I become rapidly less and less helpful, opting instead to sit crosslegged and pull the stems and roots one by one, rationalizing to my partner and myself that this is more thorough, will prevent the reappearance of these all-too-willing “pests” and their subsequent second holocaust inflicted by our tools. It’s not that slow, methodical murder is exactly better, rather that it feels less wanton, more conscious somehow and connected.
Reading Don Gayton’s Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden on my bus ride after gardening seems to make sense of some of my moral confusion. For a more careful, less eminently subjective, review, stroll on over to Book Addiction. For me, Gayton's methodical simplicity of approach, detail-oriented and focused on the experience of gardening, jives with my slow, mucky preference. He makes me yearn to compost, as an activity rather than an ideology, and wonder again aloud with MF at the regenerative power of severed worms, who, apparently, eat microbes rather than leaves.
I keep wrestling with my conscience as I tear down ivy and ferociously unearth clusters of nondescript bulbs. My continual fall back to the nondescript is encouraging me to pick up a plant identification guide, to engage in "the slow process of recognizing and committing plants to memory" (64); I feel like this indiscriminate late-stage microcosm of a plant- and insect-based holocaust would be alleviated if I took the time to get to know these plants, first. Perhaps herein lies my tendency to revert to meticulous, patient slowness as I pull each "weed" and all of its roots, then replace as much of the soil as I can. MF's approach is much faster—in the amount of time it takes me to clear two metres, he can normally manage five. Gayton, also reverting to language of warfare and conquest, addresses this tendency to guilt thus:
My arsenal for the weed war is pretty basic. I have my hands, the dandelion fork, a scythe and a dutch hoe. Henry David Thoreau mused about this implement while in his garden, wondering what gave him the right to "make invidious distinctions with his hoe," choosing which plants should live, and which should die. I have none of Mr. Thoreau's qualms. (56)
I, on the other hand, certainly do. If not just for the sake of the discriminate displacement of these plants as groups or individuals, then I am certainly concerned for their dependents—the post-World War civilians teeming with life and left with barren, stripped soil to bake in the May sunshine and eventually starve. And yet, this moral dilemma, this continual confrontation with the very real and immediate impact of human aesthetic intervention, is perhaps the most present I have been in [the pithy, short] ages [of the seemingly interminably young].
Speaking of presence, I intend to ask the Victoria Zen Centre's Abbot, Venerable Eshu Martin, about the morality of gardening according to the Rinzai Zen tradition tonight at the weekly Tuesday sit in the University of Victoria's Interfaith Chapel. Perhaps musing silently on the breath and its destructive, essential tendencies will simplify my guilty gardening. More on this later this evening, I suppose—this book and its setting will have to exist twice, I think.
In the meantime, I shall continue to approach this garden with the overwhelming astral application of significance, hyperbolically (and perhaps accurately) posed by Gayton: "one could even imagine a system of astrology based on trees" (78), an arbourology that distills and elevates. Though certainly a problematically anthropocentric approach to the immediacy of non-human nature, perhaps this quasi-neopagan imposition would indeed provide another kind of lens, one intensely focused on the role of immediacy in a grander sense of the moment.
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