garden – Notes From the Potting Shed

Gardening as Liturgy: Part 2

Tending a garden is slow work. Little can be achieved in a hurry. Germinating, training, ripening, improving the soil – even with the best conditions – requires a lot of waiting. There are few short cuts which do not compromise the long-term health of the garden.

I am struck by how loose my control over my garden really is. At the mercy of weather, pests and disease, there are significant limits to the influence I am able to wield over the process. My intervention might be able to keep a plant healthy, or even hasten its growth, but always with the risk of damage. In this last year I have had very little time for my garden. But the snowdrops still came in February, daffodils in March, tulips in April. The soft fruits are plentiful, foxgloves and nigella have seeded themselves bountifully and the echinops are putting out great thistles. All this has happened in spite of me – I can claim very little credit.

For the most part, gardening is dull and repetitive. What little work I have done over the last year has mostly been weeding – the ultimate war of attrition. Weeding is never done; there will always be some that escape and, without fail, more will have grown back in a week’s time. It would be easy to despair at the futility of it, but you cling on to the hope of summer – you imagine your flourishing borders unencumbered by competing weeds – and somehow that makes the drudgery worth it.

The sentimentalist in me gets pretty disheartened by all of this. I find it easier to like the idea of gardening far more than the actual practice of gardening. It’s easy to idealise the beauty of a well-tended garden and to persuade yourself that it can be achieved with minimal effort or cost. But, like all sentimentalism, this is a recipe for disappointment and disillusionment.

Here it might be helpful to recap James K.A. Smith’s idea of a liturgy. We are what we love: where we focus our desire and how we imagine the good life forms our identity. And our desires, in turn, are shaped by repetitive practices and rituals. Think of how the practice of shopping may train us to desire certain products and to imagine a good life that involves an abundance of possessions, or how the practice of weightlifting may train us to desire a certain body shape and to imagine a good life that involves physical prowess. These identity-forming practices are what Smith calls liturgies.

I think gardening is a liturgy. Or, to take it a step further, I wonder if gardening is best thought of as a counter-liturgy. The idea here is that we are, all of the time, being formed by liturgies. Most of those liturgies are secular liturgies – liturgies which mis-direct our desires towards things other than (and often opposed to) the kingdom of God. Discipleship, says Smith, often attempts to counter these secular liturgies with ideas and beliefs – thinking the right things – which is always doomed to failure because we are not purely rational beings. Instead, we need to counter those secular liturgies with counter-liturgies – practices which re-order our desires towards the Kingdom.

Gardening re-orients my desires in many ways.

The slowness of gardening counters those secular liturgies which train me to hurry, to rush, to compete. It calls into question the story of joyless, restless efficiency and production, and situates me in a better story – of seasons and patience and margin.

The limits of my control over my garden counter those secular liturgies which teach me to be a rugged, sovereign individual – the lonely captain of my fate. It calls into question the story of ever advancing technological innovation ushering in a utopia where all risk (including the perpetual risk of love) is eliminated, and it situates me in a better story – where there is beauty in knowing the limits of my wisdom and foresight. Where community, humility and integrity matter more than conquest, safety and comfort.

The dullness and mundanity of gardening counter those secular liturgies which insist that the only life living is one of spontaneity, self-centred hype, exaggerated achievements and rampant hedonism. It calls into question the story of empty celebrity and the unrealistic expectations of an Instagram-able life, and it situates me in a better story of rhythm and discipline, of humble aspirations, of good honest hard work, and hope of redemption. A story that values the glamourless work of character formation and showing up to reality higher than the synthetic sheen of marketing, relentless maintenance of my personal ‘brand’ and the untethered morality of being ‘true to myself.’

In so many ways, gardening is a counter-liturgy which is transplanting me and my desires from the lifeless, claggy soil of late modern secular culture into the deep, rich loam on the Kingdom. That uprooting is not a given. It’s contested. In the garden, there is always the temptation towards hacks and shortcuts. It is always tempting to squash the redemptive potential by doubling down on those secular liturgies I have been schooled in. But slowly, imperfectly, by the grace of God, I trust that my garden is an arena for counter-liturgy – for transformation.

Gardening as Liturgy: Part 1

In his essay, Think Little, Wendell Berry says that ‘I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening.’ It’s a good challenge to my tendency to assume that big problems require big solutions. I struggle to believe that small, local, personal action could make any significant dent in an issue as massive as the climate crisis.

Berry is not saying that we should opt for small, local actions (like gardening) instead of pursuing change on the level of national and international politics, economics and business. He is warning that we should be sceptical of any ‘big’ ecological solutions that are abstracted from any meaningful, real relationship of cultivation and care-giving with the land.

I think that Berry would claim that the root causes of the climate crisis are a fundamentalist addiction to limitless growth, to ever accelerating technological innovation and to the assumption that bigger is better. He is sceptical of solutions that uncritically perpetuate those root causes and insists that real change needs to begin in cultivating deep, stable, flourishing local economies.

‘Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence – that is, the wish to preserve all of its humble households and neighborhoods’
‘Word and Flesh,’ in Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (London: Penguin, 2018)

Whether or not gardening really is the best form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment, the claim got me thinking. Perhaps I have too limited, even too secular, a view of gardening. What if gardening is more than just a nice hobby or a good, mindful leisure activity? What if it’s actually closer to a spiritual discipline – a practice that is not merely an expression or outworking of my identity, but is involved in forming and shaping my identity?

James K.A. Smith is a writer I’ve been wanting to explore for a while – I’ve had multiple friends recommend him and read multiple authors who seem heavily influenced by his work. Recently, I finally read Desiring the Kingdom where he unpacks the idea of liturgies. Let me try a brief summary:

Much of western protestant theology, he says, operates with a faulty philosophical anthropology. In other words, an inaccurate understanding of what it means to be human. This ‘rationalist’ distortion, inherited from the Enlightenment, has tended to treat human beings primarily as ‘thinking things’ – as minds which happen to have bodies attached. This has led to an overemphasis in Christian education and discipleship on doctrine, on believing the right things, and a neglect of the importance of what we do with our bodies: practices and rituals.

Smith argues that a holistic, biblical anthropology sees human beings as embodied creatures.

‘What if the core of our identity is located more in the body that the mind? Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it’s a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly.’
James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009), 32

Our desires – what we love, what we hope for, our visions for the good life – shape us on a deeper level than what we believe on a purely intellectual level. Hence Smith’s snappy phrase ‘you are what you love.’ And our desires are not innate or static – they are dynamic and fluid – and formed by liturgy. Smith has a specific definition of liturgies: they are embodied rituals that are formative for identity. Liturgies are the practices which shape who we become.

All of us, all of the time, are being shaped by liturgies – whether religious worship or ‘secular liturgies’ like watching TV or shopping – our desires are shaped in particular directions and trained towards a certain imagination of what human flourishing is. And so I want to explore gardening as a liturgy – as an identify-forming habit. In what ways are the mundane routines of sowing and harvesting, tending and weeding shaping what I love, and therefore shaping the person I am becoming? My hope is that the reflections that follow this post will allow me to familiarise myself with Smith’s ideas at the same time as reframing how I think about gardening.

The Blackbirds – part 1

Years ago, when I shared this house with three other guys, we were very kindly given a sixteen-foot shed. We didn’t need anything so big, but friends were getting rid of it, and we didn’t have any other offers. Over a number of weeks, we disassembled it and then did the best our limited carpentry skills would allow us to put it all back together in our back garden where, aside from the occasional collapsed roof, it has remained, rickety and patched up, but undeniably spacious. It is a nice place to be when it isn’t too cold. We have an old dining table in there. When I want a change of scene, away from distractions and beyond the reach of wifi, I sit there and write. Hence, notes from the potting shed.

A few weeks ago, however, I discovered that I had guests in the potting shed. A couple of blackbirds had decided to build a nest on top of a cardboard box filled with wood I was drying for the fire pit. Either they had built it very fast, or I was spectacularly unobservant for a while because when I discovered the nest it was fully constructed. And they had laid eggs.

I panicked a little when I saw the eggs. Haunted by childhood memories of baby blackbirds attempting flight prematurely and meeting a messy end on the pavement outside our house, I decided I needed to ring my mum for advice. Much, I am sure, to the relief of the blackbirds, she told me that I must not move the nest, and that I should give them as much space as I could.

So that was that. A summer of writing at my shed table written off because some blackbirds had lazily mistaken a box of twigs in a shed for a nice regular tree. I’ve done my best to be generous to the squatters – using an old dust sheet to partition the shed off – their half and my half.

Mild inconvenience though it is to cede half of my shed to a couple of birds with dubious taste in nest-making, Mr and Mrs Blackbird have steadily won me over to their cause. They work tirelessly and selflessly for their young. I oversaw one particular act of heroism when the dominant cat of the neighbourhood came prowling along the nearby fence. This is not a cat to be messed with – I have seen him fighting the other cats in the neighbourhood off so that he can claim exclusive toileting rights to my garden. But Mr Blackbird’s screeches and repeated divebombing saw the cat beat a hasty retreat when he ventured a little too close to the nest.

From the endless supply of worms that Mr and Mrs Blackbird are now bringing into the shed, and the tiny chorus that greets their entry, it seems that the eggs have hatched over past few days. I cannot help but admire the tenacity and nurture of these parents. They have slowly worn away my frustration at the inconvenience of it all and I’m finding myself really quite emotionally invested in their survival. We will see what the coming weeks have in store.