When it comes to Easter, who do you believe? If the hardware stores had their way, we’d all be stocking up on supplies for a four day burst of DIY. Believe the camping stores and we’d all be heading off to a national park or a beach for a four day “escape”. Believe the bottle shops and we’d all spend the long weekend on a bender. I sure as heck don’t believe the supermarkets, but if I did, I’d spend four days eating chocolate and hot cross buns.
Here’s what I believe: faith still has its place. For me Easter is, amongst the chocolate, camping, and DIY, a time to reflect upon the big issues. Chief amongst these are life and death. If this sounds dreadfully old fashioned, and more than a bit moribund on the second biggest holiday of the year, give me half a chance. Let’s make the connection with gardening. That is, after all, the topic of this column, so here goes. When you distil gardening down to its pure form, it’s not about plants or soil or beauty or nature. Strip all that stuff away, and gardening is essentially about the two biggies, life and death. Growth and decay.
At this point, I’m sure there are more than a few loyal readers reaching for the anti-ageing cream. It’s not hard to understand why – our culture is obsessed with youth. We’re terrified of decay and do almost anything, no matter how ridiculous, to avoid its inevitable conclusion. Hair gets dyed to rinse out the grey. Breasts get “enhanced” to resist the effects of gravity (good luck!). Food becomes a convenience remote from the reality that for human beings to eat, something that once lived must die. The concept of ageing gracefully has gone the way of the Tassie tiger.
Gardeners, however, are a wise lot and I’m hopeful that those of us who practice the ancient art know better. In the garden, decay isn’t something to be feared, but something to be celebrated as a part of the grand cycle of life. Plants grow, mature, decay, and then they die. Either that or they are eaten. When plants die or get eaten, they rot, and the process of decomposition forms humus, the building block of healthy soil. In turn, soil humus helps produce healthy plants, and so the cycle goes. Gardening is about life and death.
The early 20th century botanist Sir Albert Howard, one of the “fathers” of the organic farming movement, believed that the first principle of agriculture is that “there must always be a perfect balance between the processes of growth and the processes of decay.” The consequences of this balance, according to Howard, are “a living soil, abundant crops of good quality, and live stock which possess the bloom of health.”
Around the same time that Howard wrote these words, soil scientists found that they could effectively isolate the key elements in soil that nurture plants, namely nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous – NPK respectively. Once the three elements were identified, scientists were able to synthesise them. This was believed revolutionary at the time, in that the “problem” of soil fertility could now be solved by the mass production of synthetic fertilisers, rather than reliance on animal manures. Thus began modern industrial agriculture, and the NPK ratio can still be found on the back of every pack of commercially produced fertiliser.
For Howard the industrialisation of soil fertility more or less threw the balance of nature completely out of whack. Synthetic fertilisers could replace key elements in soil, but it couldn’t reinvigorate depleted topsoil and therefore violated the “Law of Returns”, Howard’s concept that what comes from the soil, must be returned to the soil to keep it healthy and productive.
I’d take this concept a step further by arguing that decay or death actually sustains, and gives meaning to, life. One can’t properly exist without the other, yet many households see decay as inconvenient, so they unwittingly break the cycle of nature by behaving as though death is absent from the equation. A prime example of this is when people put otherwise beautifully compostable plant waste in a green lidded wheelie bin that gets carted away once a week to become someone else’s problem. And pay for the privilege!
Compost your green waste, and return the black gold to the soil. Get some chooks and feed them kitchen scraps. Use their manure to feed some fruit trees, and complete the cycle by feeding any spoiled fruit to the chooks. There’s one sure way to affirm life this Easter, and that’s by accepting, and dare I say, celebrating death.
First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 3rd April, 2010. Photo by Justin Russell – Davidson Arboretum, Highfields.
