Number 38. That’s the number of our plot in the garden club, also known as the volkstuin. I should say rather that it was our number, as we just canceled our membership. (Note: This was written in the spring of 2024.) We took our shovel and rake home, informed the directors, said goodbye to neighbors. We’re done.
Do you feel the need to defend the decision? My wife asked me the other day, because I guess I’ve been talking about it a lot. No, I said, but I have some feelings about it, because after four and a half years, I was attached to it in lots of ways.
Also consider that it might be the last garden I ever have.
At the beginning, the plot was an anchor. We visited this flat, empty rectangle of Limburgian dirt about 10 by 20 meters large for the first time in February of 2020. A blowy, chilly February day, if I remember correctly. Didn’t seem like much, this rectangle of wet, rather dismal dirt. But it was ours, and I had grand plans.
We were new to the country, had lived there for six months before the lockdowns, so knew very few people, had no community, no other places to frequent. Putting our hands in the dirt, putting some of this dirt in our bodies, seemed a good way to spend time. We've only had one community garden plot before; all the other gardening has been done in beds in our back yards.
A couple of weeks after we signed up in Amby (the name of our neighborhood), the pandemic happened, so while the rest of the world hunkered down in their miserable living rooms, we were liberated in the garden. Misty had the boys in the morning while I worked; in the afternoon I took over, bringing them to the volkstuin for digging beds, weeding, planting. We had few other places to go that warm, sunny spring, so we went to the garden, which is barely half a kilometer from the house.
Each boy became the king of a small section. Iver filled his with strawberries; Orri dug a hole in his, and kept digging. One week he dug a hole, filled it with water, then bathed in the mud; for some reason, his skin broke out in a rash. A sign of what was to come. For mere soil it bore no small hostility. I was constantly digging up shards of pottery and glass, rusty lengths of wire, bits of plastic. That particular plain could conceivably have been farmed for 20,000 years or more. We never found treasure, though–but I left treasure in it.
A neighbor gave us a rhubarb and strawberries, which flourished. We put two fruit trees, both named after a friend of each son (in the tradition of the father of a friend of mine): the apple tree, named after an American kid, didn’t make it, while the plum, after a Japanese kid, did. (We ate our first plum from it last year – exquisite.) Over the seasons we planted, and harvested, planted snap peas, green beans, beets, tomatoes, carrots, corn, potatoes. Only in the first year did I plant potatoes, because I realised that to keep good relations with one neighbor who made no effort to disguise her prickliness, I’d have to come every day to pick beetles from the plants, which I didn’t have time for. We planted towering sunflowers, prolific, gorgeous, sumptuous dahlias – I’d never been around dahlias before, but I’d found a new favorite flower. The carrots tasted exquisite, the green beans too, the few ears of sweet corn (which you can’t find in stores) made it all worth it. One particularly rainy August produced corn fungus, called huitlapoche in Nahuatl; I’d only eaten it once, but now I had enough for tacos to my heart’s content. Exquisite is the word I want to use over and over, because only it captures the exceptional fresh, delicious quality of the food that we’d grown but its jewel-like preciousness. There’s one plum on the tree you planted and cared for; it’s ripe; you pick it and take a bite. It’s beyond a mere connoisseurship of plum taste; you are plucking a web of geopiety and nostalgia, the geographic coordinates that places your tree in that relationship to the Limburgse sun, the accumulation of circumstances of pollen and fingertips and woodchips, all of it brought to bear in this single object. Which you consume. Tottering on the apex of ripeness, before the downslope towards rot, it’s perfect, and you were there: only you, and nowhere else. A harmony of circumstances.
I grew up gardening, not always willingly, so it seems surprising to me sometimes that I have returned to planting, weeding, harvesting, digging so assiduously. My first garden as an independent adult came in Austin, when a friend, the scion of a Californian farming family, helped me dig beds: broccoli, beans, peas. (My father, against whose horticultural impulses I had rebelled, apparently rejoiced when he heard I was digging beds in the backyard.) Yet when I’m depressed and go put my hands in the soil and feel better, that surprise goes away. I feel, you’re meant to be here. Also when I see one of the boys pushing seeds into a fresh furrow, confidently, as they’ve been taught. That’s what this is for – spending time together in the garden, passing on a culture, passing on a relationship to food, and to work. Over the years I also came to realize that I brought an inclination to stress and anger, especially when the boys squabbled or proved reluctant to work. This showed up particularly during the time we had #38. Why should they want to work? Why does anyone want to work like that? I’m the only one with the ora et labora whipped into me (father was a monk in training for eight years), and it’s not genetic, meaning that it’s not inevitable that my children have it. Nor should they.
As a result, on many weekend days I was the only one there, digging and digging, and often I was the only one on summer evenings watering. Iver came more often than Orri, probably because he remembers planting with me in South Portland in beds that were tiny fractions of the size of our Amby plot, so much more manageable. I know he feels connected to me through that work, so much so that when I said last spring that I wanted to give up the garden, he argued that we shouldn’t. He did come without complaint a couple of times, but it proved not enough.
In reality the plot was too large for us, and two other families we asked to share it eventually stopped tending their beds. It taught me a lesson about partnerships of this nature: don’t assume that if someone has a romance of the thing that you recognize that they’ll also share your work agenda.
It was also quite far from the house to check in on it frequently. To make it work, you need to make a weed sweep every few days, adjust the cups around the brassica starts, tie up the tomato branches, water frequently. I could barely do once a week. All those lovely gardens that we passed while getting to #38 were occupied to a person by retired people who could totter out every day.
This spring we had a reckoning. I’m going to give up the garden, I said; Iver protested. But then we all went, the four of us, to #38 to say goodbye, which turned into, embarrassingly, a shouting match. That’s when I realized that if I wanted a site for my own therapy, I should keep the garden for that, and put some parameters around what I needed the boys to do. For a while it worked. In the same period, we decided to join another farm project, Locotuin (since renamed Akkerwikke), which is where our fresh organic vegetables would come from. Every week the farmers send a list of what’s ready to pick, then in the field you look for the red flags, which means you can take a good serving from that row. This turns out to have provided a good outlet and helps me achieve the same goals: culture building, relationship with food, time with boys, time outside. I was always more interested in the food anyway, since I like to cook. Doing this threw into sharper relief how much the volkstuin work was focused on weeds, weeding, battling weeds. I still have grand ideas about bed-building and soil-building, and while I did a lot in that direction, the work itself was about unwanted plants.
There’s a poetry of the invasive, the marginal, the socially constructed, I acknowledge, but I can’t rhapsodize about the enthusiastically rhizomatic creatures that beset #38. These plants had always been normally profligate, but when we returned from three weeks of holiday this summer, the garden bed was awash in weeds. As if washed over by a green wave. My heart sank. These weeds are one result of long summer holidays but also fertilizer pollution. To the west of the community garden, the land slopes upward, across which lie hundreds of hectares of farmland on which fertilizers and pesticides are abundantly used, most prevalently nitrogen. (Perhaps the pesticide in the soil is why Orri’s skin broke out, I don’t know.) In the spring and early summer at least three heavy rains sent floods down the slope and through the garden, washing wood chips off the main path and soaking numerous gardens, probably including ours. The combination of wet soil, 18 hours of sun, and nitrogen supercharged the plant growth, including japanese knotweed and some grass so pervasively noxious it deserves no name. Some highway designer somewhere sings its praises for holding back berms, I’m sure.
When we left, I thought I had knocked the grass into a confined space; I’ll deal it with it when I get back, I thought. Now it has formed a thick mat across the empty spaces, the beds, the pathways. The fecundity of it all was demoralizing.
In reality this was the final blow in a season whose first demoralizing had come in the form of slugs. I know you’re not supposed to let one season get you down, but this one was so brutal. And slimy. Most of May and June was rainy, which encouraged the creatures, so that anything we planted got mowed down immediately. The slugs were so profuse that even devoted animal lovers took up snipping them in half with scissors with a victorious air. If you did enough snipping, and were disciplined enough to show up at night when the creatures were active, you might have been able to maintain some plants. But that wasn’t me. After the first round of devourings, the weather dried, and my energy felt restored. I’ll try again! But once I put seeds and starts in the ground, it rained and the slugs returned. All I had were shredded fibrous stumps.
I’m happy to leave the slugs behind. But I’m upset that I have to leave a treasure behind: my wedding ring. Here I’m going to rely on a column I wrote for the university newspaper right after it happened:
My left hand felt unbearably, unusually light. I looked. My wedding ring was gone.
Maybe you’ve seen me wearing it. It’s thin with rounded edges, dark gray, semi-shiny. As jewelry, it’s unremarkable; as a symbol, it’s the anchor of my life. Yet even a symbol shouldn’t necessarily hurt if it hits you, hence a ring made of a light metal, titanium.
In a month my wife and I will celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary, my first without a ring to wear, because I’ve lost it. It’s somewhere in our rented garden plot at the Amby volkstuin. I’m certain it came off my finger while I was re-planting dahlia bulbs back in May.
What does it mean to live in a place? We commonly think a place is made from what we take of it, both the tangible (the food, the weather, the landscape) and the intangible (the mood, the resonances of history). Yet places also take from us. Small things, mostly. A coin, a sock. Sometimes only time, sometimes blood. A place will take your innocence.
Sometimes it tries to eat your symbols.
That day I had caught the volkstuin soil trying to take my ring - in fact, I had already rescued the ring from the bottom of one dahlia bulb hole. “How odd”, I thought, “it’s never slipped off like that before”. I should have put it in my pocket, because another hole succeeded.
Get a metal detector, you might suggest. A neighbor tried that - nothing. Titanium has low magnetism, which makes it difficult to detect. How very Greek tragedy of my ring, for its essential character to be both asset and flaw.
For now, the ring is lost. But it’s titanium - I can shine it up nicely, once I wrest it back from the Limburgian earth.
The marriage has survived without the symbol, thanks very much. The new occupant of the plot used a metal detector to find the ring, but who knows? Maybe it’s not there at all anymore. But one thing I’ve learned about Limburgers: they like to dig holes. So maybe someone will find it someday.
