Herbal trysts with dead poets

Gardens have always eluded my planned contemplations. After all, in the manner that accompanied classic nature writing, gardens represent floral (and the accompanying faunal) collections that stray from the notion of the "wild" – a notion I find personally alluring in terms of intellectual as well as spiritual style. That is, until I found myself hopelessly embroiled in passionate trysts with the sweeping rhymes of dead poets who have contributed to New York City’s immortality and who did it with the green of Central Park pumping through their literary veins. I must say that those multiple trysts were suitably held in the circling meadow of the Park’s "strawberry fields" and some shrubby venues and pond shores, causing scandals of tabloid proportions among some crawling armies of ants, protesting geese, and not a few low-flying bugs.

So what makes a garden? In his book Botany of Desire (Random House, New York and Toronto, 2001), Michael Pollan (not a dead poet) sums up a worthy definition in the botanist-gardener’s grammatical vine-phrase: "I choose the plants, I pull the weeds, I harvest the crops." He explains the nature of a garden by way of "Desire" in chapters on Sweetness (apple), Beauty (tulip), Intoxication (marijuana) and Control (potato). In the process, he weeded my garden of ignorance, casting seeds of knowledge and laughter. Pollan proposes that gardens are really human desires for sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control. The contrary nature of these four themes already begs: Is the gardener really in-charge? After all, when the plants are selected and planted, they perform their own co-evolutionary tales with other flora and fauna in the Darwinian lanes, not necessarily always according to the original plan of the master gardener. So Echinacea, bergamot, chamomile, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme may be the invited instrumentalists in your symphonic garden but by their very nature, they bring with them the other floral/faunal players from their wild beginnings. The very act of weeding says much about the control the gardener does not fully possess. Thus, who is to say that a garden has strayed far from the wild?

These garden trysts are also lovely visual and olfactory entrapments where one can perform acts against their better judgment. Once gripped by mental paralysis so characteristic of those moments when I mount culinary effort at any scale, I spotted a friend’s two-feet-by-one-foot potted herb garden before me. In a rush of relief and enthusiasm I blamed on the herbs themselves, I harvested them like a demented barber would shave an unsuspecting client. The fruits of my labor resembled the colors of a Mexican fiesta or the local Quezon Pahiyas but I have to reserve a proper De Rerum on taste to describe the dish. Since then, every time I find myself in markets of fresh abundance and revel in the presence of garden vegetables and fruits, they all seem to take a step back in fear. And every time I place any in my bag, I sense a hesitation among the vegetable and fruit cavalry to be taken into battle as long as I am the appointed culinary general.

That is why I had to find a way to express my dialogue with those garden creatures in a manner that will not be risky to life and property – the herbs’ or those of family and friends. So I consciously invite the sights and smells of a garden to join my trysts with Nobel poetic-cohorts Octavio Paz as he spoke of Central Park in verse and Pablo Neruda as I pleaded and cajoled him to reveal to me, even in the humblest proportions, the "friendship" he has cultivated with "symmetry and the rose." The rewards are deeply personal and mind-altering.

Is the nature of things then, in this case of the garden and its denizens, our very reflections on them? Pollan sows the insight better: "And then into this great dance of plants and pollinators step us, compounding the meanings of flowers beyond all reason, turning their sexual organs into tropes of our own (and of so much else), drawing and driving the evolution of flowers toward the extraordinary, freakish, and precarious beauty of a Madame Hardy rose or a Semper Augustus tulip."

So rolling out yonder for meaning need not necessarily be in the wild Amazon or the Rockies. If you make friends with the rose in your backyard, the same journey would attend.