GARDEN OF EDEN

Sunday 23rd August, 2020

There is something wonderfully wholesome about gardening. It is as if one were trying to cooperate with Nature, trying to maximise Nature's abundant generosity so that mutuality, fruitfulness and harmony might exist. I was asked yesterday to help in a friend's allotment. The rightful owner was under the weather. I watered the green house plants and noticed their superabundance and also the manure and boxes of feed. I harvested some tomatoes and then out to pick runner beans, broad beans, courgettes, peas and also sweet pea flowers. These latter need cutting or they will stop flowering. Finally rhubarb and a giant marrow which I will stuff and bake. On the way back I picked some wild blackberries.

I had a huge crop but had not had to dig, plant, water or nurture them. I simply walked off with the fruit of another's labour and Nature's kindness.

Speaking to another allotment owner I had been told of the hard work it entailed. Then I was told of the slugs, snails, caterpillars, birds, mice and rabbits and, no doubt, other creatures hoping also to feast off the goodies. I heard of the need for manure, the careful tilling, the weed control, the rotation of crops and the unknown factors of weather and seed variety. Also I heard of the ever new theories of not digging, not weeding, not using pesticides but rather 'Vaseline, coffee grounds and garlic water' to deter the multitude of slugs.

Driving home I noticed the combine harvester in the field of corn. Earlier I had seen the agricultural workers flown in from Romania and Portugal and accused of Covid transmission. I had seen the great machines ploughing, spraying  and planting over the seasons. Those insecticides sprayed to 'keep the bugs at bay'. Agribusiness is the result of the clamour for cheap and abundant food for an ever burgeoning population.

To me Nature and Man are or should be in a symbiotic relationship. We exist with each other but it seems we are pitched against each other. The pandemic has made many think we are in a battle, a war. Homo Sapiens has become Master of the World wiping out other species of man. He has expanded to all corners of the world changing ecologies, destroying habitats, exterminating animals and plants and insects. We demand the fullest use of the world's resources. We are reaping what we have sown...climate change, deforestation, desertification, growing infertility of soils as money is sought and the demand for food and riches leads us to the brink of existence.

As I ate the especially delicious freshly picked runner beans and courgettes I realised how blessed I was yet also how precarious it all is: how long? The battle is raging for vaccines, for ways of enhancing yet not destroying our earth, for ways of accommodating an ever growing world population. Migrancy, poverty, deterioration of environment are on the increase and man battles with Nature and among his own. Wars increase, even wars over water and land and resources which dwindle.

The Garden of Eden seems merely a myth. Yet in that hour or so I spent on the allotment I felt I had tasted and seen that Eden.