Summary
Hudgins narrates his fondness of gardening various plants over the years, reflecting on its significance to the quality of his life, while also discussing several literary works dealing with the matter. He recalls that when he first began gardening, during a time when he was young and unemployed, he hovered over the plants, debating every decision as if he was charged in the deployment of troops and anguishing over every nickel he spent as if he was unemployed. Now, he finds the end of the garden a richer pleasure than the beginning, while also loving the life-at-the-face-of-death poignancy of the garden after the peak of harvest, when green fruit, ripe fruit, and decayed fruit all hang together on the vine.
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Extract
End-Days in the Garden
In the shortening days of late September, with the tomato vines sprawling across the garden, heavy with spotted, cracked, and even blackened fruit, it is hard to remember spring, when, with the days slowly lengthening, my wife Erin and I leaned over the tables at the garden center debating Big Boy, Better Boy, Best Boy, Beefy Boy, and Big Beef, until I wondered if the shoppers around us thought we were casting a gay porno flick. Moving down the counter to six-packs of Early Girl, Sweet Baby Girl, and Big Girl did nothing, or little, to ease my self-consciousness. God knows what the imaginary snoops would have thought if the garden center had sold Better Bush or the heirloom tomato, an almost obscene red, called Bloody Butcher. If Eros was here, could Thanatos be far behind?
Like Darwinian overlords, eugenic perpetuators of the master race of Lycopersicon esculentum, we held tomato seedlings to the light. We examined them and set back down on the counter those with blemishes, discolored leaves and leggy stems. Let the late shoppers settle for those horticultural losers! We wanted seedlings with deep green, symmetrical leaves and thick stems.At home, we turned the soil, dug holes, plunged the new plants in them up to their first branches, snugged the dirt around them, and watered them in. In the past I would have cut a ring out of a plastic cup and settled it over the seedlings to protect them from cutworms, but I no longer take the precautions I used to. I just straightened the crushed chicken wire that keeps the rabbits out of the small patch. I untangled the rusty wire cages, slipped them over the seedlings, and anchored them with stakes that, like the cages, I reuse year to year. There is something both monstrous in the way tomatoes can't bear the weight of their own fruit and also wondrous in their genetically engineered fecundity, their frantic vitality that has to be caged and staked to keep them from overrunning the garden.Authority balanced with love is as much an issue in the garden as in a family. You care for the young plants, watching them tenderly as they grow. Then you go away for a week on vacation, and when you return they're surly teenagers, standing on the street corn...See the full content of this document
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