How does your garden grow? Barbara Toyne considers the lay of the land

‘I am very susceptible to beauty.’

I might be here under false pretences. I’m not a horticulturalist, nor even a trained gardener. If you have tricky questions about groundskeeping, I’m not your answer. I would prefer to think about this article as a means of opening up a conversation. By pooling our knowledge we may come up with something useful.

Almost everything I know about gardening I have learnt by… well, gardening! I have very little book knowledge about the subject. Instead, I just try to get familiar with a particular plot of land, which right now means my own garden and the one at Devizes Meeting House. I like to understand the plot in great detail – inch by inch, plant by plant, and weed by weed.

But all this is a side issue, in a way. Why do I garden at all, and with such enthusiasm? The answer is simple, in the best Quaker tradition. I garden because it is a spiritual experience: a kind of meditation. To be solitary and silent is pure joy. It concentrates the finer emotions and is the perfect complement to our collective stillness during worship. There, we wait upon God to inspire and enlighten us – you might say to help us grow.

When I garden, however, I wait upon Nature.  In the same sense that I think of Christ as the Son of God, I think of Nature as the Daughter of God. She does perfectly well without me, of course, but it is the relationship between us that brings the joy. It is the combination of her energy and my vision. But Nature always remains the teacher. lf my vision is faulty, or my expectations too high or inappropriate, then things will fail, and I will know I have made an error. Nature has her rules: you don’t create a bog garden in a desert, or try to grow a cactus in a water meadow. Gardening, then, is part of a wider approach to sustainability.

First, what sustains me? I am very susceptible to beauty. Beauty and Truth are close companions, and it is these two things that make gardening such a deep, spiritual activity. But what exactly do we mean by ‘sustainable’? Human efforts and inventions are usually unsustainable. Trends, solutions and fashions rise, reach a peak, and then fade again. It is a hallmark of human endeavour. We cannot see the bigger picture clearly enough. We tend to make do with short-term solutions, partly dictated by our limited lifespan, and by our inability to predict the future. It is a very human predicament. Systems are set up, they run for a while, then cracks appear and, after a given time, they collapse. Their lifespan may vary from a few months to a century, but ultimately they disintegrate.

So can anything be sustainable? I think so. All life and growth are rooted in the Spirit. This is the nourishing and sustaining energy – the growing medium, if you like (it strikes me as significant how many of the most familiar gardening terms are borrowed directly from the spiritual realm). I can think of no human activity more closely related to the work of our Creator. A good gardener will wait upon Nature, will observe, listen, and learn the language of symbols and metaphors from the spiritual realm. Only then can we properly apply them to the material realm of soil and seed and growth. Once we truly understand that, everything acquires a much deeper meaning. For things to be truly sustainable, they have to be informed by the Spirit. That word ‘informed’ literally means ‘formed from within’. It’s not like our usual human way, which is to shape things from the outside. It is difficult for us to ‘get inside things’. When occasionally we do, we say we are inspired. At the moment of inspiration we are closest to God, and our activity is at its most fruitful.

Another key to all sustainable systems is that they are based on circularity – no beginning and no end, self-sustaining movement and energy. This applies from the giant cycles of the stars to the infinitesimal cycles of the atom. When we ignore this, it is to our own detriment – yet, despite our increasing scientific knowledge, we continue to think in a straight line, and forget to close the circle, to think in self-sustaining cycles. Nowhere is this more dangerous than in our relationship with the soil, whether on the small scale of gardening or the large scale of farming. Many of the activities we pursue on this planet have drifted a long way from their spiritual roots. Wherever humans enter, we break the cycle, and interfere with its perfect functioning. Thus we fall out of the divine cycle, cutting ourselves off from the source of inexhaustible energy.

This is where we find ourselves today. We talk earnestly about the energy crisis, but something tells me that what we suffer from is more of a spiritual crisis.

We smile condescendingly at the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, thinking it a pretty legend for children. In fact it plots human history very accurately. Our journey starts there in Eden and ends in Paradise. Aren’t they the same place? Instead we teach ourselves that the route between them is studded with obstacles – suffering, sickness and war – and that religions navigate this route with one golden thread. But in so doing we make another straight line. Another cycle closes.

The sooner we realise that the entire planet is a garden, and that we are gardeners under instruction from the Creator and Sustainer, the better. We have reached the point where the dire consequences of not following instructions have caught up with us. We now feel threatened by almost every element that surrounds us: water, fire, air and earth. In each case we have broken a self-sustaining cycle, thinking that we can improve natural law by cleverness and greed. We’ve deprived the earth of its resting and recovery periods, and so exhausted it; we have poisoned it with fertilisers and pesticides, which in turn have interrupted, or even killed off, other life cycles. We’ve created waste and fed it back into rivers and seas; we have waged endless wars, playing literally with fire. Not a good track record! And now we cannot turn the clock back.

So where do we go from here? How do we heal the damage, the broken cycles? The emphasis must be on the natural. But where is this natural world? Wherever we have settled, nature has been chased to the margins of existence. How do we retrieve it? Slowly and painstakingly, we gardeners have the chance, and the task, to think once more in cycles instead of straight lines. We need to work out carefully what leads to what. Where does it go? How can it be re-utilised? Nature does things slowly and thoroughly, but leaves behind no indigestible rubbish. We have to use materials the earth can reabsorb, closing the cycle. As we relearn the natural rhythms of the earth, we will restore and revitalise our spiritual vigour. This vigour is nothing else but love: love of Creator and Creation, love of our neighbour, love of our planet – this jewel of beauty and the storehouse of all our needs and nourishments. We must learn to love it well, or human history itself will become a legend.

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