The Tao of Vegetable Gardening: Cultivating Tomatoes, Greens, Peas, Beans, Squash, Joy, and Serenity
By Carol Deppe.
Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015.
Paperback, 288 pages, $24.95.
Reviewed by Eric Scheske.
American gardening literature is a big thing.
Amazon has an entire department dedicated to “Gardening & Horticultural Essays.” Yes, just “essays.” It has two dozen other departments dedicated to gardening and horticulture in general.
The genre of American garden writing runs the gamut from technical to inspirational: garden bed blueprints to meditations on weeding.
For instance, there are seed catalogs that merely list the price and seed specifications: days to maturity, spacing, and sun requirements. And then there are literary seed catalogs . . . those rare (and free) publications that are informational, occasionally witty, and serious about their prose.
Among contemporary books, you have The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible, which is a standard “go-to” book but hardly qualifies as serious literature. And then you have Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening, by theologian-gardener Vigen Guroian, which is lovely and scarcely mentions gardening techniques.
And then there are those books like The Tao of Vegetable Gardening by Carol Deppe, which is a beautiful hybrid: mostly how-to gardening advice, but laced with a meditational attitude that, though rarely overt, informs the book as a whole.
The Tao of Vegetable Gardening is part of a rich bed of American gardening literature that, in the words of M.E. Bradford, mixes “practical agricultural advice and moral reflection.”
In Western culture, gardening literature goes back over 2,500 years, at least to Hesiod’s The Works and Days in the 8th century BC. The Greeks later followed suit, as did the Romans (Cato the Elder’s De Agri Cultura, Virgil’s Georgics). Agricultural literature was firmly ensconced in the classical world.
It’s no surprise that America followed suit. The early Americans loved ancient Rome, including its agrarian literature. In the words of Paul Meany, “Roman poets, such as Horace and Virgil, praised an agrarian lifestyle, and their work struck a chord with the self-sufficient, hardy farmers of early America.”
Colonial Americans, such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, wrote about gardening and agriculture in general. French transplant Hector St. John de Crèvecœur wrote Letters from an American Farmer (1782), which became wildly popular with Europe’s reforming class and would later be sardonically savaged by D. H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature for its romantic intellectualizing, “This American Farmer tells of the joys of creating a home in the wilderness, and of cultivating virgin soil. Poor virgin, prostituted from the very start.”
There’s John Taylor of Caroline, a wealthy lawyer and agriculturalist whose talents didn’t carry over to the printed word. The prose in his Arator: Being a Series of Agricultural Essays, Practical and Political: In Sixty-Four Numbers is denser than hardpan soil, prompting John Randolph of Roanoke to suggest that someone translate him into English. But if one can get past the prose, he’ll find perhaps the best early example of American gardening literature: agricultural advice meandering into short meditations.
American gardening literature didn’t stop as America evolved out of an agricultural society.
The nineteenth century produced a lot of gardening literature: Henry Ward Beecher, the young Frederick Law Olmsted, and the Shaker Seed Catalogue, just to name a few. An Englishman, William Cobbett, entered the genre with his popular The American Gardener while spending two years on Long Island.
The genre was even popular during the urban-infatuated Roaring Twenties, prompting House & Garden magazine to assemble an anthology, The Gardener’s Bed Book, in 1929, shortly before the stock market crashed and sent everyone scrambling to grow their own food.
The later twentieth century saw explosive growth in gardening literature, probably because mega-agricultural corporations, tractors that crush the earth under their threads, and artificial chemicals gave small agricultural pursuits a sense of urgency. The urgency manifested itself in 1943 with the publication of Pulitzer Prize winner Louis Bromfield’s Pleasant Valley, which paved the way for today’s organic agriculture movement. He also published a book of essays named after his Ohio agricultural footprint, Malabar Farms, which became such a popular destination spot that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall got married there in 1945.
After that and the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the ideal of small agricultural practices, especially organic ones, fed into and melded with gardening literature, creating a gardening literary boom. As a result, there is a late-twentieth-century American gardening book for every taste.
Are you interested in gardening literature from the Upland South? Wendell Berry built much of his writing career around Kentucky agricultural matters. Looking for something from the southwest? Try John Graves’s 1974 Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land, about converting hundreds of acres of cruddy land in Texas. Do you want something with a heavy religious bent? Try Catherine Doherty’s Apostolic Farming. Do you want to see unbridled disdain for modern agriculture and modern life in general? Try Gene Logsdon’s The Contrary Farmer.
Deppe’s book is the DeWit diamond hoe of contemporary American gardening literature. It’s packed with gardening advice from a highly-educated and experienced gardener (Deppe holds a PhD in biology from Harvard), but it’s about much more, as evidenced by its subtitle: Cultivating Tomatoes, Greens, Peas, Beans, Squash, Joy, and Serenity.
She clarifies on page one that she’s providing practical agricultural advice and moral reflection, “The Tao of Vegetable Gardening is about the practical methods as well as the deeper essence of gardening.”
She’s not referring to “the Tao” in the same manner as C.S. Lewis, who, in The Abolition of Man, used the term as a kind of shorthand for the natural law. Instead, she means “the Tao” as used by Lao Tzu: the nameless and eternal, the effortless flow of the universe. Gardening is, she illustrates, a great way to engage the Tao, and she’s serious about it (she uses her own translation of the Tao Te Ching).
If the first intellectual principle of the Tao is that it can’t be named, the first practical principle is that it can’t be pursued. The affirmative pursuit of the Tao requires a lot of negatives. A lot of “no’s,” or “wu’s,” as in:
Wu-wei: non-ado,
Wu-shih: non-concern,
Wu-chiu: non-seeking.
Deppe puts the wu’s to work.
She’s a woman who doesn’t fret about gardening. When her elderly mother entered her final walk in this garden of tears, Deppe cared for her and let her garden go to weeds. When something goes wrong in the garden (as it always does), she’s not remotely angry but instead looks at it with curiosity. Although she plans her garden, she more often just lets things in the garden unfold and changes direction at the moment, like the time she bought a pile of compost for her garden but, instead, whimsically spread it over her driveway to create her first “eat-all greens garden.”
The eat-all-greens garden is probably her favorite gardening idea. She scatters seeds of a fast-growing hearty green, like green wave mustard, Chinese kale, and quinoa. The seeds produce a vibrant crop in 30-45 days. Because they germinate quickly, they out-compete and shade out weeds. She gets over 50 pounds of edible greens in eight weeks out of 12 square yards with very little effort.
Many traditional gardening tasks are unnecessary interventions that are both laborious and counterproductive. .. . We should dare to not do one part of the planting. This requires objectivity and humility.
In Deppe’s gardening world, the ratio looks like this:
Units of Effort : Units of Edible Calories = Gardening Happiness.
20 Units of Effort: 50 Units of Edible Calories = 2:5 Ratio of Gardening Happiness.
50 Units of Effort: 50 Units of Edible Calories = 1.0 Ratio of Gardening Happiness.
Every beginning gardener immediately learns that compost is crucial. All gardens start with good soil, and good soil needs the microbes that come with good compost. So the gardener either needs to buy compost or throw all her kitchen debris into a pile and let it decompose. As part of the process, the gardener needs to churn it occasionally, make sure it stays moist, and mix the “green” (nitrogen-rich) debris with “brown” (carbon-rich) debris.
Not Deppe. She says that if you have a large garden (say, over a half-acre), it’s impossible to make enough compost, so you must buy it. If you have a small garden, you can bypass the compost pile and toss the kitchen scraps directly onto the soil.
The Tao of Vegetable Gardening provides a harvest of such advice. The Tao, like it does in nature, runs through the book’s leitmotif: teaching gardeners to listen to the garden instead of mastering it, to work with the garden and accept how it responds to our efforts instead of trying to conquer it and force it to do what we want. The latter is the approach of aggression that ultimately makes us slaves to our own creation. The former is an outline of sanity for our gardens—and our lives in general.
Eric Scheske practices law, writes, and gardens. His works have appeared in dozens of publications, including Touchstone, Philosophy Now, National Catholic Register, Our Sunday Visitor, and Logos.
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