The garden out back becomes a home’s extension
This may just be our common culture’s lost season. Bizarrely enough, this cool and wet spring is perfect for our gardens. The complement to living in the confines of our built world in this time of sequestration is that many are finding that what we grow is the flip side to the hard edges of where we live — our homes.
You have to have dirt to garden, but the dirt can be in containers and in the smallest of rentals. However, many live in suburban America in order to have a garden, a patch of earth that can be loved and worked into growth. I think in this time of isolation, our relationship to our immediate environs has intensified, and what we grow has become more important in more people’s lives that at any time since supermarkets happened.
So growing our own food may come to mean more in our day-today lives in a time of threatened shortages. As reported by NPR, Leah Penniman, director of a community farm, Soul Fire Farm in New York, takes that to another level: “We can’t fundamentally have freedom and autonomy and dignity and community power without some measure of control of our food.”
We can either treat the plants we grow as our pets — living within and without our four walls — or we can treat what we grow as a natural extension of our homes. That means gardening of all sorts may become a basic part of how more people live. The places that I help create for families either have gardens woven into their design, or the plants are visitors, bought, not grown.
This season may mean that home design changes to reflect a new value of facilitating all the ways we can garden. Adam Farstrup of Greenwich feels this new urge to extend his home out into its site: “For those of us in the prime of our careerfocused years, spring gardening is often jammed into the few spare moments between work and parenting. Quarantine spring has given us not only the luxury of time to garden but luxury of time to enjoy the garden. More than just a distraction from COVID, I find myself able to really enjoy and appreciate the daily changes that happen in the spring garden. During normal times I might get to see those changes once a week. Now, they serve not only as a source of beauty but a reminder that life finds a way and renews itself year after year.”
Sue Groner of Bedford, N.Y., echoes the sense that her home now has an extended meaning.
“Being home and watching the daily changes of spring has made us more in touch with the earth —literally!” she says. “My husband, Bill, and I are germinating seeds with a heating mat and grow lights as well as planting directly in our garden. The daily changes bring us joy and wonder as if something that seems so simple and ordinary, is really another one of nature’s miracles.”
Joni Mitchell implored “we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden,” but that essential desire has new meaning in a time of sheltering in place, and in a glorious season of growing, whether we planted it our not, the stir-crazy housebound have a new-found joy at home.
Home takes on new definitions depending on how we live. Extending life to include the growth that is already all around us when we are house bound means we will change how we think of our homes. I can hardly wait to eat the results.
“BEING HOME AND WATCHING THE DAILY CHANGES OF SPRING HAS MADE US MORE IN TOUCH WITH THE EARTH —LITERALLY!”