My career has been built around the written word because I hate speaking to strangers. I have had a few brief attempts at sales, whether retail or other. They were not spectacular, but they did fail. Why was I wearing a nametag and grinning nervously to people I had never met on Saturday? Someone needed to staff the native plant information table.
The Master Gardeners Chapter in my county was holding its annual plant sales, which is one of their two or three biggest fundraisers each year. As I sat in the ag centre’s fluorescent lights under the cone flowers, hostas, and heirloom tomato aisles, looking sallow, and ready to answer questions about the science, art, and mysteries behind native plant cultivation, hunkered down.
In 1978, the University of Maryland Agricultural Extension started the Master Gardeners Program as a community-oriented extension. Similar programs are offered at universities that grant land grants across the nation. The program’s aim is to promote responsible land use among homeowners. This is what we call “outreach”, a term that’s thrown around a lot. It’s putting up information tables in libraries and at farmers’ markets. Holding clinics about composting, seed saving, and helping people evaluate potential runoff.
It’s a little lefty, but it is pretty crunchy. The site of the program has an acknowledgement for land. Even in my part, the volunteers are school teachers and librarians, with the usual political bent. One volunteer has a bumper-sticker that says, “Courage means being a Democrat here in C____ County.” It’s not what I usually do.
But I still work these little fundraisers and talk to strangers. It is a cliche that American civics is in ruins, there’s no shared culture, and our public institutions have been discredited, and are increasingly nonexistent, , and so on. It is an undeniable fact that we all share the same physical space, and it is in everyone’s best interest to care for it. This is the lowest common denominator but it’s a good place to start. We all share the Bay in Maryland.
Here I am, brainstorming with people wearing nose rings and amulets made of cannabis leaves and praising the virtues native grasses for people still wearing facemasks late in spring 2023. It’s not a common interest, but we all want to avoid poisoning our waters with expensive fertilizers. The Southern Agrarians made their position; I will take my place, behind the stacks on pamphlets about the ornamental use of Joe Pye and switchgrass.
Enoch Powell said, “In the end, being a country is subjective. Those who behave as if they were a country and feel like it are a nationality.” Powell hated America, and Americans in particular, because of their constant interference in European affairs. He saw us as a colonial culture incapable of self-definition, unable to look back at the Old World. Wendell Berry was an unlikely ally on this issue. He believed that the American people’s mission should be to become natives.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that the ultimate goal, the moral necessity of the American people, must be for them to become aborigines in the American land ….” Berry wrote in 1971 in a review of The last Whole Earth Catalog. When I look at my front flowerbed, which I hastily sowed with poppy seeds last year and now supports very little else, I think about this wistfully. The colonist is now colonized, and the dominator has been dominated. (Although, I still love poppies.
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To become a nation, we must use the native flora of this continent to create our gardens rather than trying to recreate European gardens. The same reasoning was behind the arguments of the Founding Generation over what native animal should be placed on our flagpoles. In retrospect, the turkey would have made a better selection. The Capitol dome features an American Indian and buffalos. Maybe, with the conflowers, the compost, and the bison our country will become a more primordially destined unity. Right-wing magazine editors will see the shared America in a future time clearing.
We can either continue to be apart, perhaps not at each others’ throats but in separate peace. We can order meat and grow it in laboratories. Maybe will make this truly preservationist . It’s not a very good life is it? It’s not much of an America either.
It’s likely that I will have to continue to talk to strangers, i.e. other Americans. Well, maintaining any garden requires some unpleasant tasks.
