Why You Should Garden

This one is not about liberals.

When you run a pseudonymous Instagram page for a while, you start to develop some inside jokes. One that emerged early, and has since become integrated into the fabric of the account, is the gardening schtick. I forget exactly how it came to be—it was probably some off-the-cuff response to “so, what do you actually believe in”—but it has since developed into a core part of Anacreon’s message. Although initially accidental, I have come around to it as a sort of microcosm of what we ought to be driving at. This is because gardening shares many characteristics with what a political project should look like.

First, it involves a profound respect for life and growth. Much has been made of the idea of “living death” as a symbol of what our generation, caught between the physical and digital world, experiences on a daily basis. While I think that this discourse is a little overwrought, it is undeniable that the modern mindset is a life-denying one. This is the natural and logical conclusion of a materialistic worldview: when you lower your vision from the divine and cosmic and focus it on the human and tangible—as post-Enlightenment ideology, with its pursuit of Utopia on Earth, does—you will inevitably begin to view people as means to an end, valuable only for their contribution towards your goal.

This was expressed most explicitly in the eugenics projects of the last century, which actively sterilized and even killed people in pursuit of an imagined racial perfection. The clinics and death panels are (mostly) gone now, but the mindset still survives and even dominates in a subtler form—on the Left in birth-and population-control campaigns and on the Right as a watered-down natalist stance that is more concerned, as left-liberals accurately point out, with birth than with life. What is missing from both sides is a genuine celebration of life as a sacred event, valuable both in itself and as part of a larger cosmic hierarchy.

Gardening is about life. Moreover, it is about ordering life—in a way that restores ecosystems, nurtures people, and beautifies the world. It isn’t about bending the natural world to human will to produce an unsustainable material goal—that’s a monoculture farm—nor is it about seeding life randomly and paying no attention to what happens to it—that’s an empty lot. Instead, it charts a middle course—just as we should in our own lives.

Second, it is a thoroughly local activity that ideally gets the whole community—and not many other people besides—involved. Gardens cannot follow a standard pattern throughout a vast area. Instead, they need to consider things like terrain, climate and the surrounding ecosystem. What works well in one area may need fertilizer, imported water and other artificial help to survive in another. Meanwhile, fresh foods do not make for efficient exports without mechanized help, and the output of a modest garden is best used by the people intimately involved with its maintenance, who might develop unique recipes to make use of the produce on hand. As a collective activity, a garden gives neighbors a tangible project on which to collaborate, fosters a sense of shared purpose and lends itself to other local activities like farmers’ markets or block parties that rapidly lose their charm and meaning when they are scaled up.

Unique local conditions, the difficulty of standardizing and exporting policies and boosting community spirit are also, incidentally, all good reasons to conduct politics at the most local level possible. Neighbors with a shared interest in the well-being of the community are much less likely to come to blows about abstract political problems—while you may disagree with Dan the butcher about affirmative action, you must see him every week and so are probably not going to argue with him the way you’d argue with a guy on Facebook from South Dakota. Localizing politics defuses pointless conflict, fosters stronger communities, prevents the unhealthy consolidation of power, and gives everyone in a community a vested interest in its well-being. Gardening serves as a powerful symbol—and perhaps even a catalyst—for that process.

Finally, gardening does not admit of any shortcuts. There is simply no alternative to planting, watering, weeding, and waiting. You cannot pay gems to make the process go faster. Nor can you outsource your garden to Vietnam. A well-tended garden requires forethought, planning, patience, and the continued involvement of many people. Aside from forcing neighbors to interact with each other on a regular basis, this state of affairs also has implications for a community’s social capital.

As I have discussed elsewhere, social capital spends quickly but accumulates only very slowly. This is because it is, at bottom, basically a measure of the amount of trust that members of a society have for each other. Trust, as anyone who has had theirs broken can attest, is a very hard thing to earn back once it is lost. It is a function of a repeated pattern of behavior over a long period of time. While an occasional heroic act might accelerate the process, most of us are not presented with opportunities to prove our trustworthiness in a dramatic fashion and must settle for proving it slowly, methodically and with a multitude of little acts. This is not a particularly exciting prospect for most people—but it is a dangerous conceit to imagine that the moment always calls for dramatic, violent action. Many moments—this one included—call for a different kind of heroism: the heroism of modest consistency, of tireless commitment, and of quiet dignity. As it is with gardening, so it is with our society. What our parents neglected is up to us to restore. It begins with a garden, spreads to your community, and flows out into the world. There are no shortcuts; this the only way. And the best time to start is immediately.

I write this towards the beginning of January. For many of those who read this, the ground will be frozen and planting impossible. However, this is a great time to start some seeds under a UV light, gather tools, reach out to your neighbors, and put a plan together. If you want to take action—start a garden. If you want to make a statement—start a garden. And if you want to get in on the joke—start a garden.