October is the end for the Russo family’s annual adventure in horticulture. The mild (a partisan might say ideal) climate of the Maryland Piedmont means the garden yields tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers sometimes until almost Halloween. But last night was the first under forty degrees Fahrenheit; the end will come swiftly. It is time to take stock.
An objective assessment must grant that what success the garden had was due mostly to luck. Our tomatoes were excellent, exploding under what might generously be called a laissez faire maintenance regimen; last year, despite many tender and desperate interventions including radical pruning, mid-season fertilizing (both with homemade and with store-bought products), and daily watering, the better part of our crop was afflicted by blossom end rot. The difference? Kindlier nature this year gave a more moderate distribution of dry and rainy spells.
Our peppers were not merely successful, but exuberant. Friends and relatives can look forward to a Christmas of novelty hot sauces with amusing (to me) names: “Creeping Authoritarianism” (Hungarian wax peppers), “The King and I” (Thai prik kee noos), “1893” (Aji pineapple). The processing of peppers yielded many and sometimes painful lessons, foremost of which is the importance of keeping gloves close by.
On the other hand, the garden’s failures can be attributed mostly to neglect. Our handsome cucurbits were ill-starred; in the space of a busy week, they were overcome by squash bugs, and a single knobby fruit was the sole survivor. (A promising Negroni season has given way to a thin decorative gourd season.) A rushed, last-ditch effort to put an end to the invaders—scraping eggs, scattering tobacco ash on the leaves—was too little, too late. You cannot cram for the test in gardening.
Our ornamentals had similarly mixed fortunes. All our sunflowers but two were eaten by rabbits. The same bandits harassed our two-year-old apple sapling all summer; it will, I think, survive, but has been robbed of much of its growth. Next year we may need to resort to a cage. The front bed is a chaos of violets, mid-season poppies, and blazing stars. Two surprisingly crudescent patches of lavender enframe the sign looted from a condemned university building that gives my house its name, Marist Hall. The overall impression is, I fear, messy. It is a characteristic quirk that our garden’s finest section is behind the house, where our neighbors’ jaundiced eyes cannot see it and appreciate whatever aesthetic sense we have—a square planter anchored by obedient plant and a young serviceberry, with accents of daisy, milkweed, and black-eyed susan. Naturally, this oasis was afflicted by a fungus and is in a somewhat diminished state.
Gardening is a salutary exercise—not just for the fresh air and mild physical exertion, but because it sets you toe to toe with the conditionality of the earth bringing forth her fruits in due season. Here’s existentialism; life on earth, on this particular piece of it, anyway, may just not happen this year, gentlemen. Farmers and agronomists are the world’s great heroes and wizards, the bringers of consistency in the face of fickle winds and waters. Sophocles names the farmer, along with the sailor, as one of the primeval exemplars of derring-do: “Many terrible things there are, and none is more terrible than man . . . he wears out the most ancient of the gods, the untiring, deathless Earth, the plows running up and down year by year, as he turns her with the breed of horses.”
Virgil’s second great work, the Georgics, elaborates this kernel of heroism into four books about man’s war on nature. The farmer takes up arms against an indifferent world; the plantings of his vineyard stand “as when often in a great war a long legion has spread its cohorts, and the battle-line has stopped on an open field.” Here is the promise of the shield of Achilles fulfilled: the epic finds its peacetime counterpart.
In more ways than one. Max Weber’s oddly neglected analysis of the fall of the Roman Empire identifies the peculiarities of the Roman agricultural system as the culprit for the mass declension of material conditions in late antiquity. The ever-expanding plantations—the latifundia—were oriented towards the cash crops of olive and grape, and subsistence farming grew harder and harder as the landowners enclosed more and more productive lands. Eventually, declining efficiencies and disruptions to the supply of slave labor toppled the system. The ultimate war for the classical world was fought in the fields and vineyards of the Georgics.
For better or worse, though, most students regard Virgil’s farm-world as terribly boring. The problem is neatly—beautifully, even—summed up by the aging poet Homer in Wim Wenders’s late Cold War masterpiece, Wings of Desire (Der Himmel Uber Berlin). “My heroes are no longer the warriors and kings . . . but the things of peace, one equal to the other. The drying onions equal to the tree trunk crossing the marsh. But no one has so far succeeded in singing an epic of peace,” he thinks. “What is wrong with peace that its inspiration doesn’t endure . . . and that its story is hardly told? Must I give up now?”
For Wenders’s Homer, the strife has turned inward, away from the field of battle and toward the self and the everyday, where routine wages war on happenstance, and where labor omnia vincit—that is to say, a struggle that looks a lot like that of the gardener and the farmer. Little wonder that the meeting-place and metonymy for the school of Epicurus, where the Samian’s acolytes cultivated their souls in the short time before annihilation and dispersal into an uncaring universe, was the Garden.
