Welcome to my garden

Some introductory thoughts and feelings

I planted this :)

I recently noticed that something (maybe the only thing) I can pay very close attention to are plants that I am growing. I stare at them lovingly, standing motionless for a long time, like a flamingo. I feel high while I’m doing it. I think this is uncomfortable for neighbors and passersby. 

I have a larger than usual growing space right now because Alex got a job in New Orleans, so I gave up my community garden plot in New York and started planting stuff in the yard behind his apartment. I have been doing this quite vigorously, and sort of without permission from his landlord, as if something terrible will happen if I don’t stuff as many plants into the ground as possible. 

It’s actually kind of hard to not be annoying when writing about gardening. When I try to describe plants, I sometimes tumble down a road that is moist and pious. Do you want to hear me talk about the gentle happy crackle of dry soil soaking up water? As if the very crust of the earth is saying hello to me? I don’t know…

Obviously, a number of writers have escaped this fate. Jamaica Kincaid, prominently. In My Garden (Book), she presents her garden as a source of delight and endless agitation. The world, she writes, “cannot be left out of the garden.” Thomas Jefferson, the colonizers, the plant hunters, can’t be left out of the garden, because they shaped our landscapes and named the plants inside of them. Right now I’m reading Olivia Laing’s new book, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, which finds the world in the garden, too, and her own—also very beautiful—way through it. A garden can launder violence, and it can invite experimentation and repair. 

In response to my last post, a reader gently suggested that I keep this new series fun. And I think that’s good advice that I appreciate and will try to stick to most of the time. But not always? Today, I am stuck on the genocide and ecocide we have all been paying for and watching on Instagram. I am trying to understand the concept of over 13,000 dead children, and how protesting that is somehow impolite to Jewish people such as me. I keep thinking back to the sick bright green of the garden in The Zone of Interest, fertilized by a pile of human ashes. 

I’ve been reading around recently to learn more about plants in Palestine, and doing a bit of a dive into Vivien Sansour, the founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. This profile in The Guardian is a nice introduction to her work. I also read this piece about Sansour in Atmos, where she recalls being tear-gassed while foraging with her nephew for akkoub in the West Bank. “They can’t kill all of us,” she said. 

I liked this: “The seed library’s objective isn’t to preserve seeds for doomsday. It is to keep seeds alive in a living archive, in the land, so they continue to be alive and creative…” 

That’s all for now. Thank you for joining me! Next time maybe I will talk about how to plant a seed.