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November
What the garden gives us: Food, and a cornucopia
of useful symbols
Over 40 metaphors and one bad pun in just this
article alone!
Whenever I'm in a group of people talking about
Denver Urban Gardens, everyone naturally and
subconsciously peppers their speech with garden
metaphors. We believe, for example, that instead of
trying to start many more gardens quickly in a
top-down approach, the DUG network should grow
organically, from the grass roots. DUG does not try
to transplant the community garden model into
neighborhoods from outside. Rather, when the desire
to create a garden germinates among committed
people in the neighborhood, DUG supports them in
nurturing the project. We all want community
gardens to be successful and benefit neighborhoods
for many years, so DUG's mission is to help when
neighbors join together to cultivate new gardens,
because experience shows that urban gardens tend to
thrive and be, um, perennial when they are deeply
rooted in the community.
Wow, that was at least nine garden metaphors
(ten if you're willing to count "peppers") in one
little paragraph about our organization. I suppose
it's natural that horticultural allusions would
sprout up (eleven!) in discussions about a
gardening network. But that's just the low-hanging
fruit! Look around: gardening imagery is constantly
invoked to explain and teach lessons about all
areas of life. The garden is fertile ground that
yields a bounty of metaphors you can organize your
whole life around.
Can you dig it?
The abundance of garden images in our language
shows that a garden is not just a place to grow
food. As a microcosm of the natural world and the
cycle of life, the garden produces excellent models
of how we and our communities can grow and thrive
in ways that are more organic, sustainable, and in
harmony with the natural order.
For example, I am a person of very strong values
and deeply held convictions. I don't live in
accordance with them, but I have them. So I know
that all of these principles that lead to success
and personal satisfaction -- cooperation,
discipline, delayed gratification,
self-sufficiency, and so on -- can be unearthed by
working in a garden. A garden is, well, a garden
where good values take root and flourish as
examples for us in other areas of our lives. And if
we wanted to summarize them all, we would pick a
garden metaphor: You reap what you sow.
The garden metaphor is adaptable to all fields
of human endeavor, including even business and
government. The city of Littleton, Colorado,
actually adopted the garden as its official symbol
of economic development. The garden model was seen
as an alternative to the common practice of
offering costly tax breaks and other incentives to
lure big existing companies from outside, a
top-down approach akin to planting GMO corn and
drenching it with Roundup to obliterate whatever
life remained in the local soil. Under Littleton's
garden model, the city saved money by spending a
much smaller amount (seed capital?) to create a
favorable environment (fertile ground!) for local
entrepreneurs to grow businesses in a culture of
diversity, innovation, and creativity. I don't know
all the details -- when it comes to economics, I'm
much more comfortable on the metaphorical level.
But from what I've read, thousands of successful,
homegrown small businesses are flourishing as a
result of this garden strategy.
On the national level, the garden is the go-to
symbol of hope and renewed economic growth. In
recent interviews, both current Fed chairman Ben
Bernanke and his predecessor Alan Greenspan claimed
to see "green shoots" sprouting in various sectors,
reflecting their cyclical view that an economic
springtime is coming.
We talk about so many fundamental things in
gardening terms because growing food is among the
most basic human acts. So thinking like a gardener
keeps us grounded when we venture out into the
complex modern world. Perhaps in some ways it is
good that the economic crisis is undermining what
used to be generally accepted ways of living -- for
example, insisting that our food be cheap, even if
that means it's unhealthy and gross, so we can
spend our money consuming more important things
like plasma TVs. Ideas like that have to be weeded
out eventually -- they don't give us what we really
need. Gardening leads us back to more natural ways
of thinking about food, the relative value of time
and money, and other very basic things. So it's no
surprise that more people are turning to the garden
as a model for a life that makes more sense and as
a tangible place to start living it. For the
community gardening movement, in other words, these
are the salad days.
Now if you'll excuse me, I must hurry out to the
garden. It's autumn, there's not much left to
harvest out there, and I have to go and take a
leek.
© 2011 John
Hershey
Other Father Issues,
Books
* * *
Parents are the bones on which children sharpen
their teeth. - Peter Ustinov
John Hershey
is a dad, a writer, and a lawyer (in that order).
He writes a syndicated biweekly humor column about
parenting and family life.. His columns have been
published or accepted for publication on websites
and in magazines around the world, from Maine to
Oregon, Colorado down to Texas, and down under in
Australia.
Blood, Phlegm & Bile:
Parenting with Humor appears monthly on
menstuff.org. But, why the gross title? Well, for
one thing these are three substances with which
every parent becomes quite familiar. They were also
called the "humors" by medieval scientists who
believed that the proportion of these bodily fluids
determined a person's health and temperament. So
it's a pun! A pun requiring a lengthy explanation,
but a pun nonetheless. E-Mail
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