TIME, DISTANCE and GROWING THINGS 2.0

This was my second attempt at a 700-word assignment on “Why I Garden”. It is written for Fort Worth Magazine’s April 2011 edition. This is the version that was accepted, (after a few edits).

How far back into your family tree do you go before there’s a farmer? 

For me it is just a few branches down, my Grandfather Ray grew row crops and raised poultry just outside of Youngstown, Ohio.  I have a copy of his driver’s license; listed under his profession is “hunter” so I’m not that far removed from a “hunter/gatherer” in the family line either.  His middle son; my father, deferred on the family acreage and joined the ROTC. After his stint with the Air Force he was hired by American, trained in Dallas and based in Nashville. He bought 2 acres of old pasture land that sat just above the newest Corp of Engineer lake.  He flew 36 years for AA and spent the same length of time anchored on that good soil, expanding out his estate of grasses, flowers and shrubs into every nook. He has 30-year-old rhododendrons the size of elephants and thickets of azaleas taller than a fence that my 4-year-old can’t wade through. My wife and I married there, alongside twenty kinds of flowering plants whose names he says so fast I can never remember any of them. It was a late Spring that year and all the flowers seemed to know the right weekend to take bloom. Not a single flower was picked for the tables, we merely lined the tent against a long row of them and let them lean in as if to watch the dancing. 

Like my father and his father before him I enjoy working the land, something I didn’t become aware of till later in life. I didn’t even consider garden space in my first house, it perched on a steep sloop facing east with woods in the back.  I had to build a series of 4x4 beds terraced down the side of my drive to find enough sunshine. I expanded where there was only marginal sun to justify it.  I spent two summers standing in a small and steep front yard leaning on a hoe, masterminding complicated schemes of retaining walls and bed expansion. My wife hoped my wood shop would distract me but I kept starting the next landscape project. The only way to keep me from replacing all the grass with garden was to send me to Texas. So here I am in Fort Worth scouting houses on my days off.  My realtor Susie knows to walk me to the back yard first so I can get out my compass and trace out the sun’s arc like I’m trying to find the entrance to some hidden Egyptian tomb.

Getting on your knees and digging into a rich, black soil makes a wonderful quiet, much like staring at a campfire at night.You know that somehow you are more connected to the moment than what you are seeing in that moment. There is a comfort there, a familiarity absent words. In an age of instant gratification gardening is to to find pleasure in an incremental progress exactly equal to watching grass grow. My two boys are still young but starting to get it, especially when the early peas come in. The reward comes in the form of bounty. To set a table with food from your own land makes you both a provider and proficient. There is something about growing your own food, about bypassing the general commerce of things at a price better than wholesale. You’ve side stepped all the middle men; you are the producer, the transportation hub, the retailer and the restaurant. It is a way that runs deep in the past but is so satisfying in the pragmatic. To eat from your garden is to reek of Green. 

But the best thing I like about gardening lay in the biology. In each seed there is a twist of DNA, the merging of two parents; a duplication but purposefully not exact (the 2nd class lever of adaptation not to move the earth but too fill it). In your hand it is something not quite living but carrying the instructions on how to do just that. In the right soil and season along with a little water it exhibits a desire. Something expected as destiny would demand but none the less always such a surprise when it first breaks through. The reminder of the farmer in us all. 

Here is a look at my garden back in Tennessee as featured on the local PBS station in Nashville. Annette Shrader is a jewel and wish she was my neighbor.