God Gardened in the East, Avram Wandered West

It’s cool this morning, not unusually so, but it feels unusual given how hot it’s been recently. Passing over the expected, luxurious, and infinitely gentle transitions that normally characterize autumnal life in Atlanta, Georgia, this fall seems to have stolen in on us overnight. The steam rising off my coffee cup is visible even against the grey canopy of morning sky. It’s cold. And quiet, the city still asleep. Pigeons are gently cooing and playing on the roof. A dog barks somewhere up the street. My stomach gurgles as I sip the coffee—that gentle nectar which turns waking into such a subtle, sweet pleasure. I am in the garden.

I am here, as I am nearly every day over morning coffee, to survey the subtle changes each evening brings in this season. It is a point of pride that I use no fertilizer of any kind, nor pesticides; I have found that fresh grass clippings work best, both to hedge in the individual rows of various crops and to minimize the weeds which manage to muscle their way up into the sunlight. These clippings also serve to enrich the soil as the grass is gradually and magically transformed, with a little help from the veritable army of earthworms just below the surface that the birds are after. Each morning I find the ground pockmarked like a gardener’s no-man’s-land, the latest scars on the dark earth testimony to the dawn skirmishes in the Great War. The birds poke somewhat spastically through the grass, looking for breakfast. In the process, they unwittingly bury the new shoots under a deadly umbrella of grass. So, along with the savory smell of coffee and subtler aromas from the spice garden, I savor the feeling of damp bedding in my hands.

That magical transaction, of brownish-black for green, is a source of endless wonder. I am gazing now upon rich, loamy vegetable and flower beds that bear eloquent testimony to the constancy of my affections for this place over some seven years now. Hardly a miracle worker myself, I have stood watch nonetheless over some really miraculous transformations. I have been a witness to, perhaps also an agent of, the transmutation of the impossible red Georgia clay—which bakes all summer no more than four inches below the surface—into a rich, loamy brown topsoil in the comparatively brief span of several years. This morning, in the cool of early light, that rich soil is especially wet with autumn condensation, and infinite promise.

Numberless hours are buried in this small plot, amply illustrating what Jim Nollman calls the “golden rule of organic gardening.” Essentially, you put back into the soil everything you take out of it, and then something more. “Any gardener who practices this rule soon learns,” Nollman adds, “that he or she is not so much growing produce as growing soil.”¹ “Growing soil”—I like that. The rich loam in my garden goes down more than two feet in the older beds, the first ones I cut and cultivated in what now seems to me almost a former lifetime. Countless bags of grass clippings have gone into the soil, just here; countless hours spent doubled over this piece of sacred ground, weeding, cutting—and sweating, it seems important to add—but also simply watching, and listening. I know this plot better, probably, than any other place in the world. It bears thinking about, this powerful attachment to local place. It is what gardeners know best, the knowledge they seek—and seek to pass on.

There is nothing terribly profound in these random morning thoughts; their personal poignancy derives solely from their proximity. Of course, there is a poignancy in table scraps being turned into new food next season; everyone knows that. But there is an immediacy about the whole transaction here, in a garden of one’s own. Yesterday evening, for instance, I picked a wonderful batch of new beans. As I listened to the news, I cut the ends off and tore the hard...