Chasing Eden: Part 1
woman in garden with gloves and pitchfork
When I’m planting something or noticing a sprouting seedling or the fragrance of honeysuckle wafts my way I think of Eden and remember that humans were created for a garden. I often wonder what Adam’s tending involved before thorns and thistles. He wasn’t hauling mulch from Lowe’s or putting down weed barrier so I have a lot of questions. Was Adam created with the necessary information to do this work? Did God create and provide the tools for the tending? Did he give him detailed plans of what he wanted it to be like, as we see later with the Tabernacle and Temple? Also, how much do I want to see that garden? A garden God designed Himself!
Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden…
Genesis 3:8
Gardens are temporary things like childhood or snowflakes. It’s not like building a house. It’s more like writing “I believe in the future” in the sand. Where you know it will be washed away.
Sometimes at estate sales I’ll see a ghost garden, something beautiful that the homeowner made with great effort and cost only to be overgrown with weeds when no one cares about it and the creator is no longer around to tend it. It makes me profoundly sad. There’s so much work and love to a garden. It’s creating something akin to painting or sculpting but with plants and stones instead of paint and clay.
Gardens don’t just happen, even in a place called Eden. They begin by a creator looking around and imagining what could be. Isn’t that how anything starts? A business, a family, a vacation. Everything begins with what if? What could I do? What is possible? A vision.
Write the vision and make it plain…
Habakkuk 2:2
In the 80s Martha Stewart had a few holiday specials on PBS when no one knew who she was. Those sometimes involved a peek at her gardens. Something in me connected to those brief moments and I was hooked for nearly 40 years of backbreaking work, joyful sunrises in the garden, and more dead plants and wasted money than I care to think about.
My first “garden” was in the backyard of our first house and involved some herbs. I dug up an oval area only about six feet long and while I was planting the older man next door came out and asked me if I was planning to bury my husband there.
A couple of years later after moving to the home my husband grew up in, I had a grand vision. What, I thought, if I dug up the entire yard and made the whole thing a garden? What if we literally lived in a garden? In those peaceful days before the internet I would haul home large stacks of garden books from the library and pore over them. What if we didn’t have any grass? What if the entire thing was put to use? What if we had chickens? I felt like this was crazy and kept these ideas to myself.
My father in law had a bed of hybrid tea roses in the back yard. Other than that it was just an ordinary suburban lawn. One chilly March day I dragged the playpen outside, put my six month old son in it and started digging up two 4×4 plots to put a few herbs in while my daughter played with dolls nearby.
The next year I dug up the space between the beds. 3 years later in the height of our Beatrix Potter phase I added more plots and a trellis that my father in law made for me. I put up a sign that said Peter Rabbit Garden and added blackberries, chamomile, and lettuce. It was a cute garden but I had bigger ideas. Are there pictures? Maybe. Somewhere.
It was a glorious time when we were living our lives instead of bothering to document everything.
Spoiler alert: I never achieved the goal of totally banishing the lawn, but I did put in a front garden and a backyard garden that have both evolved over the last 3 decades. Nine of those years included chickens and for the past fourteen years, bees. The gardens have expanded and contracted depending on my time constraints and energy level.
A garden is a living changing thing. You don’t have the same garden you had last year or last month or last week. Aside from the gardener’s constant interference, the plants (ones desired and ones despised), the soil, the animals, and the insects present are ever changing.
The gardener changes too. Every day the gardener is a day older. More knowledgable. More energized or tired. Inspired to change something or feeling exhausted from the maintenance and ready to let it all go wild again, which it longs to do. The thing is never done and is always in a state of flux.
…God who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished…
Philippians 1:6
It is a metaphor for life. Not only our physical lives but our spiritual lives. It can never be settled or finished completely. However there are fleeting moments of gratitude and joy in the thing. There are dry seasons when our hearts aren’t in it and other times we are filled to overflowing with thankfulness and praise. Some days we feel so burdened we know we couldn’t go on except for God and on other days our hearts arise and sing a new song to our Creator. Some days we feel we should expand the garden because this isn’t enough and at times we feel that pulling even a single weed is more than we have energy for.
A garden wants to be wild again in the same way our hearts lead us astray. The Gardener of Our Hearts is weeding, pruning, and tending to change us into something beautiful that looks like His Son. Even though the hardest work of the garden being purchased and secured has been done.
There’s something wonderful in knowing that the God of the Universe is also the original gardener.