Monty Python and the Winter Garden

One of my all-time favorite Monty Python skits is the infamous “Parrot Sketch”. The bird ain’t dead, just asleep. Resting. We laugh in part because it captures hilariously the lengths to which we will go—delusional at times—to avoid the obvious. Things die. We age and face the same reality.
Part of the appeal of gardening is that it quietly debunks our tendencies to evade the basic rhythms of life. Beautiful as they were, the annuals will not be back next summer. If the winter gets too nasty, we begin to worry about the perennials. Sobering stuff. Still, as gardeners we pick ourselves up, plant and cultivate. We still hope.
Our world is experiencing a powerful wake-up call, learning a lot about limits these days. These are hard truths that make us question our capacity to delude ourselves about boundaries and what really matters in life. I find myself watching the DOW like most semi-retirees, well aware how much life can and will change in the months and years ahead. And when it all becomes too discouraging, I pick up the first of the garden catalogs and begin to dream.
We are no longer a pastoral society where survival is measured by the actions of a handful of people in tiny frontier villages or the capacity of a plot of ground in our or the neighbor’s back yard to sustain us. Our world has changed. But some things are constant, all the same.
A seed goes into the ground, and if tended faithfully, grows. A flower buds, blossoms gloriously and fades but even in its passing, enriches the soil around it. No excesses here, I find myself thinking, unless it is the unexpected largesse of zucchinis that can be left on a neighbor's porch. Plant foods can work miracles, but finite ones.
In these ambivalent times, one of the greatest gifts we can give to coming generations is the legacy of gardening. Gardening is the ultimate reality check. It is hard to fake a balance sheet in a flower bed. We reap what we sow. The values I like to think I learned gardening alongside my own grandmother have never seemed more relevant. Patience. Commitment. Good stewardship. Respect for the earth. Appreciation of the simple beauty of a rose drenched in morning dew.
There is talk that President Obama’s chef, Sam Bass, is dreaming about a vegetable garden on the lawn of the White House. Planting things on the lawn of our nation’s Mall is not the worst of ideas by any stretch of the imagination, either. But I would insist that our elected officials each take turns nurturing and caring for it.