Wildness in the garden

After a week of traveling to towns and cities, and a week of thinking far too hard about research questions, surveys, and communication across cultures, I have dived back into the more pleasant pace of farm life.  The pace is slow for me because I have the luxury of being an intern here rather than a full-time employee.  I was unhurriedly informed today that the farm is actually way behind schedule:  the girls are still out in the valleys weeding when the second harvest of cardamom should have already begun.  Myself, I am learning the valuable lesson that not everything can be done in one day.  The potatoes and onions I lost the light on today will be planted tomorrow.  The beans that I did manage to seed into the freshly composted ground will have one extra day to grow big and leafy in the coming weeks.

The truth of it is I’ve been absorbing the gardening in a new way.  I’ve been reading an old Michael Pollan favorite, The Botany of Desire, and each time I leave the book for a bout in the garden, I notice new things.  About wildness and order, or seeds and multi-cropping, or even about biotechnology and genetic engineering.  In this, one of his first and most respected books, Pollan deconstructs the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and potatoes from many angles- biological, cultural, and philosophical.  I found myself wishing he would just keep going, and leave us with an atlas of plant histories.  I’m especially interested in how he would tell the story of coffee, or cardamom, or pepper, the main crops in this area. 

Pollan closes his book with a visit to his own late-August garden, which at that point had become “an anarchy of rampant growth and ripe fruit.”  His description reminds me of the farm here, where our cultivated plants mingle with wild tubers, miniature forests of ferns, and all manner of hulking jungle trees.  He writes,

“Whenever I hear or read the word garden, I always picture something so much less wild than this, probably because in common usage garden stands as the opposite of wilderness.  The gardener knows better than to believe this, though.  He knows that his garden fence and path and cherished geometries hold in their precarious embrace, if not a wilderness in any literal sense, then surely a great, teeming effulgence of wildness- of plants and animals and microbes leading their multifarious lives, proposing so many different and unexpected answers to the deep pulse of their genes and the wide press of their surroundings- of everything affecting everything else.”

This relationship is undoubtedly even more pronounced on a farm such as this, where wildness is intentionally integrated into the cultivation process.  I am continually impressed by the choreography of the crops here, at how unassuming hedgerows attract the pollinators that feed the coffee trees, whose fruit-husks mulch the vegetable patches.  Here it seems to always be ”an anarchy of rampant growth,” but I suppose that’s the nature of a rainforest.

It’s humbling to see in action the various biological processes we learn from day one in school, and a gift to be able to participate in it.  There is nothing so refreshing as spending a day barefoot building vegetable beds out of forest soil and cow manure, and then patting fresh bean seeds into it at the end of the day.  Now I just have to hope their green shoots will come up with the same vigor of each wild plant I am surrounded by each day.  

Photos:  1- Seedlings of beetroot, tomato, nurkol, and chili, wrapped in a wet leaf and ready for the garden.  2- Freshly planted seedlings, neatly organized and fenced in, even within the rainforest.