A Green Cloak

Here’s my first philosophical entry:

I once had a teacher, Rainer Hasenstab, who described people as being defined through four relationships: relationship to the self, to others, to the land, and to the unknown. As whole beings, and in practice, each of these relationship patterns is just a different projection of our selves. But by focusing on one relationship at a time we can get some traction and make some sense of the whole.

At some level this blog is about our family garden. By zooming in and looking at relationship to the land I get some traction on the phenomena of being human. As I record my perceptions and choices related to the land, I get the opportunity for insight into that relationship. Perhaps as I formulate and select my land use patterns I produce a more accurate reporting of my relationship to the land than if I were to try to use lots of words.

Before getting much farther, I think it is important to tell that I tend to think about plants and soils as a unitary thing. We can break this green cloak of peds, clods, bacteria, humus, roots, fungi, stems and leaves down into various bits and pieces, and that can help us think about what is going on. By labeling and isolating these bits and pieces we can understand the processes and structures at work. In the end it can be very difficult to parse any clean distinctions. There are no solitary actors -- too much interdependence and interaction. So I usually work with this mental image of a living cloak of soil and plants and fungi and bacteria draped on the rocky earth. The land I am talking about here is a self-designing plant-soil system.

So my motive for gardening is really pretty simple. The sun shines down on the land, an endlessly finite budget of energy. That energy is either captured or it is lost. The plant-soil system, the green cloak, grabs carbon from the air to capture and store sun energy in complex organic forms. That is the source of all life. Nothing else makes life – not concrete, not water, not petroleum, not words. There is only this one source of life. We just hang out and eat, somewhere between parasites and symbiants. We can harvest a chunk of the plant-soil system and put it on a styrofoam tray, wrap it in plastic wrap and ship it across the world under refrigeration, and trade it for currency, but it is still the same thing. It is still sun energy trapped in the green cloak, and we still need it to survive. So I think of landscape design as a kind of devotional art, but also an art of survival, because if our relationship to the plant-soil system is symbiotic than we live, and if it is not we will die. I really think it is that simple.

So gardening is about being in an effective relationship with the land – with a plant-soil system. And making it a right-relationship, so we can grow the green fabric, and maintain life.