A Gardening Piece at The University Bookman
My dad received The University Bookman while I was growing up, so I was especially pleased to see one of my pieces appear here today.
American gardening literature is a big thing.
Amazon has an entire department dedicated to “Gardening & Horticultural Essays.” Yes, just “essays.” It has two dozen other departments dedicated to gardening and horticulture in general.
The genre of American garden writing runs the gamut from technical to inspirational: garden bed blueprints to meditations on weeding.
For instance, there are seed catalogs that merely list the price and seed specifications: days to maturity, spacing, and sun requirements. And then there are literary seed catalogs . . . those rare (and free) publications that are informational, occasionally witty, and serious about their prose.
Among contemporary books, you have The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible, which is a standard “go-to” book but hardly qualifies as serious literature. And then you have Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening, by theologian-gardener Vigen Guroian, which is lovely and scarcely mentions gardening techniques.
And then there are those books like The Tao of Vegetable Gardening by Carol Deppe, which is a beautiful hybrid: mostly how-to gardening advice, but laced with a meditational attitude that, though rarely overt, informs the book as a whole.
The Tao of Vegetable Gardening is part of a rich bed of American gardening literature that, in the words of M.E. Bradford, mixes “practical agricultural advice and moral reflection.”
In Western culture, gardening literature goes back over 2,500 years, at least to Hesiod’s The Works and Days in the 8th century BC. The Greeks later followed suit, as did the Romans (Cato the Elder’s De Agri Cultura, Virgil’s Georgics). Agricultural literature was firmly ensconced in the classical world.
It’s no surprise that America followed suit. The early Americans loved ancient Rome, including its agrarian literature. In the words of Paul Meany, “Roman poets, such as Horace and Virgil, praised an agrarian lifestyle, and their work struck a chord with the self-sufficient, hardy farmers of early America.”
Colonial Americans, such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, wrote about gardening and agriculture in general. French transplant Hector St. John de Crèvecœur wrote Letters from an American Farmer (1782), which became wildly popular with Europe’s reforming class and would later be sardonically savaged by D. H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature for its romantic intellectualizing, “This American Farmer tells of the joys of creating a home in the wilderness, and of cultivating virgin soil. Poor virgin, prostituted from the very start.”
There’s John Taylor of Caroline, a wealthy lawyer and agriculturalist whose talents didn’t carry over to the printed word. The prose in his Arator: Being a Series of Agricultural Essays, Practical and Political: In Sixty-Four Numbers is denser than hardpan soil, prompting John Randolph of Roanoke to suggest that someone translate him into English. But if one can get past the prose, he’ll find perhaps the best early example of American gardening literature: agricultural advice meandering into short meditations.
