the companion plant of theology?)  As I seek to clarify and articulate theology that responds to both the tremendous connection to God that I feel in places of wildness and that honors humanity as belonging in the midst of creation (rather than letting the dualism I’ll blame on Plato lead us toward a devaluing of the physical world as we spend our effort reaching a supposedly higher, spiritual reality), I appreciate his “garden ethic” for describing a way of living that values a natural world (recognizing also our inability to really control it) while also inviting us to be a part of it, tending and shaping it in generative ways.

All of this humus connects me to my experience of the natural world and to God.  At best, I see myself as a gardener at work on both, trying my best to care for the little plot of land surrounding my tiny, urban house and to tend to the Holy Spirit’s work as She grows the Kingdom of God in our midst.  Both grow by a grace I’m unable to manufacture.

Molly Vetter serves as the Minister of Justice and Outreach at First United Methodist Church in San Diego. She is passionate about many things — including music, the visual arts, reading, gardening, making stuff out of trash, blogging, and being with friends.