The Homestead Gardener: Defining Homestead Gardening
by Derrick Gentry –
What Do You Think You’re Doing?
A reader recently asked me what I meant exactly by a homestead garden. I knew that question was going to come up sooner or later. And it is a slippery slope from there, leading to a series of other pressing questions: Who is this column for, anyway? What kind of writing are we to expect here? It it a “how to” column, or is it a “how to think about it” essay-like thing? Is it cis-genre, trans-genre, meant for gardeners and/or farmers, for city and/or suburban folk, or only for those already committed homesteaders with speckled hens and heirloom beans?
I can offer here only partial answers to these questions, mostly because I do not know what the answers are myself. I do know that I want to keep my audience as wide as possible, and that I’d like to continue to find out who my audience is by way of correspondence. As for the question of how to define “homestead gardening,” my only response is that I would like to use this space to figure that out. I have been thinking about what homesteading means and the extent to which “bringing nature home” captures the enterprise and its attractions. I think it does, but that it is only one part of it. I have also been thinking about the attractions themselves, which are many and sometimes hard to articulate. I have not even fully thought through many of the ideals I have instinctively committed myself to.
So where does homestead gardening fall along the spectrum that includes everyone from windowsill gardeners and tomato-loving hobbyists and multi-acre farmers? Let’s take stock of who is in the room. First for all, there are those who have no land and no garden but are interested in thinking about such things. We love you. Then there is that large number of us who dedicate a small plot and the time every year to growing tomatoes and herbs and other things worth growing at home. We love you, too. A tiny handful of us grow a greater variety of food on a larger scale and sell it on the market. Yes, we love you too, and thank you for the hard work and for what you send our way. And then there is the vast majority of us, who purchase most or all of our food from people we have never met who live some distance from where we live.
Most of us, in other words, go to the store. And I am not sure we love ourselves as much as we ought to. Getting others to do things for us “more efficiently” is an arrangement that has certainly had its benefits. We have more free time, which we fill up with activities like gardening and other perhaps less rewarding and newly obligatory tasks. But one thing we all increasingly have in common is a mournful recognition of what we have lost in the deal, along with an awareness of the great price that we actually pay for living this lifestyle (environmentally and otherwise). Our despair over the bind we have gotten ourselves in can sometimes take the form of a learned helplessness.
But we have much more in common than our sense of despair and our names on an unwritten contract. And we are not helpless; at least I do not think so. One other thing we all have in common is that we have a home — a home in the world, at the very least. That is another reason for embracing the term “homestead.” For a while, I thought about writing under the title of the “Village Gardener” to provide some continuity with my wonderful role model of a predecessor, Georgeanne Vyverberg. But I am drawn to the broader metaphorical resonance of the homestead and would like to broaden the scope of this column a little bit, and (for better or worse) make it a bit more discursive and long-winded. And because homesteading overlaps with so many other pursuits — small-scale gardening and larger-scale agriculture, conservation and cultivation, the basic pursuit of making and keeping a home — I would like this column to establish something of an ongoing dialogue between all of these points of view. I am myself a container for many of those divergent points of view.
It’s funny how linguistic metaphors, like compost piles, can come to signify larger ideals. The The concept of a “homestead” captures a number of tensions and paradoxes, including the shaky but intriguing parallel between a home economy and the economy of nature (i.e., ecology). I like the economy metaphor, because the word is itself a metaphor with some history. The word “economy” derives from the Greek word “oikonomia,” which may be translated as management or care of household. Take a little more liberty with that translation, and you get “care for our common home,” which is the subtitle of Pope Francis’s widely read encyclical on spiritual ecology from a few years back. And finally, the word “ecology,” which is a much newer word than most people appreciate, derives from the 18th-century concept of the “economy of nature,” the title of a widely read article of 1775 (in Latin!) by botanist Carl Linnaeus. Am I onto something, or am I a butterfly-chasing idealist letting myself be led astray by mere words? I do not know. I’d like to think and write and talk about it.
I look forward to having your company and your assistance as I use this forum to reflect upon what it is that you and I are doing or think we are doing. And if you are reading this, then you are my intended audience. (Good enough for now?)
Darwin Comes Home
In writing this column I am also seeking some historical and cultural context, some models and precedents. That means I will be devoting at least some space here every month to examining my ideals and understanding my own limited experience in light of what others have said.
I have been re-reading and thinking a lot lately about The Natural History of Selborne, a lovely and modest book written in the late 18th century by Gilbert White, who is often considered the father of modern ecology and one of the first examples of the familiar modern attitude of natural piety, or reverence toward nature: all creatures great and small, every creature filling a pre-ordained ecological niche and having value by virtue of occupying a place within the harmonious scheme.
White wrote at a time when the “economy of nature” was a new and powerful metaphor. White, however, clearly understood this metaphor in the oikonomia, “care for our common home” sense. The Natural History of Selborne is focused entirely on the local ecology of his home in the tiny rural village of Selborne, England. The book also contains a famous passage that is one of the first acknowledgements on record of the important ecological niche filled by the earthworm. The earthworms he was talking about are ones he observed near where he lived.
White’s 18th-century vision seems quite relevant to our interest today in “going local” and restoring an ecological sense of place that has been dissolved, or at least blurred, by the logic of the global economy. From a historical point of view, The Natural History of Selborne was one of the key early influences upon the thinking of Charles Darwin. It also gave inspiration to the naturalist ethic of Henry David Thoreau. When Thoreau wanted to say a few words for Nature, he was speaking at least partly in the voice of Gilbert White.
I am interested in what happened to these early ideas about nature and the sense of place that now seem so self-evidently on the right track but somehow fell off the radar in the intervening years. It is a fascinating story, and I think the best way to tell it is to look at how White’s ideas evolved in the mind of Darwin within the context of changing attitudes in the 19th century I will tell you what I know based on what I have read…
Darwin’s faith in White and the economy/harmony of nature metaphor was seriously challenged when he made his famous visit to the Galapagos in the 1830s. The steaming, volcanic Galapagos islands were as far as one could imagine from the image of the idyllic English cottage garden that Gilbert White had portrayed. On that other side of the world, Darwin discovered disorder and randomness and excess, too many creatures cast for the same part, ecological imbalance, grotesque violence and suffering that had little to do with the pro forma pas de deux of predator-prey relations. Another visitor, Herman Melville, wrote a decade later that “in no world but a fallen world could such lands exist.” Darwin recorded in his diary the discovery on one island of the skull of a ship’s captain who had been murdered by his crew. Significantly, Darwin compared the appalling but entirely natural spectacle of the Galapagos to the blighted and hellish landscape of Staffordshire, where iron foundries were belching out smoke and beginning the 200-year trend of treating the atmosphere as an open sewer. By the late nineteenth century, the Galapagos tortoises had been hunted to near extinction, while in the Atlantic the great auk had already been slaughtered to complete extinction.
The romance with nature came to an end in Europe in the mid 19th century. What upset people like Darwin and so many others was not so much the displacement of humans from their central place in the scheme. Rather, it was losing the idea of the harmonious system itself — a system that we could idealize and within which we could live harmoniously (and therefore meaningfully). It was the disharmony between what we thought we valued, and what we imagined to be the source and guarantor of those values.
There have always been, and there still are, plenty of reasons for growing disenchanted with nature. The unpleasant facts have always been there; we do not need to travel to the other side of the world. One might think of the massacre of an entire flock of chickens by a raccoon who has no interest at all in getting enough protein. Or the lack of a maternal instinct in some animals (guinea hens, for example) who tend to abandon their young. Or a cat torturing the chipmunk purely for sport. Or the way violent rape is the preferred “natural” form of mating for certain species. These are simply facts that we choose or choose not to dwell upon and incorporate within our world view.
“Nature red in tooth and claw”: That was one lesson to draw from the newly dwelt upon facts. And it was the lesson drawn by many people in the Victorian period, partly based on Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Then down the slippery slope they went: If nature is this way, and human nature is that kind of nature, then time to pull out, time to put away the mirror, and time to start making up our own rules. We live in a place that is not our own; so let us take ownership, by violence if necessary, and remake the world in our own image.
It is all the more surprising, then, that once the Victorian disenchantment with nature had settled in like a London fog, Darwin nevertheless felt the need to revisit Gilbert White and his more harmonious and value-laden ecological vision. Darwin was not seeking consolation; he was seeking an alternative and compelling vision. Darwin had already followed White’s example by coming back home to England and settling on a homestead-like property called Down House, with a cozy cottage garden and some land where he could go for walks and focus his observational skills on the local ecology. Partly inspired by the passage on earthworms in White’s Natural History, and conducting all of his research at home, Darwin began work on his final book with the catchy title of: The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms.
There are many people who find something deeply moving in Darwin’s commitment to place in his final years, coinciding with his attempt to envision another and more complex vision of the interdependent harmony of nature, one that would encompass all creatures great and small. He spent the last years of his life studying the common earthworm, among the smallest of creatures, with a devout and almost child-like fascination. And he did so at a time in the late 19th century when many of his countrymen were in no mood to ponder their kinship with others in the web of life and were instead seeking (under the banner of social Darwinism) to rationalize their place in the hierarchy of a world they had largely created. Darwin surely had a sense of this historical irony, even if he chose not to express it in bitterly ironic language. In his final book, this is the language he chose instead to express his newly encompassing vision:
“The plough is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man’s inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly ploughed, and still continues to be thus ploughed by earthworms. It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.”
There are signs of a deep reconciliation in this passage and throughout this book; they are subtle signs, but they are there. It feels almost like where we arrive after the necessary work has been done following a painful divorce or break-up, the work that allows us to approach a new relationship with a more cautious distance but forming a deeper and longer-lasting commitment.
Like Darwin, we continue to steer an uneven course through a bewildering archipelago of facts and ideals, which may or may not be connected. It may not be possible to encompass everything under one vision with a single slogan or label. If our default answer is “all of the above,” though, we thereby inoculate ourselves against disenchantment. Perhaps that ought to give us some comfort, even teach us some patience, as we address the question of how to define the ideal of the homestead and “care for our common home,” knowing ahead of time (as we do) that our various conflicting and complementary answers will all turn out to be faithful and true.
