©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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That's why weeding and hoeing the family vegetable patch this past summer was made more enjoyable (if weeding and hoeing can be made enjoyable at all). I found myself taking more half-hour breaks, sprinting up to the shaded patio, and diving once again into Carl Klaus's engrossing 1995 vegetable garden journal.
Garden journals make better reading when they're peppered, spiced, and served up with all the day-to-day minutiae of the writer's life -- not just his gardening. From this vantage point, it's possible to see what effect the garden has on his life and what lessons it has to teach.
Klaus is a sower of seeds. As a professor of English, he is the consummate gardener, tilling the mind as well as the soil: "Yet, I also know that in many ways the classroom is a seedbed of my own work, a hothouse of ideas about prose that nurtures my own."
But, this book is not just a year's chronicle of the author's Iowa City vegetable garden. The changes that take place in his vegetable garden are similar to the changes in his day-to-day life. These are the same little changes of birth and death we all see in our own lives. During the year, Klaus comes to grips with his changing neighborhood, his aging gardening friends, his wife's possible recurring cancer, the changing nature of the academic community to which he belongs, and his two beloved animals, Pip (his old dog) and little Phoebe (his sun-loving, twenty-year-old cat).
But, first and foremost, this is a garden journal. It records the volatile mood swings (and often destructive temperament) of Mother Nature: ". . . I remembered the seventy-mile-an-hour wind, the driving rain, my fear of the corn being leveled again, but most of all my surprise the next morning when I discovered the storm hadn't disturbed anything, even a single corn plant."
It acknowledges the dictum that frustrated, overworked gardeners everywhere subscribe to: when the garden comes "in," you don't sit down. "If the cucumbers, eggplants . . . and zucchini aren't regularly picked, they grow monstrously large -- in just a few days. If the tomatoes aren't picked when ready, they go soft -- in just a few days . . . Now's the time when I feel most imprisoned by the garden."
And, it reaffirms man's commitment to purpose. For Klaus, vegetable gardening is the thing that keeps one vital and anchored in purpose. Those who one day retire and choose to forego its rejuvenating powers as well as the mental and physical benefits of the activity it requires, retire without much to take its place. There is little else to do but search for activity to fill the endless days which seem lost to purpose.
After you put your garden "to bed" and prepare for fall leaf-raking chores, take a break. Make a tomato sandwich and settle down with this steamy romance of vegetable gardening.
Pat Regel writes, gardens, and teaches in Nashville.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.