Why Gardens?
I want to travel to design and build gardens but also to uncover stories about how we grow and eat food. As I write this I’m sitting in an apartment in San Isidro, Argentina, a few miles north of Buenos Aires, in 97 degree heat, looking out over the city.
When I was in college I became a little obsessed, as only a college student can, with films by Andrei Tarkovsky. I fell in love particularly with The Mirror, shot in the late 70’s in Russia. I might have loved The Sacrifice even more, filmed so beautifully on the island of Faro off Sweden, if the narrative hadn’t intruded. Not because I’d wanted to improve the story; I wanted to remove it completely.
For years I hoped to see the world through these films, as a direct experience of the natural world without benefit of a story line. So maybe it’s inevitable that I looked at my first experiences growing food through Tarkovsky’s perspective. Images of walking through the snow, pulling coins out of the mud in The Sacrifice, or a long tracking shot of Margarita Terekhova running in slow motion through the rain in The Mirror, changed the way I looked at nature and, by extension, my gardens.
In other words I used to believe that a garden is first and foremost a place to connect with the elements. Food expresses our relationship to the environment, and planting seeds or grafting fruit trees brings us into close daily contact with sun, soil, wind, rain. But there’s something else to the foods we plant, and as I get older it’s the stories inherent in these seeds and cuttings that interest me most.
When we abandon our gardens we neglect foods handed down for generations, and they quickly disappear. Even gardeners tend to forget that these foods didn’t spring intact for us from the ground. With the exception of wild foraged foods like mushrooms, nearly everything we eat is the product of human design, and a food garden is the expression of thousands of years of culinary and horticultural history. For better or for worse, plant and animal breeding represents one of humanity’s greatest creative endeavors.
In the past 100 years we’ve moved away from the land and forgotten our stories about the foods we eat. How did that tomato growing in my garden in Maine make its way from Central America to the Ukraine, and from there in an immigrant’s pocket to Pennsylvania, and then into my collection? Imagine all the hands it passed through and the changes it underwent along the way. Should I focus most on trying to preserve the variety as it is now? Or follow the curiosity that brought us these foods by letting them evolve for new conditions and tastes?
I want to travel to design and build gardens, but also to uncover stories about how we grow and eat food. As I write this I’m sitting in an apartment in San Isidro, Argentina, a few miles north of Buenos Aires, in 97 degree heat, looking out over the city. Despite the 17 million people living here it’s remarkably green and beautiful, with quiet streets, row upon row of sycamores and mimosas, and clear blue skies. In the next three weeks, while helping to build two school gardens, I hope to learn more about how people in this culturally diverse city grow and think about their food.
Eat by Design
Sunday, December 30, 2007
A thriving kitchen garden in a shantytown area north of Buenos Aires.
