Life In Balance: The Spiritual Practice of Gardening

A sermon prepared by Lori Kenschaft, Guest Speaker
Sunday, May 25, 2008 • Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

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First, I want to thank the worship arts committee for inviting me to be here today.  I am delighted to have this opportunity to share some of my thoughts with you.

What I want to talk about today is gardening as a spiritual practice. 

I am a gardener.  I do not make my living by gardening, but I spend a lot of my time doing and teaching what I call earth-friendly, low-maintenance gardening. 

My house is surrounded by about 5,000 square feet of garden and no lawn.  Three blocks away I have a garden in the center of a traffic circle, which I started two years ago.  I have planted about 2,800 tulips and other spring bulbs in it, and last year the garden was in bloom from April through November.  A year ago I took over taking care of the grounds at my church, the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington.  Last year I spent huge amounts of time pruning overgrown trees and shrubs and removing invasive vines.  This year I have installed a butterfly garden, a daylily garden, and a sun garden. 

I spend a lot of time gardening.

For me, the act of gardening is very close to the center of my spiritual life.

I could talk about this in terms of our seventh principle – respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.  But it isn’t just a matter of respect.  It is also a matter of feeling, experiencing, that interdependent web in a very direct way that goes beyond mind and respect and into my very being.

For me, gardening is about being in relationship with a piece of land and everything living and not living that is connected with that land.

I often say that I do not feed plants.  I feed the soil, and the soil feeds the plants.  Healthy soil is a community of living beings, the vast majority of which are too small for me to see.  But I have learned to sense their presence by the look and feel and smell of the soil, and I know that they are the foundation of the garden that I can see.

Without healthy soil, plants will always struggle.  So when I see plants struggling, I know that the soil is probably in trouble.  But if I see healthy and happy plants, and if I see healthy and happy butterflies and other garden residents, then I know that the earth in that particular location is doing well.

One of my great joys in life is taking a little patch of earth that is sickly, entering into relationship with it, and within two or three years seeing it blossom into abundant life.  There is a Hebrew phrase, tikkun olam, healing the earth.  Tikkun olam refers to the human responsibility to try to heal brokenness and to bring justice, abundance, and right relationship to this planet.  There are many different forms of tikkun olam, and different people have different callings.  But I feel like, for me, creating a healthy life‑giving patch of earth is a small part of tikkun olam.

And I personally have learned so much from the practice of gardening.

Last summer, for example, I pruned more than fifty shrubs and small trees at my church. I love pruning.  I often describe it as channeling energy – literally.  What I’m doing is telling the plant where to put its energies, where its resources will be most fruitful. 

People often think of pruning as cutting back a plant, but it is more accurate to think of it as releasing a plant.  The different parts of a plant are in competition with each other for resources – sunlight, water, sugar, nutrients.  Every growth tip of the plant therefore puts out hormones that suppress growth in nearby areas.  When you cut off a growth tip, you release the other areas from that inhibition, so they start to grow.

The problem is that if the plant is competing too much with itself, or with other plants, then each part does not get all the resources it needs.  Some branches will die.  Others will be sickly – they will not look good, and they will be more vulnerable to disease, pests, and wind damage.

So when I’m pruning a plant, my goal is to release growth in some places and decide which branches it would be better off without.

From one point of view, I have all the power in this relationship.  I’m standing there with my pruning shears in hand, and if I decide to cut off a branch there isn’t anything the plant can do about it.  And the effects of my actions today may be visible five years from now.
From another point of view, however, I have very little power.  I cannot make a plant do anything.  It has its own internal rules, its own reality.  I can only try to attune myself to its reality, and follow its rules in a way that produces the results I hope to see.

Success as a gardener requires choosing your goals carefully.  If you try to make plants grow in a way that does not match their nature, you can put a lot of time, energy, and money into a garden and still be disappointed.

So I sometimes think of pruning, and gardening in general, as practice in following the tao.  Most of reality has nothing to do with me, and if I try to fight it I will wear myself out.  But if I can perceive the world around me accurately, then I can perceive the places where my actions can have a real effect.  A garden is an excellent place to practice setting ego aside and honoring what is.

So I find pruning a very meditative exercise.  If I am going to prune a crabapple tree well, I need to see what it really is at this moment.  I also need to see all its possible futures, all the ways it might grow.  If I cut here, what will happen?  If I also cut there, how will that change things?  What that is currently inhibited would be best if it were released?  What that is currently alive would be best if it were killed? 

Killing things sounds bad, but it is a lot of what I do as a gardener.  Pruning is a form of killing – I am killing some branches for the good of the rest of the tree.  But I also do a lot of killing whole beings for the good of the community.

Weeding, for example.  People sometimes define a weed as any plant that is somewhere a person does not want it to be.  There is truth to that definition.  Grass in the middle of a lawn is part of the lawn.  Grass in a vegetable garden is a weed. 

But botanists tend to define a weed as a plant this is adapted to growing in disturbed soil.  People tend to disturb a lot of soil, so we produce a lot of opportunities for weeds.

By either definition, gardens are going to have weeds.  And unless you want the crabgrass to take over the flower garden, you need to be willing to kill things.

But it isn’t just crabgrass.  Plants that are happy tend to reproduce.  If they reproduce too much, their offspring compete too much for limited resources, and all of them are weaker.
For example, one of the most aggressive weeds in my back garden is strawberries.  I like my strawberries.  I planted them, and every June I eat a lot of very tasty berries.  But if they could, they would take over the garden and smother every other plant that is less than fifteen inches tall.  And when the plants are too close to each other their berries tends to grow a gray mold that makes them inedible.  So every spring I have to kill most of my strawberry plants.
I have quite a few other plants that self-seed and do not know the meaning of moderation.  So every year I kill thousands of otherwise desirable plants, just because there are too many of them.

I have learned to be quite uncaring about whether an individual plant survives, as long as there are plenty of its species around.  Two years ago I may have carefully planted and tended an individual.  But now, if it has enough babies, I may not even notice if it dies.

I sometimes wonder whether there is a deity who feels like this.  In my garden, I’m somewhat God‑like in deciding who lives and who dies.  I thin this carrot seedling, and let that one grow.  Often the choice between them is truly arbitrary.  I care much more about the good of the interdependent web than the good of any one individual.  If some species becomes too abundant, I consider it a threat to the whole, no matter how beautiful or tasty each individual might be. 

In a garden, life is not an un-mixed good.  Too much of one form of life threatens the balance of the whole.  Life at all costs for one individual, or one species, very obviously inflicts damage on other forms of life.  I can, as a gardener, increase the abundance and diversity of life in a particular patch of land.  But there are limits.  And those limits mean that each life comes at the expense of other lives.  I constantly make decisions about which lives are worth keeping and which lives will be sacrificed.

I know that the price of life is death.  That animals live by killing plants and animals.  That plants live by drawing nutrients from dead things in the soil.  I constantly replenish my garden by killing things and letting them decay back into the soil.  When I eat something from my garden – when I enjoy a June strawberry or an August tomato – I am tasting the life that comes from the death that I have inflicted.  This interdependent web of existence thing is not theoretical for me.

The garden also teaches me to be acutely aware of the present moment.  Everything is constantly changing in a garden.  I can often see plants change over the course of a day, or even a few hours. 

The petals of a crocus or tulip open when the sun shines on them, to welcome an early spring honeybee, and they close again when the shadow of sunset falls over them, to protect their delicate inner parts from the chill night air.  The warmer the day, the more quickly the pace of life runs within them, and the more quickly their tissues age and the petals fall.  The same warm sunlight that urges the sprouting peas to reach towards the sky speeds the tulip blossoms towards their death.

There are moments when a garden is spectacularly beautiful, when the colors and textures and smells reach some sort of perfect balance and I stand there in awe at its beauty.  I know I need to pay attention now, because a few hours from now it will not be the same.  Tomorrow will be similar, usually, but even that cannot be counted on. 

When one of my gardens is in that moment of spectacular beauty, I often say to people – “Come, you should look at this garden.  It is gorgeous.”  Sometimes people come.  Often, though, they say things like, “That sounds good.  I’ll come visit in a couple weeks.” 
I feel like telling them – You cannot visit this garden in a couple weeks.  You can visit another garden in a couple weeks, but you cannot visit this one.  This one is here only now.
I have some guesses about what that future garden will be like, but I don’t know.  I plant and tend, weed and prune, but ultimately I cannot control the garden.  Nature has its own rhythms.  At best I can nudge the current in one direction or another. 

And sometimes things happen.  When I left the house in the morning there were three beautiful tulips, deep red flushed with purple, in my front yard.  While I was gone, someone picked two of them.  So suddenly it is too late to enjoy that perfect triad.  And two days later the petals on the remaining tulip will start to grow old and thin. 

A garden is full of reminders that life is transient and you had better enjoy it now.

Gardening has also made me concerned about the fertility of our planet’s farmlands.
For most of the history of life, nitrogen was one of the things that most limited how much life could exist.  There was plenty of nitrogen in the air, but most living beings cannot use that nitrogen.  Some bacteria, however, can take nitrogen from the air and bring it into their bodies, a process that is usually called “fixing nitrogen.”  Until the 1940s most of the world’s biologically available nitrogen was fixed by those bacteria, and the rest of us depended on them for our lives.

During World War I, however, German scientists figured out how to fix nitrogen chemically, on an industrial scale.  After World War II this technology was adapted to make fertilizer instead of munitions.  Chemical fertilizers allowed a huge expansion in the world’s food supply and therefore the world’s human population.  It is estimated that about half of the nitrogen that is now biologically available on this planet was fixed chemically, not by bacteria.  And about 40% of the human population, more than two billion people, owe their existence to those chemical fertilizers.

The problem is that chemical fertilizers, and chemical herbicides and pesticides, kill many of the things that live in soil and form the community that makes soil healthy.  Over time, therefore, farmers have to use more and more fertilizer to keep producing the same amount of food.  If the soil becomes too damaged, crops fall no matter what.

Fixing nitrogen chemically requires a lot of energy.  It requires heating the mixture to about 700 degrees Fahrenheit at 200 times atmospheric pressure.  So farmers nowadays often use more than a calorie’s worth of fossil fuel to produce a calorie’s worth of food.  As the soil becomes more damaged, that ratio gets worse over time.  This is, by the way, why corn ethanol is not an answer to our climate change problem.

There are several reasons why the global price of food commodities increased by more than 60% in the last year.  But one of them is that the price of food is now closely linked to the price of oil.  And the diversion of corn into making ethanol has helped create real problems for the 2 ½ billion people who live on less than two dollars a day.

And remember, one type of life comes at the expense of another type of life.  Excess nitrogen from chemical fertilizers and animal feeding lots flows into our rivers and lakes and oceans.  Farming, and the quest for perfect lawns, have created a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, an expanding area of ocean that is the size of the state of New Jersey and has too little oxygen to support most forms of life.

Unless we can find a way to restore soil fertility that honors and works with the web of life, I am afraid that the 40% of the human population that is now alive because of chemical fertilizers may not be sustainable.

Some people suggest that the solution is to eat foods that are locally grown, because they use less oil than food that is shipped for hundreds or thousands of miles.  I am skeptical of that argument.  If you personally drive out to Lincoln to get a dozen local eggs, I guarantee you that those eggs will use a lot more oil to get to your table than a dozen eggs from the supermarket. 

But there are many ways in which the decisions I make in my garden and my kitchen reflect my awareness of these bigger problems. 

It’s back to that issue of power and powerlessness.  I am just one person, and I cannot make much difference in the world.  But I do want the choices I make to reflect my values and my understanding of reality, of what is.

So I grow some of my own food, and I buy as much as possible from the farmers’ market, both because really fresh food tastes really good, and because I want to help keep alive the knowledge of how to grow food in New England.

I try to purchase organically grown food, because organic farming generally increases the health of the soil.

I compost as much as possible, so that nutrients return to the soil rather than needing fossil fuels to be trucked somewhere else and perhaps be burned in an incinerator.

I try to eat low on the food chain.  I am not vegetarian, but I try to eat meat and seafood sparingly and only when I truly want it.  At this point, the meat I cook at home comes from a local earth-friendly farm called Chestnut Farm.  I know the farmers, and the farmers know the animals. 

It was a little odd when the daughter told me the name of the pig that became the sausage they were selling that day.  I don’t think the mother thought that was good marketing.  But I like knowing that the pig had a good life for a pig.  And whenever I eat meat, I try to take a moment to be aware of and honor the whole chain of life and death and life and death that led to my meal.  I know that, from the point of view of the planet, meat and seafood are luxuries.
I try to eat foods that are in season.  If it is in season, it is a product of the natural rhythms of life for that species.  The plants did not have to be manipulated to make them bear out of season, and the food did not have to be kept in storage for months.  A produce worker at Whole Foods recently told me that they keep their apples submersed in 34 degree water.  That is how they can sell apples six months after harvest, but it takes a lot of energy to refrigerate all that water.

There are also many personal advantages to eating foods in season.  They taste better, because they come from happy plants.  They are generally cheaper, because they are abundant.  And they keep me in touch with the cycles of the year, as each season becomes associated with particular tastes.  For me, eating seasonally is part of a spiritual connection with the earth. 

Eating mindfully in all these ways helps me feel connected with the web of life.  It makes me more aware of my food, and it helps me enjoy and appreciate what I am eating.

At my church in Arlington, our soil is not healthy.  It has very little life in it, and the grass and trees are stressed because the soil is stressed. 

I am trying to make our grounds a place that nurtures life.  A couple months ago I planted clover, because clover roots support nitrogen-fixing bacteria.  I’ve brought in compost and mulch and spread it around.  We now have a compost pile, so that we don’t have to truck all our leaves somewhere else.  I’ve started a butterfly garden, which will be full of plants that feed butterflies and other beneficial insects and birds.

I’ve also left little piles of leaves under various shrubs, so they can decay into the soil.  I have heard some people comment that these leaves seem messy, a sign that the grounds are not well-tended.  But the aesthetic that a garden should be “clean” and devoid of dead things is related to the twentieth-century idea that plants live by chemistry.  In fact, plants live by biology as well as chemistry, and biology is not “clean.”

Leaves are nature’s fertilizer, and if you take all of them away you deprive the soil not just of nutrients, but also of the living beings that cause the leaves to decay over time.  We need some dead leaves if we want healthy soil.

For me, creating healthy soil and healthy gardens feels like a vote in favor of life.  Not life at all costs, not life out of balance.  But a web of life in which human beings are only a part. 
When I spread mulch that will feed the soil that will feed the maple tree, or when I plant a tithonia that will feed the monarch butterflies when they migrate through New England in September, I feel like I’m contributing one small little step towards the healing of the earth, towards tikkun olam.

Finally, I want to share with you a brief passage that was written by a British gardener named Beverly Nichols.  I have often had this feeling in my garden.

 “It was inevitable, I suppose, that in the garden I should begin … to ask myself what lay behind all this beauty.  When guests were gone and I had the flowers all to myself, I was so happy that I wondered why at the same time I was haunted by a sense of emptiness.  It was as though I wanted to thank somebody, but had nobody to thank;  which is another way of saying that I felt the need for worship.  That is, perhaps, the kindliest way in which a person may come to his or her God.

There is an interminable literature on the origins of the religious impulse, but to me it is simpler than that.  It is summed up in the image of a person at sundown, watching the crimson flowering of the sky and saying – to somebody – ‘Thank you.’ ”

A garden is full of reminders that we did not create life.  We can nurture life and we can destroy life, but we cannot create life, with all its beauty and all its imperfections.  And sometimes all we can do in response to the miracle of life is say, “Thank you.”

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