Tag Archives: gardens

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turning the clay

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When you go down deep enough into your ground you find your true place in the valley of ancestors that inhabits every backyard.

from Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate by Wendy Johnson

The land of the farm, like most of the Ottawa Valley, is dark soil for two to four inches that sits on top of quick clay.  Compressed by the weight of continental ice sheets of the last ice age,  this clay formed the ground of the Champlain Sea until the waters receded.  Digging up various sections large and small, it’s common to find sea shells and imprints of creatures that once lived in the brackish waters.  The larger fields have been turned over often, green crops plowed under to increase the organic content, wheat crops rotated with corn to replenish the depleted nutrients.  On a smaller scale the flower and vegetable gardens have benefited from turning in well-aged compost, rotation of vegetables in the boxes, and a moving stage of flowering plants.

The surface is broken open to native crops put in service of enriching the ground.  Digging past the four inches of topsoil, I am unearthing the quick clay of 10,000 years ago which mixes in with last month’s composted local broccoli stalks and limp lettuce.  But there is also a subtle international net that draws in the nourishment from far-flung soils.  This clay which has lain here for these thousands of years now meets mango skins from Mexico or Thailand, strawberry hulls from California, peach peels from British Columbia, and coffee grounds from South America.  Microbes, pollen, floral skin and bone cross cultural, political and chronographic boundaries to shape the ground.

This is how life takes root today and how wide the arms of nourishment can be thrown.

Is penetrating into our true nature any different?  The hard ground of our practice was likely just as compressed by a heavy frozen weight that slowly melted allowing our deepest ground to assert itself.  It’s only when we surface from the glacial sea of self-absorption into the drying air that seeds can take hold.  It is only when the clay is turned with what is present and available that we can be enriched by the living and dying of all matter from near and far.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

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the consequential garden

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Gardening on the farm was a haphazard affair in the first decade we lived here.  The south garden had been used for various flowering plants, only the campanula has clung on these thirty years, tenacious as my lack of mindfulness.  The patch north of the house was the vegetable garden put in by the original family who built this farmhouse.  Roger was born the year it was built; 1923 is carved into the banister upstairs.  He took over the farming from his father, married Blanche, and they had 15 children, 13 of whom lived to populate what was then a four bedroom, 800 square foot house.  Blanche loved her vegetable garden and the lone peony she planted in the west lawn under the maple.  It took us over twenty years to dig out the last of that peony.

Roger and Blanche sold to the next owners who upgraded the house, adding electricity and running water.  Not much of a farmer, this fellow is best known in the mythology of the farm for the railway spike-sized nails he used in his “renovations.” I don’t recall much of what they did outdoors other than ruin a beautiful barn by using it as a run-in shed for his cattle.  The two feet of manure over the 30 x 60-foot concrete floor took three summers to dig out and kept many of my plants fed for years.

Over the years, the various plots around the house have evolved.  We turned the north garden plot into the rose garden.  The south garden was a collection of ambulatory plants that grew, blossomed, and seeded themselves in new spaces each year.  At one time, I grew a rock garden then a series of exotic species that likely only lived long enough for a gardening magazine photo shoot.  Now it’s settled into a collection of plants that splash blues, yellows, and reds in sequence from Spring to Fall.  About five years ago, the west side became a burst of sandcherries and barberries and the east a woodland garden filled with hosta and ferns.  The Japanese garden went into the southeast space when the makeshift deck rotted away.  The vegetable garden is now neatly boxed in north of the roses.

But this is just a timeline of seeds and flowers, fruit and feeding.  There have been innumerable attempts behind each plant that survived the hard ground, droughts, heat, and through those attempts, I have learned many things.  Some lessons are about planting and growing things, some about living and letting things die.  Most of what I learned is that allowing self-seeding plants the run of my garden isn’t the same as giving them space in which to exert their freedom to blossom.  The first encourages the bullying nature of some plants; the latter allows a respectful relationship with me and the others plants in its vicinity.

Gardening is about awareness and relationship – consequential relationship.  It’s also about taking a stand, and standing by your principles.  At the same time it’s about giving up control and learning from your mistakes.

from Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate by Wendy Johnson

Relationship is like that.  Sitting at my desk, listening to the voice on the other end of the phone one dark afternoon, I understood that not having taken a stand, not establishing the perimeters and parameters of a relationship in its germination had created this choking, shame/blame tirade I was hearing.  I wondered as I listened carefully if I was allowing the bullying to continue or if I was bearing witness to the suffering that had been generated through unknowable causes and conditions.

Practice is like that too.  Is sitting with the overwhelming suffering that arises masochistic or is it a moment of respectful silence in which the real roots can be uncovered and the plant uprooted?

Thank you for practicing,

Genju