As my time at Pendle Hill winds down, I have been catching up on my work-study in the garden. Since it’s founding in the 1930s, Pendle Hill has had a large vegetable gardens that provide food for the kitchen. The growing methods are organic, with elements of biointensive, permaculture and other sustainable techniques thrown in.
Some of the beds I work in are probably decades old and their fertility has been carefully and respectfully maintained. Moving potatoes this afternoon the soil was dark, loamy, light, and rich - totally different from soil in a new, recently tilled bed. It was enviable, soil that has obviously been well cared for. The whole garden has the well-earned patina of a place where humans regularly collaborate (joyfully, carefully, respectfully, sensually) with the divine.
Right now the garden feels particularly alive. The asparagus has been up for a few weeks, the arugala and radishes are spicy and fresh, the blueberries are coming in, and the dark green of kale and potatoes is really exciting. There’s a robin nesting in the eaves of the greenhouse, where a lot of plants are still waiting to be put out, and the chatter of birds and bullfrogs is deafening at times. The birds especially make me feel like I live in a rain forest, and work in a garden at the edge of huge, healthy woods.
The garden is steps from some woods (and Pendle Hill has many amazing trees), but it is is also steps, literally, from 476, the major intra-country highway that runs from I-95 to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. From the pea and beet beds, through some trees and over the earthen sound barrier - and there it is. Four lanes? Many cars.
The highway is loud, and makes conversations in the garden difficult. It is a constant background roar - and I, unlike some, can't seem to convince myself its the sound of a river.
I remember when they built that highway. I was five or six, and the cutting down of all those trees was, I realize now, one of the most traumatic events of my early life. I have a memory of standing in the wood shop at the Arts Center (immediate neighbor to Pendle Hill), looking out through the courtyard door on a view of stumps to the horizon (I was little, so the horizon was pretty close, in actuality, the highway isn't all that wide.)
My whole life I've hated that damn highway. It was a cornerstone of what I was fleeing when I quit the suburbs after college for the city and vowed never to come back.
The highway, like strip malls and ugly housing developments, are a constant reminder to me of what we are ruining, what we do not value, and the ugliness we are capable of creating in the name of progress and convenience and class mobility. While the suburbs are about escaping the crush of the city (and "crush" could mean a variety of things, like crowdedness, pollution... or, oh, maybe racial diversity?), they are not, really, about being close to nature, though greenery seems to be prevalent.
These are the lessons I learned growing up here:
The suburbs are about holding nature under our heel and making her do tricks. Not living at the edge of or with wildness, at the edge of a glorious unknown. They are not about wonder. They are not about stewardship.
They are nature tainted and deeply damaged. We will keep cutting down the old mother trees that aren't protected because that's what you do with trees that are in the way. Those lessons came back painfully when I first came to Pendle Hill in January, when it was hard to get away from the roar of the highway. (Notice I'm not even touch the lessons about community that the suburbs teach...that's another post.)
But lately another lesson has been emerging.
In the winter it did not take much to find huge magnificent trees. Now there are bullfrogs in the wetland pond - one of several ponds in this area that drain to the creek. You can hear the highway roar from the pond too. And there are clutches of trees everywhere - the triangle between road, creek, train. In protected little glades and forgotten stone gardens. Huge ones at train stations and in random back lots.
I haven't read that book The World Without Us, but this winter and spring it became clear to me how quickly nature would reclaim everything if we were not around to stop her. The trees are waiting, patient. They've been here far longer than we, and they are not going to go any where. And they are pretty sneaky.
There is a lesson here about closeness, about survival, and about cooperation. I find it in the organic garden, which flourishes with life and wildness so close to the highway. And in the 300 year old beach tree that's also literally steps from the highway. The tree was growing when William Penn landed here and I like to think of it as our resident nature deity, so massive and powerful is its presence (and had Pendle Hill and Swarthmore residents not fought the original highway plan, it would likely have been destroyed, along with most of Pendle Hill).
The lesson is in the juxtaposition - strip malls and wetlands, highways and ancient trees - where we can see what we have made, what we are doing. When the highway is this close, it's hard to ignore. But when the garden, and so the potential for partnership, is this alive, and there are so many birds and amazing trees, that is also hard to ignore. We have to hold them both. The suburbs offer both.
The lesson is to acknowledge that we have done profound damage by building our highways, strip malls, and cancer-cell housing developments. But that all is not lost - that that spirit still exists, that we can find it, partner with it, and protect it.
This thinking has changed how I understand the place that I'm from.
I guess the suburbs could teach me something yet.
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