I had planned on writing about selecting plants for containers after a weekend in Manhattan that included a trip to a favorite city nursery, a matinee of Macbeth starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga, and the planting of some friends’ window boxes in Brooklyn. However, in light of yesterday’s slaying in Texas, it seems impossible to think about such things.
How does one make sense of a world where such actions take place? Normally I turn to my garden for solace in such times and, indeed, I spent today edging beds, planting some dahlias I had started off in pots, and desperately trying to get a grasp on the world we live in while working to check off a few of the myriad tasks that overwhelm me in spring. I thought I could lose myself in the process and shake off the sadness about what had taken place, but I found myself trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. What causes an individual to take such action and destroy others? Is it for glory and recognition? Casting about for an answer led me back to thinking about Sunday’s matinee. After all, none of Shakespeare’s plays is as openly violent as Macbeth, and the play is riddled by supernatural forces that work to undo the order of the world as know it. At its core, the play is about turning the natural world upside down and causing humans to perform monstrous acts.
The performance opened with a somewhat improvised speech by one of the actors on the curse of the Scottish play; it was lightheartedly peppered with references to the present, the pandemic that we are still living in (Shakespeare wrote Macbeth during a plague in England), and the violence of our times as the natural order of the law is overruled. It was meant as a playful take on how things do not change but, even before the senseless massacre that took place on Tuesday, the cynicism felt off in a time when we so need hope. It also felt at odds with the casting of the show, politically correct to the extreme, playing with gender and race so extensively that a purple-haired nonbinary actor is the hope for the Scottish future and Banquo is a woman. I wanted to admire the production’s attempt to recast the world, leaving behind race and gender and the things that separate us, but something about this felt naïve even before the slaying of 19 children on Tuesday. The production worked so hard at trying to right the world through the sheer force of casting that it failed to delve beneath the surface.
It brought me back to why I garden. Gardening teaches me other ways of seeing the world and the actions of others. We do not change the world by wishing things were different and by play-acting – or by merely changing the surface of things. But just like putting together plants for a container, we change the world by working to understand the needs of individual specimens and working to meet everyone’s collective needs, with a goal of peaceful cohabitation. This involves looking beneath the surface to understand our motivations and strengths, as well as our weaknesses and liabilities. It involves creating laws and rules that protect the community, as well as programs to help resolve the illnesses of others. And, just like in the garden, our attempts will have varied levels of success (death and loss are inevitable in the natural order), but our goal must be to improve the world for all of its inhabitants and to provide adequate protection for those we love.
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A gardener grows through observation, experimentation, and learning from the failures, triumphs, and hard work of oneself and others. In this sense, all gardeners are self-taught, while at the same time intrinsically connected to a tradition and a community that finds satisfaction through working the soil and sharing their experiences with one another. This column explores those relationships and how we learn about the world around us from plants and our fellow gardeners.
