How to Garden for the Coming Disasters
Growing equity, plus carrots, peas, and cucumbers
By Kea Krause
Sierra Club
September 11, 2022
Excerpt:
But the garden came to my family in a time of crisis: the early pandemic in Portland, Maine, when I would drive aimlessly with my infant daughter looking for … something. The garden seemed like an oasis for weary souls; each time we visited, gardeners were hard at work, turning compost and pulling weeds. We put our name on the waitlist and hoped one day to learn a plot would be ours.
Catastrophes often inspire a turn to nature and, for some, specifically, gardening. Wars and economic disasters, meanwhile, have brought bursts of funding for new plots. In her book about community gardens, City Bountiful, professor of landscape architecture Laura Lawson writes, “that gardening satisfies deeply ingrained values associated with nature and individualism helps to explain why gardens are promoted during times of crisis.”
In 2022, we are learning to live with crisis in perpetuity: an ongoing pandemic, widening income inequality, and a climate emergency. These catastrophes manifest most cruelly in communities with the least resources to handle their impacts, where food can already be scarce. But in those first pandemic days, as I envied the gardeners near the Presumpscot, I hadn’t pieced together that a garden was more than just an aesthetic space. It was a tool. And as writer and naturalist Wendell Berry wrote, a grassroots one: “Gardening has a power that is political and even democratic. And it is a political power that can be applied constantly, whereas one can only vote or demonstrate occasionally.”
