This comment is from Walt Amses, a writer and former educator who lives in Calais.
I am amazed at the rich soil that runs easily through my fingers and am impressed that it is not hard like concrete or muddy – it is not even damp. It’s like we’ve gotten off winter, skipped early spring and settled in to warm, hazy April that doesn’t come up very often in these areas.
“The cruelest month,” said TS Eliot, was anything but cruel this April in northern Vermont, with little mud season, ice break weeks ahead of schedule, and a deafening early chorus of spring scouts and wood frogs.
Even the rest of Eliot’s line from “The Wasteland” seems far more hopeful than the beginning and slacken April a little: “Breeding / Lilacs from the dead land, mixing / remembering and craving / stirring blunt roots with spring rain.” Though the interpretation of the rest of the poem is as epic as the poem itself, much of it provides somber memories of WWI and a subsequent quest for spirituality in a crazy world.
As we hesitantly emerge from a soul-destroying year that cost five times more American lives than the Great War, April was an unexpected piece of natural philanthropy – a balm for rattling psyches.
Poetics aside, there has been a massive shift towards bucolic over the past year, with numerous people showing up on hiking trails, bike paths, nature reserves and of course gardens that have provided the much-needed respite for many years in the face of the disaster challenge – the victory gardens of World War II – as well as simply reconnecting with our figurative and literal roots.
According to Better Homes and Gardens, pandemic gardens could well last beyond Covid-19 as growing plants is “something fundamental and hopeful”. Psychologists who have studied the effects of gardening on wellbeing claim that it can improve your mood and calm your worries.
My own gardening has seen various levels of success and failure over the years. Raccoons and marmots; hard freezing, severe flooding, and even a bit of snow once or twice. Last season was extraordinary in every way: The nightshade gods were never very lucky with tomatoes and smiled so broadly that my plants collapsed their cages like fleeing zoo animals. On the other hand, whole raised beds of leafy vegetables fell victim to a gopher who eventually fell victim to me, but not before it decimated broccoli, cauliflower, and lettuce greens.
But win or lose, I love being out there. It’s like I’m more than a spectator in the garden. I become a participant, a small but satisfying fragment of spring magic.
I didn’t really start gardening until nearly 40, and surrounded the first half of my life in ubiquitous intricacies of urban life, including concrete, asphalt, crowds, and the kind of relentless traffic that would slowly crawl itself down even after a minor with sheet metal damage. Tired of the baggy strangulation of the New York subway area, coupled with months of tropical heat and humidity that made it even more unbearable, we fled into greener summers, whiter winters to lead a different life, which eventually led to the spring debris play.
I still remember sitting on the deck listening to the “eyes of the word” of the Grateful Dead – “Right outside the door, that lazy summer house” – as I marveled at that first patch of tillage and romanticized everything disproportionately before I did encountered swarms of black flies that are native to our newly discovered paradise.
And although gardening and the dead have absolutely nothing to do with each other, I equate them both with spring and create a scenario in which the band provides the background music for my annual forays into backyard breeding. Decades separated my first tripping horticultural ventures from regularly attending dead shows, but most of the early concerts were outdoors in warmer weather. While most people get poetic about spring itself, my memory provides a vision of crowds swirling in the dust, in a wild expression of a kind of spirituality that dates back to the dawn of human history.
In fact, after all, there are parallels between dead concerts and ancient spring rituals, be it morris dancing – the practice of greeting spring, waving handkerchiefs and carrying flowers and bells – or endlessly circling a maypole, the medieval tradition on Jan. May. is considered a metaphysically powerful day when early Europeans washed their faces with morning dew in search of beauty.
Growing your own food also has a certain history. The first cities are creating a leisure class and gardening for enjoyment becomes an option. But over 23,000 years ago, our ancestors purposely began planting seeds and dancing them to germination. In one way or another, we’ve followed their example ever since.
In the early 1970s when I was studying Bill at GI there were a significant number of dead shows within a reasonable driving distance so I’ve seen them a few times during what I consider to be their busiest time. Back then, after four years in the military, nothing said freedom like a dead show. Oddly enough, I was able to connect with these heady times this winter as a number of excellent recordings of these shows have surfaced on YouTube, ironically some that I know I’ve been to and some others that I’m not so sure about am
My gardening is a long way from flower pots grown on a Jersey City fire escape, and my taste in music has broadened too, but there’s always room for the dead, especially in spring. I managed to see one last bittersweet show on their last tour at Highgate 25 years ago. Eight weeks later, on a North Truro beach, I learned that Jerry Garcia’s long, strange journey was over far too soon.
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