A garden in wartime

As happens every year around this time, the tomatoes are getting leggy, the cucumbers are gone – killed by an organic-spray-resistant infestation. In a week or so, when the rain starts, hopefully, in earnest, it will be time to pull them up, refresh the soil in my vegetable beds and plant lettuces, green herbs and radishes.

I’ve done it twice a year for years. Why does it seem, this time, as though it’s a next-to-impossible task?

During the last dreadful crisis – the beginning of COVID – gardening was, as frequently advertised, an exercise in healing. We all nursed batches of sourdough starter, tended to the plants around the house or learned to knit. It’s true that we needed pastimes when we were under lock-down and quarantine, but these acts of sustainment and creation helped us maintain our equanimity. We didn’t just stay at home, relearning to spend enormous amounts of time with one or several people, we applied ourselves to projects that implied a return to future stability. If we only followed the daily instructions, we understood we would eventually eat the peppers and kale from plants just pushing themselves out of the soil. We would break bread with loved ones; we would send our children off to school with hand-knit scarves.

During the COVID lock-downs, my garden looked great. I thought that somehow, even if this frightening disease carried me off, at least the mourners passing two meters outside the house would say “Too bad about Judy, but she had a beautiful vegetable patch.”

It’s true that this current never-ending war is energy-sapping. Just thinking about the people getting called up to the northern border after months of fighting in Gaza makes me want to lie down. Thinking about the number of missiles with a range to hit the center of the country makes me want to hide under the bed. Reading the news makes me yell, usually with no one to hear me but my husband. Thinking about the hostages makes me cry out loud. With all that lying down and yelling, who has time for work, much less gardening?

What right do I even have to the normal pleasure of watching vegetables ripen when normality, itself, has fled?

For me, planting a garden implies I believe in a future. A future here, on this kibbutz, on this bit of land, in this country. Any future at all. A future I can plan for and expect to reap at least some of the benefits of my planning and execution. It implies I believe I’ll have the space, time, energy and ability to rid the growing plants of slugs and beetles, to fertilize and mulch them.

And that, right there, is the problem. Because it is harder and harder to believe in that future.

In the face of an increasingly uncertain future, we are having trouble planning next week. Even the act of arranging a holiday meal together is open to upheaval as people’s flights get cancelled. Truce or war? We might be toasting the end of the conflict or opening another bottle of red to drown our sorrows.

It seems almost impudent, in the face of such uncertainty, when so many are still homeless, so many still held in captivity, to think I can get away with such a genteel, leisurely activity as planting a garden. What right do I even have to the normal pleasure of watching vegetables ripen when normality, itself, has fled?

If fate agrees, I will, of course, pull up the summer plants and prepare my beds for winter. I’ll do it, if for no other reason, than to participate in this cycle that is independent of war. I’ll do it just in case; I’ll do it because I still believe in the healing power of gardening. I’ll do it because of the sharing, which, as every gardener knows, is a part of the deal. I’ll do it because it lets me focus on daily tasks: Today, I’ll save the chili seeds for next year, tomorrow I’ll weed around the kale. Tasks that will let me enjoy a façade of normality.

My garden won’t quite be a sign of my belief in my future here, nor will it be a victory garden of the sort planted in England and the US during the World Wars to make people think they were contributing to the war effort. It won’t be the garden of someone stuck at home, just the garden of someone who doesn’t go off on long excursions. It will be a modest garden, with modest aspirations. It will say to people passing within two meters of the house: Here lives a person who still exists, who has not yet given up, who might still have a future, who wants to heal. And while you’re at it, help yourself to kale.