Every morning I walk out back to check on the garden, and each morning I find that something else has already beaten me to it.
The green beans - nibbled.
The lettuce - gone.
The blackberries - disappeared.
Even the squash - stripped from its stem.
When I first planted a garden, it was both an act of meditation and act of family gathering. It was my way of introducing my children to the cycles of growth that produce our food so that they wouldn’t grow up not knowing what a tomato looks like on the vine. It was my way of creating a daily habit of attunement to the little ecosystem I’ve created in my backyard. The garden was for me.
My garden has a little tiny pond in it where the birds like to stop for a drink and a bath. It is surrounded by feeders, trees, bushes, and grass - habitats for the many critters that occupy this place. My fence has a few holes in it which I leave unpatched so the local fox and groundhog families can move freely. My dog Rosie knows those holes well as she frequently escapes to explore the neighborhood. At first I thought this garden and this backyard were for myself, but it’s become clear that this place is not mine, not really.
I share it.
I share it with the lumbering groundhog mom who leads her pups right over to the squash. I watch them snack. I share it with the bunnies who sneak invisibly through the trees and bushes to grab a nibble of lettuce. I share it with the birds who rise before me and know the ripening of berries much better than I do. I share it with the beetles, aphids, lightning bugs, and worms that force me to pay closer attention to the phenomena around me.
Some would call this a failed harvest, but I’m learning to see it as something else. A celebration of the nature I sustain here, not as a master of this domain, but as one member among many, living with, not over, this place. This patch of land is not a project to control, it’s a place to share. My role here is no longer gardener, it is host.
In their incredible book Plants in Place, Edward Casey and Michael Marder talk about “arboreal hospitality.” They describe a quiet but profound generosity in how trees, or plants more generally, both take place and give place. By existing and by growing, they both are in place themselves and create habitat for the beings that depend on them:
The remarkable thing is that by taking their places plants give place to other things. In their consumption or decay, they make room for and are succeeded by many other forms of life, indeed by the entire livable world. Covering the whole earth, they bring the world into existence: the world as we and other living creates come to know it.
This is a possibility for us as we learn to attune and to dwell with the more-than-human world in which we participate. We can learn how to take place and give place. My home is plopped down amongst these trees, taking its place on this plot of land I claim to own. In doing so, I’ve created habitat for myself. In this habitat, I’m learning to accept and attune to the other beings that exist here with me.
I still plant, prune, and hope. I still care for this small piece of Lenape land that has been deemed mine by some unknown authority. I still love to feel the dirt under my nails, to smell the strawberries as they ripen in the sun. But I no longer expect the garden to give back to me. Instead, I watch it feed others and that is enough.
There’s a lesson here about teaching, too. I used to think of myself as the gardener. I planted and pruned hoping my students would grow just as I’d imagined they would. But maybe that’s never really been the role. Maybe the more honest position is that of the host. Not the one who makes growth happen, but the one who makes place for it. Like the backyard, the classroom isn’t ours to control. It’s a place we share. A place where learning happens not because we command it to, but because we’ve created the conditions for it to emerge, sometimes unpredictably. As the teacher, we can both take place in the front of our classrooms and give place by allowing our student’s experience to unfold freely. We can tend the garden, knowing that the nourishment grown there is available, freely, to those who cohabitate with us.
This is an inspiring perspective. I feel it knocking against one of my own blocks to sharing.