Hope Is a Garden
In the spring of 2018 my family moved into a small house in the suburbs outside Boston and I started digging up our lawn. Now there is only a tiny patch of grass surrounded by garden beds filled with annual and perennial vegetables, fruits, flowers, culinary and medicinal herbs, and natural dye plants. There are young fruit trees, bushes, and vines. Water is provided by rain barrels. The rock borders around garden beds were scavenged from a construction site across the street. Soil fertility is increased from our own compost and an abundance of autumn leaves. While we added additional soil at the beginning, the garden has reached a stage of mostly providing for itself and takes minimal maintenance other than harvesting and tending the annual beds.
At first this project was about growing food and my aversion to mowing grass. However, having watched the garden evolve in response to levels of human care and an increasingly variable climate, there is something far more fundamental that my garden practice provides: hope. It isn’t an optimistic or ignorant feeling that everything will be ok, but rather a reinforcement of what I already know: that with great care we can undergo unthinkable transformation. The garden is forever changing in response to unpredictable events, whether it be the number of bunnies or the frequency of rain. And yet it remains, adapting and continuing to support life.
Tending this permaculture food forest garden is a community practice. It is a collaboration with soil, plants, animals, weather, and the humans who harvest, sow seeds, share knowledge and materials, and spend part of their lives there. It is a source of care and an opportunity for caretaking.
