Since I began gardening seriously, and by that, I mean sometimes devoting hours a day to that activity, I’ve begun asking myself what it would be like if I had to depend solely on my garden to sustain my life.
What if the only fruit or vegetables I ate were those I grew? What if a couple of chickens picking at the earth were my sole source of eggs, and when they got too old, of chicken stew? There’d be no more need of diets or cutting back on this or that high-calorie treat. Between tending the earth and losing crops to pests or the elements, I’d soon be as thin as a rake.
Yesterday I spent over four hours in the garden. I mowed the lawn with a hand-mower (I am keeping things simple and limiting pollution in all forms). I removed slugs, one by one, from ripening strawberries and tossed them into a bowl of beer. Some of their fellow creatures had already climbed in; all were drowning in a drunken stupor. It’s cruel, but it’s me against them. If I didn’t seek and destroy, there’d not be a single strawberry left for me.
This year there are no cherries. Not a single one. In March 2018, I had my cherry tree radically trimmed. It seemed ill (I don’t know if it really was) and was too big, casting a shadow over my vegetable patch. Most importantly, it was not producing well. Though as towering as an oak, it gave me just about enough cherries to make two clafoutis, a light French cherry custard. That was a lot of tree for what came down to a harvest of about 50 pieces of fruit.
I thought trimming would make things better. I hired a professional gardener to do the job. He showed up with an assistant, a man who claimed he was a lumberjack. As I walked into the garden to see how things were going, I discovered him hanging by his feet from a ladder, his chainsaw sputtering on the ground near his head. He looked like a cross between Saint Peter, crucified upside-down, and the about-to-be victim of a chainsaw massacre.
The gardener managed to get the chainsaw under control. Somehow the lumberjack, no spring chicken—he was precisely at that age when you’d start thinking about throwing him into the pot, got himself back on his feet (I turned my head, the whole scene too gruesome for me). The two men returned to work and reduced my cherry tree to a trunk with three ugly bare stumps.
Since then, for the past two springs, those trunks have sprouted branches and the branches, leaves that turn from tender green to black. Black flies cover every inch. The leaves wilt and the tree is an eyesore. The gardener says I just have to let nature take its course. In a year or two…or ten, there may be some cherries.
This makes me ask myself, again, what if all I had was my garden? At this time of year, I could live on fresh lettuce, deformed radishes, and the tasty leaves of the red beet and turnips sprouts I pull from the earth to create breathing space for the more robust plants (this is my first time planting from seed and I’ve created too-crowded conditions).
Soon I’m hoping for green beans, zucchini, pumpkins, onions, carrots, tomatoes and cantaloupe, but only time will tell if those hopes become reality.
In le Perche, where my home is located, there are many former monasteries. Some have fallen into ruin, some have been converted into private residences, others, into parks and monuments.
I visited one last weekend in a place called Thiron-Gardais. The “Thiron” in the hyphenated name honors a monk who, in the early 12th century, on lands given to him by a local lord, created an earthly paradise for hermits who had been wandering in surrounding forests.
In the early 12th century, what is today the town of Thiron-Gardais was a forest. No land was cleared for planting, no stone structure stood. Saint Bernard de Tiron and his fellow hermits cleared the land, created a pond, and built themselves a church, a cloister and a dormitory. They became a community of men working to create a garden where every tree, plant and flower spoke to them of God. And, as a biographer of Bernard Thiron wrote, the monastery became the very image of Paradise.
For the monks of Thiron-Gardais, work was prayer. God created the ground on which they stood, and that made it holy. They took care of it, and the earth gave to them all they needed to live. In their cottage garden, there were onions, leeks, lentils, cabbage, parsnips, beans and common vetch, known as “poor man’s peas.” These were the main ingredients of their diet and monks were vegetarians long before the term came into vogue.
They also had a garden for medicinal herbs, which included flowering plants, such as lilies or roses. Lily root fought leprosy; attar of rose healed ulcers and eye infections. The cemetery was the monastery’s orchard, with fruit trees surrounding the graves. At its center, in the place of the apple tree of temptation, stood a cross.
The monks of Thiron-Gardais prayed without ceasing, hoeing, digging, weeding, pruning, harvesting. Their time was the time of the seasons and they submitted to the whims of the sky. Observing nature, they learned patience. Growing the food they ate, completely dependent on Mother Earth, they became humble. Sharing what they produced, they practiced love.
That was the monastic ideal put in place at Thiron-Gardais, where the gardens live on today. Almost 1,000 years ago, the monks, cut off from the outside world, created their paradise on earth. Today we enter their sanctuary and admire, but we have little idea of the difficulties they faced to maintain their simple diet of herbs, legumes and fresh vegetables.
Thanks to my vegetable garden, I may have a clue, but I’ve a long way to go before I learn the patience, humility and love it takes to truly care for Mother Earth. I also have a lot to learn about failure and submission to the elements. Far from an image of paradise, my organic garden (just like the monks’) is an open-air school of hard knocks.
Meanwhile, I’m glad there’s a supermarket down the road, a bakery in my village, and food on the table every day. And I take my hat off to the monks of Thiron-Gardais.
