Category — Politics of plants

I was intrigued by hyperlocavore when I found it on Twitter. The short version (that’s all you get on Twitter) was that this site helps you find gardening partners in your area, so you can share your yards or dig up your lawns and grow food locally.

A lot of people in my area are involved in the slow and local food movements; in fact, a lot of people in my area moved here in the earlier “grow your own” era, and some of the ones who are still moving here have the same sentiments.

While this site is definitely in favor of “grow your own”, the vision is a lot bigger than that. I checked out some of the videos to get the flavor of what was on offer here.

One of the videos, “Transition Towns”, caught my attention.The video might benefit from a little editing. Peak oil philosophy is not a riveting opening for most. But I kept going, and found original and inspiring thinking about how gardens might be a part of  dealing with an oil-based culture that is running out of oil, and choking from the bad effects of oil dependency. That’s what Transition Towns are all about, according to Rob Hopkins, the movement founder.

“We could do nothing, let this unfold as a series of lurching crises, or we could do something…there’s no  reason why a world with less oil couldn’t be preferable to where we are now,” says Rob Hopkins “We really need to re-discover what was actually good about the life before cheap oil.”

So they set about doing it - what else? - locally. In Totnes, Devon, UK, Transition Town enthusiasts began mining their own resources; old people, with their memories from the time before cheap oil  came in and really started to change things.

One thing you notice when you start interviewing, says  Hopkins, is “how resilient people were in those days, how everybody had skills they could turn their hand to. Dig for Victory - Victory Gardens I think it was called in the U.S.  - that was possible because everyone knew how to garden. They hadn’t been to gardening college, they knew it by osmosis. Nowadays, if you said, ‘here’s a spade, dig a hole,’ you’d have lots of people who could design a hole, you’d have lots of people who could quantity survey the hole, inspect the hole up for you, put the hole-digging out to tender, and they could insure the hole-digging process against public indemnity,  but actually there’d be very few people who could actually dig: so we’ve moved away from being a practical, hands-on society.”

Transition Towns is no pie-in-the-sky idealist movement; their idea is to find workable community solutions - solutions that are, in fact, much more workable than the ones we use now.

“The idea is to look to draw what was good  about  those times before cheap oil, not to romanticize it. We try to apply the best of the old and the best of the new, but it’s really about getting people to ask the right questions. We don’t claim to come in with all the answers.”

What they’re looking for is a way to replace common misconceptions with common sense. “If you look at all the plans the government draw up, town planning, it’s based on the assumption that oil prices will always remain cheap, the move away from the household economy will continue.” Hopkins points out that we really have no basis for those assumptions, and so we make bad decisions based on shaky foundations. In the U.S., such decisions have allowed us to become a sedentary, obese, depressed people, whose food travels long distances, and is often highly processed and without nutritional value.

For  Hopkins and the Transition Town movers, one of the first obvious good decisions is to produce food locally. The old model puts “good economy” as the enemy of “sustainability”. The Transition Town movement seem to be saying that we need to work together, locally, toward a richer and more sustainable economy. Which only makes sense. If we mortgage the future, how good is our economy, anyway? Any gardener knows that if you deplete the soil, you’re going to have to pay somewhere down the line.

But I think the most inspiring part of the Transition Town movement is the concept that we don’t have to wait for Big Experts to Solve the Problem for us. “Rather than breezing in with lots of experts who design everything for everybody, it’s a question of unleashing the genius of the community around you.”

(To read more about local food gardening, visit http://hyperlocavore.ning.com/)

Sometimes it’s easy to forget how exuberantly beautiful a vegetable can be. This fading but vital red chard arrested me as I was passing through a friend’s garden, just at the moment when the sun backlit it.

In the past twenty years or so, there’s been a movement to get vegetables back into the ornamental landscape (or maybe it’s the other way around). Pioneers such as Rosalind Creasy an Robert Kourik proved that edible plants can be ornamental, and that landscaping can provide food.

This seems like a new idea (it’s still controversial for some zoning boards and neighbors), but it’s actually a very old one. Food plants didn’t get split up from other plants until the age of European colonialism.

Colonialism opened up new vistas of plants, and for the first time, it wasn’t just curators of botanical gardens who were plant collectors. Wealthy people became aware that they could show off their status by using exotic plants in their gardens. Though slow transportation and primitive shipping methods meant many foreign plants arrived dead, avid collectors were willing to pay the price. Wanting to be the first on your block to have something is not a modern phenomenon.

Neither is showing off  to your neighbors.  Wealthy Western Europeans started to display their substance to the world by planting only ornamentals in the visible parts of their gardens and landscapes; the vegetables and fruits were relegated to areas visited only by the servants.  To show only ornamentals was to announce that you were too wealthy to farm; someone else could do that work for you.

This trend only applied to the wealthy, of course.  Workers and farmers kept on doing what gardeners have done for millenia: they grew what they needed as near to the door as they could get it. Plants that provided medicine or dye or food or were just the gardener’s beautiful pets or breeding project were all grown in one place: the original definition of a cottage garden. For many people, the idea of edibles as ornamentals has never passed away.

But as time went on, Western Europeans (including the ones who emigrated to the what became the U.S.) adopted the styles of those who were wealthier than they were. This trickle-down or social climbing in styles is a very pervasive feature of Western European cultures. The styles don’t necessarily have to make sense for us to adopt them. The reason why Spaniards lisp, for instance, is because one of the royals a few hundred years ago had a lisp. In order to save him embarrassment, the courtiers-the wealthiest class-followed suit. Since the courtiers were wealthy and prominent (the equivalent of movie or rock stars today), people copied what they did. The lisp spread until now standard Spanish Spanish means lisping,  and not only on the “s” sound.

Our culture is full of stories like these. Many of our fashions are not only the sign of deep changes; they are part of creating them. On a larger scale, the separation of food and ornamental plants-something you see in most of the gardens of the modern-day U.S.-reflects the economics of colonialism. A garden that shows that you don’t have to work the land yourself, that unseen others do the dirty work for you, is the basis of colonialism, where far-off workers make cheap goods for our sometimes uneasy consumption. It’s  a knotty issue we’re still struggling with. Maybe we can begin to unravel that knot by appreciating the beauty of red chard.