Why Plant a Garden in a World at War?

Bombs, blossoms and hope for the future

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This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic is by Lancia E. Smith

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Many years ago, I was homeless. Not figuratively, literally. I had lost everything I ever owned, not once but twice. The first time I was alone; the second time, I was an alcoholic married to a practicing addict. This time, my family and I were evicted from our apartment, and we ended up in an emergency family shelter for the weekend. I was a 26 year old mother of four children. Landing here was my greatest fear, worse than when I had been homeless in the streets by myself. This was worse because it was in front of my children, as witnesses and victims. We were displaced, powerless, ashamed, and hopeless. As it sometimes happens, I was met at the bottom of the well of fear and shame with a great grace. Right there in the terrifying pit, I was given a gift.  

Some kind soul knew our plight and had left a box of food and necessities for us in our room. Decades later, I remember that box, not so much for its contents as for the rush of mercy I felt opening it, and for its accompanying note—a single piece of unlined typing paper folded into thirds addressed to our family. I opened it up to find only these words handwritten inside.

“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” — Jeremiah 29:11, ESV

Even now, I cannot explain how, but when I read those words, they sounded like they were being spoken aloud, alive, and in person to me specifically and intimately. They reverberated in my mind, bypassing the cloud of shame and fear. I remember something happened within me as I read them. I believed them.

All these years later, I still believe them. The idea of “a future and a hope” isn’t something we manufacture out of a state of wishful thinking; it isn’t a mental night-light in denial of the darkness. It is a promise given by someone outside of time—someone who knows the end of it. Someone who knows the future in its full bloom as the present.

For me, the future is often shrouded in risk, harboring impending loss and potential ruin. It is starkly at odds with the word “hope” as a synonym for “future” in the English language. My base instinct is to fear, but my God-given nature is to hope. These two impulses wage an invisible conflict within me every day, and every day I must choose which one I listen to, feed, and act on.

Our current state of world affairs can make it difficult to believe there is any future on earth really worth hoping for. Not just for my husband Peter and me, but for our children and grandchildren, and on the really hard days, even for our species. Why plant a garden when it will be wiped out by hail some summer afternoon? Or the country may be at war in the next six months? Why plant a tree when I won’t live long enough to see it reach maturity? Why love a child or an animal when they may die before I do? Why make art if civilization, as we know it, may not have another hundred years left?

Yes indeed, why bother? This question wrestles with me persistently. In my low points, a passage from C.S. Lewis’s, Learning in War-Time, comes to mind.

“The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself…

Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never come. …They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffold, discuss, the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.”

Lewis wrote Learning in War-Time under the shadow of World War II. And even though the geopolitical realities are somewhat more subdued at our current point in history, we still live in a world at war in one form or another, waged in arenas both seen and unseen. Every day we must choose where we will place our alliance, how we will serve, and whom we will defend. Our battle tactics seem counter-intuitive: do good, defend truth, and make beauty. Our swords of defense are pens and keyboards, trowels and spades, camera lenses, paint brushes, potting wheels, musical instruments, dance shoes, even kitchen pots and garden plots.

Thirty some years ago, Vedran Smailovic, known as the cellist of Sarajevo, offered an embodied example of what Lewis describes in Learning in War-Time. On May 26, 1992, Smailovic witnessed 22 people killed by a bomb while standing in line for bread. The day after, he returned to the site of the massacre and began to play his cello. For 22 days—one day for every life taken—Smailovic continued to play the same piece of music, Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor, even amidst the continued rifle fire and bombings. His actions were not planned for a media campaign or to bring attention to himself, they were his response to the anguish of his city and the horror that he witnessed. It was not self-serving, vain panache.

With extraordinary courage and defiance, Smailovic surrendered his horror to the discipline of art, in the service of the suffering. He brought the consolation of beauty to a place of ruin; he played sublime music while sitting on the rubble of his bombed city. That responsive action lingers as a picture of what every act of beauty becomes—consolation in the face of devastation, both great and small, and holy defiance. Smailovic modeled the better part of our human nature—to answer sorrow with beauty.

While Vedran Smailovic’s actions in Sarajevo were a kind of embodied metaphor, in a similar way, gardens are physical realities that speak as metaphor about what we love, what we choose to cultivate, and what we choose to neglect. From humble to grand, gardens represent the ground of a cultivated life. They are the product of choice and sacrifice. The work done in them may be work that is loved and work that is therapeutic, but it is always an act of will and sacrifice. Gardens bear witness to our yes’s and our no’s. What we make and tend today is what comes to bloom not just tomorrow, but even after we have no more tomorrows. This is the immutable law of gardening.

An untended garden will eventually revert to wild ground or wasteland. Wilderness is by definition, wild land. Raw, untamed, bearing witness to its own mysterious wonders and harsh realities, the word “wilderness” means uncultivated. Wilderness land, if it is known and loved at all, is land that is for the greater part, loved from afar.

Cultivated land is entirely different. Whether garden or farmland, cultivated land is that which is known and loved by individuals, up close and personal. Created and tended by people, gardens and cropland come into being no other way. There are no gardens without gardeners. There is no cropland without cultivators.

Gardeners are grown first, not by learning skills, but by yearning for a taste of Eden. We are stirred by a longing that leads us through the seasons of planning, studying, buying, digging up soil, digging in compost, adding biosol, fertilizer, then pruning, weeding, waiting, watering, watching, weeping, fighting bugs, hail, sun scorch, and wind. The fruit that leads this longing is the scent of roses, the taste of strawberries, the harvest of onions, the sight of raspberries and blackberries on the cane, the last tomato taken in before frost. Tolkien frames this this poetic task in the words of Gandalf in The Return of the King: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule. 

If ever there was a practice of hope, an investment in resonant beauty for the future, it is found most tangibly in gardening, whether in soil or soul. No matter what it gives us in its season, gardening is always in its essence a practice for tomorrow. Every gardener will tell you that no matter how beautiful their garden is today, it will surely be more beautiful next season. To garden is a work that is never fully done.

We don’t labor to make beauty as an idle act to fill the time, or with intent to control the outcome. There can only be the love of tending, planting, tilling, and harvesting, with the occasional glance at the fleeting moments when wonder is unveiled to our naked eye. We make beauty—gardens of every kind and craft—simply because it is our original telos as recounted in Genesis, the book of our beginnings: “Then Adonai Elohim took the man and gave him rest in the Garden of Eden in order to cultivate and watch over it.” (Genesis 2:15, TLV)

In this light, growing gardeners of the future is of paramount importance. The future will be a wasteland without them. If we do not grow gardeners, and cultivate cultivators today, there will be no gardens and no civilized culture tomorrow.

I have lived in many beautiful places since that weekend in the homeless shelter; three of those places I have owned. In each of those three, I have designed and planted gardens, unique to the place and time. When I first read that note with God’s promise of a future and a hope, I could not imagine what would become of us after that weekend, let alone anything beyond that. I never envisioned owning a home, becoming a garden designer, or a photographer.

And the piece of paper we were given? It was framed in a 25 cent garage sale frame a few weeks after we left the shelter. It is the first thing I have carried into every place I have lived since, the first thing I hang on the walls. Every day as I walk passed it, I am reminded that my home on earth is rooted in hope itself. My faithful God plans and forms the future; He never asks me to live anywhere except in today as He gives it.

So, why do we bother affirming goodness in the bitter seasons, craft beauty in the seasons of sorrow, defend truth in the seasons of heartbreak and uncertainty, for a future unknown? Because we are made to. It is not panache, after all. It is our nature.

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Lancia E. Smith
Executive Director & Gardener

Veteran gardener and designer, Lancia is the founder and Executive Director of the magazine Cultivating and the fellowship of its content makers ~ The Cultivating Project. She lives with her husband Peter in the Black Forest of Colorado, writing, gardening, and photographing.

What did you think of this essay? How do you cultivate hope for the future?

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