Our first child would be born in April, 2021. Late that winter we were talking about the garden. Gardening season was imminent (it never really stops in Texas), and we were both eager to get our hands in the dirt. But we told each other that things were about to be different. The amount of time that we’d spent gardening since moving to our home in 2015 was unsustainable, we thought. It would be okay, we said. We assured each other that neglected flower beds and unproductive vegetable plots wouldn’t bother us. Besides, we would have more important things to do.
Our boy would be the new project. He would become the greatest show on dirt, much bigger than okra plants that produce and bell pepper plants that don’t. C.S. Lewis noted somewhere that if people are immortal, then the least important person is infinitely more important than, say, the Roman Empire. My son is not the least important person in the world, at least to me, and our garden, I believe, is less important than the Roman Empire. In other words, we finally had important work to do.
Besides, wasn’t the garden an ersatz child during our seven years of childlessness? We might always enjoy gardening, but it wouldn’t matter as much anymore. This is the story of how we were wrong, how, since our first son was born, and especially since our second came along in late 2023, we’ve gardened more, not less.
Some of the reasons are down to earth. For one thing, we were home more. Two introverted homebodies suddenly had more time at home than they had bargained for. We needed something to do, something physically and intellectually engaging, something that took us outside, something that could be worked at in short stints.
For another, we kept on liking gardening, and we kept having new ideas. What seemed a mature part of the garden one day was obviously only a nascent five o’clock shadow of what it might be the next. When we’d moved in, we’d planned the more intensively cultivated part of the garden in three areas: orchard, herb garden, and vegetable garden. After four or five years of humdrum yields and mediocre aesthetic value, we began getting more and more interested in mixing things up. Without having stumbled across the idea of permaculture yet, we were beginning to the think that gardening of all kinds should happen in the same places, to the benefit of everyone and everything involved. Making that transformation (it is still ongoing) would involve a lot of work, work we were eager to undertake.
But we also had a stronger sense of our home as an entity than we’d had before our son was born. Yes, he was a useless loudmouth, but he gave the place more telos. The garden (and I’m using the term in the British sense here) wasn’t just, or even mainly, our retreat anymore. It was the place our boy would soon play, explore, and—hopefully in the right spots—dig. More importantly, it was the place where we would all work together toward a common goal.
Some of my own best childhood memories are set in my parents’ vegetable garden. Through the fall and winter my dad (and I) would gather windfalls from our heavily wooded backyard and have a series of spectacular bonfires. These were always events. Lawn chairs and drinks (Dr. Pepper, tomato juice, or Schlitz) came out of the shed (which had a minifridge), and my mom, sister, and I watched in agonized suspense as my dad poured way too much gasoline on the pile. A struck match, a breathless moment, a loud roar, and my dad fleeing from an out of control flame: this sequence, which always seemed to play out the same, is emblazoned on my mind.
In the spring my dad roto-tilled the winter’s ashes into the soil. My mom dug rows, and when the time came, planted seedlings. I loved the neat rows of squash and beans, and I loved the sights, sounds, and smells of putting up pickles in the kitchen. It was a different kind of gardening from the no-dig, permaculture-inspired garden we are attempting. But it was productive, and it gave my parents the opportunity to do the kind of work they enjoyed. It was one of their few shared endeavors. I couldn’t imagine not giving my own children some version of these memories that now, at a distance of thirty-five years, seem not just magical but sacred.
There is also the question of family culture. My wife and I are both discontents in this post-modern culture, and we struggle not to give in to embittered pessimism: hardly what we want to bequeath to our offspring. We’ve both known for a while that finding alternative ways of being is an important antidote to cynicism, just as the pursuit of virtue is the best way to vanquish vice. I don’t mean to make us sound admirably radical or notably weird, merely to point out that the quest for things, however small, that we find good, true, and beautiful has drawn us back from helpless anger or despair about the state of things.
We recently read The Liturgy of the Land: Cultivating a Catholic Homestead by Jason Craig and Thomas Van Horn, an excellent book for young families exploring the idea of family culture, how families ought to relate to their home, and how the material culture of the home relates to the spiritual health of the family. Our home hardly counts as a homestead, yet the authors admirably describe what we’ve hoped for in a home: a place that is truly the family’s center of gravity. We did not want our home to be a place where everyone happens to stop when they are too tired to keep going, or a place where we simply “relate” to each other, lamely trying to convey experiences that weren’t shared. Instead of being pulled in every direction from home, we want our family to be pulled toward home. How can that happen if no meaningful activity—no production—takes place there, creating the bond that only shared work can create?
It’s early days. The boys are three-and-a-half and fifteen months. The three-year-old picks food from the garden and eats it on the spot. He has also claimed possession of a small garden bed and defends that claim as zealously as a micro-nation defends each square inch of its territory (I was once stopped from pruning a peach branch that was growing too low on the grounds that it wasn’t in fact growing in my ground.) I am happy that we made the transition into parenthood without giving up on gardening. I am happy that the boys enjoy the garden too. But who knows how it will be in five years? Will the boys insist on playing lots of sports and doing other activities that pull us away from home more than we would like? Will they willingly work with us in the garden, or at least spend time with us when we do? I don’t know, but I am thankful that we at least have a vision to invite them to share.
Image Via: GetArchive
