Summer Gardening 5

For many years, my father led the adult class at the Methodist Church in my hometown of Pine Village, Indiana. Perhaps it was there that he honed his understanding of stewardship. As my father was far wiser than I can ever hope to be, it has taken me a long time to begin to comprehend the meaning that my father attached to the concept. The slender tendrils of my thought have grown from my gardening.

Void Where My Beets and Onions Had Grown

Stewardship means leaving things as good as, if not better than, they were when they were acquired. Obtained by earlier generations, such things are left to later generations. Fulfilling the obligation is what is meant by being a good steward.

In my garden, I use no manmade “cides”: herbicides, insecticides, or fungicides. By avoiding the temptation to apply manufactured chemicals, I hope to leave the soil in a healthy condition. I rotate the vegetables from one location within the garden to another, ensuring that legumes periodically return nitrogen to the earth.

Unbelievably Tall Sunflowers in My Garden

I remain aware of birds, butterflies, and bees. I plan a floral border that can sustain all three. Next year, I want to return to a mixture of zinnias, giant marigolds, and other medium-sized flowers, but, after watching flocks of finches appreciating this year’s sunflowers, I believe I should plant some of them, too. Maybe I can anchor the corners of the border with tall sunflowers but plant none in between.

Recycling is part of my effort to be a good steward, and I am always on the watch for broken glass or rusty nails that I can remove from the garden so that no one risks an injury while working or walking there.

My Sunflower Border in Full Bloom

Chuang Tsu said, “At the still-point in the center of the circle one can see the infinite in all things.”* While standing in the middle of my garden and listening to the buzz of the cicadas in mid-August, I perceive that the boundary of my flowers is hardly a boundary at all and that the earth of which my garden is a small part spreads ever outward around the globe. Stewardship of my small portion of the planet is stewardship of the planet. Chuang Tsu commented, “To be constant is to be useful. To be useful is to realize one’s true nature. Realization of one’s true nature is happiness.”

Sunflowers Are Funflowers

If I were to say, “I am a gardener,” my statement would be closer to my true nature and to happiness than if I were to say, “I am a professor.” Even so, both expressions are true, and both link me to the experience of this time and place and to times and places farther off. Stewardship invites recognition of one’s location in the infinite. Stewardship is the ultimate global positioning system.

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*Chuang Tsu Inner Chapters: A New Translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English (New York: Vintage, 1974).

Summer Gardening 3

The grand experiment of growing a second garden went fifty percent bust with the loss of my beets to an animal that ate the tops of the few that had sprouted. My snow peas, though, remained green, promising a good crop. Meanwhile, sparkling waves of goldfinches visited the towering sunflowers. What a pleasure to see so many of the bright yellow birds feasting on the seeds!

My Sunflowers on July 11, 2016

The patch of earth where I grow vegetables occupied much of my spring and summer. You could say I was focused on the garden. Nearly every day found me bending to pull weeds so as to keep the area as productive as possible. In early August, the lack of rainfall prompted me to pump water from the spring-fed well every other day, to carry the buckets to the garden, and to pour them on the row of snow peas and the half rows of gladiolus corms, now in full flower from cool pink to hot pink. I started the corms late, and not all of them thrived.

I noticed that a few of the beans were blooming again. I wondered if I would get another bushel from the spectacularly productive plants.

A Cat Among the Squash on July 11, 2016

At a time when I would have been preparing to teach early American literature in the fall semester, I spent my days as a retiree appreciating the curling tendrils of snow peas and the joyous flutter of goldfinch wings. Life had come down to terms simpler than those to which I had become accustomed during the thirty-four years I had taught a grueling four-course load. While I loved teaching, I was finding that I loved the tranquility of the garden. Under the blazing sun, passages from the great works that I had taught flitted in and out of my memory like finches visiting sunflowers. For me, living in retirement was becoming more elemental: less the elaborate construction of creative minds. The garden presented philosophy in starkest conditions: cycles of life and death, as well as beauty arising from the human touch but taking its own forms without reference to the gardener.

I found the snow peas in the hot soil of the August garden symbolic of Thomas Aquinas. The vital spark sprouted the material plants from the seed peas and unfolded their leaves. Studying their growth inspired my intellectual responses. I was connected to the peas by having planted them, but I was disconnected from their life, which I had not created. I was both in the picture of my garden and out of it. The more I contemplated my vegetables, the less I felt the presence of ego. I did not vanish, for I was necessary to keep the garden weeded; but the “I” so often at the forefront of my waking activities counted for less and was quiet in the face of such a splendid nature that hardly needed me.

I looked forward to dining on fresh snow peas.