Solomon's Garden

The best-tended garden is subject to frost. All the labor and all the fertilizer will not extend it one day beyond one night of frost.

Oh, it doesn’t seem fair, of course, but it is the way of the world. All our glorious efforts and designs have an expiration date. We wake up one morning and every one of our flowers from which we had hoped to get some more blooms and every one of our vegetables from which we had hoped to get one more crop have turned to an unrecognizable, and very sad, puddle of mush.

Gardens are metaphors of all human endeavors. What could be more full of promise (except maybe a hedge fund promoter) than a seed catalogue in February? Ideas begin to turn into reality as the spring progresses, and then summer seems to propel winter’s ideas into the stratosphere. But all too soon, so soon, the stillness of the frost.

Gardens teach patience, diligence, and acceptance. We must accept that there are forces beyond our control. We must accept that nature knows better than we. We must accept that nothing is achieved without effort. We must accept that all things end. And we must accept that all the schedules are on a timetable of a higher power.

People who don’t have gardens, if they know these things, know them only as academic abstractions. On the other hand, those who garden, on whatever scale, understand that the garden is where all knowledge is made real, where philosophy and reality meet, and where the hours spent in the garden are hours spent in touch with the eternal.

Solomon’s garden is better than any library, lecture, or learned treatise into the mind of God, into His will. Pope says that “the proper study of mankind is man,” and that is true, but man is an abstraction, and abstractions can only truly be known by indirection. In other words, by metaphors, analogies. All learning is grounded in physical reality. But nothing beats a garden for providing both physical and metaphysical pleasure.

I don’t like, trust, or understand people who don’t appreciate dirt. Unless infirm and incapable of doing garden work, one should never hire others to do the gardening. Theirs will be only a job, they will be only functionaries, and the results will be symbolically imperfect, though perhaps pretty. One can appreciate fully only his own dirt. Employees, alas, can’t appreciate YOUR dirt. Only you can do that.

Frost. And all one’s efforts and hopes lie in ruin. Whatever will propel one to do this all over again? The results will be absolutely the same. Again, we must rely on Pope to provide the pithy rationale: Hope springs eternal in the human breast, Man never is but always to be blessed.

Gardens work on yearly cycles. Every year we get a chance to beat the odds and work against the forces of destruction. Of course, we lose, but ah, February and those catalogues!