Be Real
In a virtual world, resistance is real
Continuing thoughts on gardening as the rebellious hobby. Of course you could just take to buying gas-guzzling sports cars, that’s a pretty unacceptable hobby in the current climate too, but you in your shiny, red motor are unlikely to inspire any one else to similar levels of rebellion. Gardening is cheap and easily emulated.
Aspects of gardening that p*ss off the regime:
outdoor pursuit surrounded by healing elements of nature - greenery, birds, bees
providing nutrition-packed fresh food all season that only cost you the price of a few packets of seed and a bag of compost
increased physical and mental health - good for executing escape from the matrix
reduced use of pharmaceuticals
These I discussed in my previous post. However there is at least one more significant benefit to this simple activity. It is real. By which I mean it takes place in the real world, involves physical activity, and results in a real product: the crop.
Increasingly we are spending more of our time on our computers, on our phones, on video calls. Increasingly in the western world our work is not productive in the true sense of that word. Large swathes of the manufacturing industry have been sent overseas. Our work is so disengaged from our need to be in the workplace that many of us spend one or more days a week working from home, or work from a home-office entirely. Much of the activity we are engaged in just disappears into the digital universe: reports, spreadsheets, apps and computer software all exist in this insubstantial ether that is on the other side of our phone or computer screen.
A computer game and a piece of software are products. They exist, they had to be made, somebody will pay for them (or for access to them). But in another, quite true sense, they are not really real. Anybody who has built a shelf, or changed the oil in their car themselves, knows the satisfaction of completing an actual physical task, with practical benefits. The shelf was needed and is useful, the car runs better now the oil is changed and you saved yourself a bit of money. You feel a sense of achievement that puts you in a good mood, perhaps for the rest of the day.
Nowadays these feelings are rare as we become increasingly helpless and impractical: out-sourcing the simplest task to mechanics and plumbers and less and less likely to be mechanics or plumbers ourselves. Cooking is a popular past time perhaps because it is an aspect of our lives in which we still have practical physical skill and a product at the end of it. Cooking is accessible. Specialist equipment is on a domestic scale and affordable. The skills involved are easily learnt and can be perfected over a lifetime.
Gardening is also an accessible skill. Unlike electricians, plumbers, mechanics, or carpenters, gardeners do not require any specialist training. In fact some highly successful gardeners attribute their success to never having received a horticultural education and therefore being free from preconceived ideas and indoctrination. Whether formally educated or not, more than one stresses the need to think for oneself.
I advise you to forget the ‘rules’. Instead, understand better what is going on in the soil and with your plants, in your own garden, and work out your own methods instead. You may even invent some new ones or make an interesting discovery. Charles Dowding
‘Pruning and planting at the “wrong” times’…The wrong time may be the only opportunity and a preferable alternative to not doing something at all. Or it may not be the wrong time, contrary to accepted practice as quoted in gardening literature, if you act cannily. Christopher Lloyd
Furthermore mistakes are nothing to worry about. A botched oil change may lead to a seized engine. A poorly constructed shelf may collapse leaving a damaged wall. A plant grown in the wrong place, neglected, or pruned at the ‘wrong’ time resulting in its demise is sad, but there are no greater consequences. It can be dug up and replaced. Its corpse can go on the compost heap and contribute to the garden’s fertility. The garden is organic. Mistakes heal. Gardeners learn from making mistakes.
So the final way in which gardening can benefit us as individuals is that it connects us to the psychological and emotional healing of handling real objects, engaging in practical activity, and producing something real at the end of it all. In the course of our gardening we may create innovative structures for supporting our plants, or develop a new method of irrigation or planting out. Our brains are working in new ways, new synapses are firing.
An article published on PubMed in 2019 states that forty one seniors with a median age of seventy-six showed that brain-derived neurotrophic factor and platelet derived growth factor were “significantly increased after the gardening activity”. Both of these are associated with increased cognitive function and memory. Perhaps any physical activity would result in these improvements but it seems indisputable that gardening leads to physical improvements in the brain.
Problem-solving is an innate part of any practical activity, gardening perhaps offers greater scope for this than many. There is no prescribed way of solving every problem in your own garden. The challenges are unique, and so are your solutions. In this way gardening provides you with not only an emotionally calming activity, a nutritious crop, it also provides the confidence and self-sufficiency which comes with repeatedly solving practical problems.
The old crafts that our modern societies have by-and-large abandoned, knitting, sewing, gardening, all provide a useful product and practical activity that engages hands and brain, and some level of mental and emotional healing, but perhaps none provides as much as gardening.
Gardens never stand still and never allow us to buy a season ticket on the line of least resistance. They need as much guiding, reshaping and rethinking in their twenty-fifth year as in their third.
Robin Lane Fox
