Gardens (and gardening) as Refuge
The idea for this blog occurred to me when I noticed that my American chestnut tree had a fruit on it. Do you know about the American chestnut (Castanea dentata)? Prior to the 19th century, it was a common tree in eastern North American forests and an important food source for both humans and wildlife. It was all but wiped out when Europeans started importing other chestnut species from elsewhere in the world, which carried with them a deadly blight to which American chestnuts had no resistance. There’s a significant ongoing breeding effort to restore this tree to its native range and Richard Powers writes beautifully and poignantly about the American chestnut in The Overstory. Of course, there’s also lots about them all over the internet.
The lore of this tree and the collective effort to save them prompted me to purchase my own American chestnut seedling about six or seven years ago. Since then, I’ve successfully protected it from the deer and it looks healthy and happy.
A young and healthy American chestnut tree.
This year, it produced a single fruit. It seems like a little thing, but it wasn’t a little thing to me. For me, it was reason to celebrate, a reason for joy, a reason to get excited and take a picture, and share it with people on social media. This tree, due to its once central role in wellbeing and the current collective effort to save it, occupies a place in my imagination as a metric of hope. So, when I saw that it had a fruit, it immediately shifted my perspective and popped me out of anxiety, fear, sadness, and powerlessness, which are states of being that are all-too-familiar to me these days.
I don’t know if this tree is going to survive. The odds are against it, but this one moment of spotting the fruit and celebrating it reminded me of why I garden.
The burred fruit of an American chestnut tree.
Gardening helps preserve my capacity to stay tuned in to this very difficult and scary moment in the United States and elsewhere in the world. It helps me because I know that once reality becomes just too much, I have a refuge. I have a place where I can wander and wonder, a place where I can find little moments of tenacity, resilience, and hope, all of which are qualities that I can take inspiration from. My garden, presuming I can let go of everything else outside of it, demands 100% of my attention and that’s a hallmark of a good refuge.
America needs citizens with moral clarity right now. It needs citizens willing to do the work of protest, of standing up to the authoritarian and racist actions of a powerful federal government. To do that, we also need to take care of ourselves and of each other. Towards that end, I want to offer you a few qualities that I think are important aspects of a refuge.
Forgetting Yourself
I’ve already said that the garden, when I permit it to, demands 100% of my attention. It provides an opportunity to check out of the violence of the current moment and check into something else. For me, that’s a bit like forgetting myself, or at least forgetting the threat and the fear that feels almost constant in most of daily reality. It’s a bit like walking into another dimension.
Hope
A fruit from an American chestnut, a seed sprouting, birds and monarchs returning and reproducing every year.
Wonder and Joy
The other day I looked out my kitchen window and saw a goldfinch on a sunflower, where they often are these days, watching a hummingbird as the hummingbird flew side-to-side, side-to-side, side-to-side, rhythmically and hypnotically, right in front of the goldfinch. Something interesting was happening between the goldfinch and the hummingbird. I had no idea what it was, but I was very glad I saw it because it was something I’d never seen before and it made me laugh. There’s always something happening in the worlds of other creatures and my garden provides a place for them to do their thing…and there is joy (and refuge) in watching (or listening) to them.
(Yes! Frogs are disproportionately represented because they’re disproportionately cute.)
Beauty
When you grow cut flowers, there’s no shortage of beauty in a single bloom, but I’m often stopped in my tracks by the way certain plants look together, or the way the light is hitting certain parts of the garden.
Preoccupation
I have to do a lot of learning to do things the way I need them to be done. Whether it’s figuring out how to restore the area torn up by a sewer replacement, figuring out how to germinate a certain kind of seed, or how to make a pleasing bouquet….when I’m doing this, I’m outside the fear and anxiety. It sustains me so I can stay in the fight.
Gardens and gardening may not be your refuge. Yours may be something else, but my hope for you is that you have found it. All good things to you!
