Gardening as Metaphor

After this morning's rain, a cleansing wind swept in and opened the clouds. I finished reading a very good book - Allegra Goodman's latest, The Cookbook Collector - and headed to my community garden plot as the sun beamed down.

For a variety of reasons, one of them a kind of benign neglect, I have been allowing my little plot to do its own thing. Being the end of the summer, and not the middle, members of the Compositae Family tend to be most visible. Many species of sunflowers, asters, and goldenrod appear everywhere in the Eastern forest zone. The predominance of yellow hues really brings to mind light and flames. How fitting!
However, it's an embarrassment of riches. My plot is tiny, so a large Rudbeckia plant (pictured) and several Jerusalem Artichoke/sunchoke plants (Helianthus tuberosum L.) took over. My carrots, new arugula and sorrel were all overshadowed by the towering stems and foliage.
Today, since the sunchokes had stopped flowering, I felt I had permission to yank them from the soil. I pulled up about 10 plants in all, and harvested the potato-like tubers. The stems and spent flowers all went into the compost pile. Their day in the sun was over. To everything a season!
I certainly opened up the plot to what's left of the year's useful sunshine. My undernourished leaf and root crops might have a chance now.
According to Kahlil Gibran (if I recall my adolescent reading of The Prophet), "love will be your growth, but it will also be your pruning." Indeed, a very close connection to another person can lop off the odd "dead branch," much like on an old rose bush, allowing us to grow better. (I'm thinking of the loss of bad habits and routines, and openness to new plans.) Gibran also might have meant weeding the garden of the soul. Love forces us to re-evaluate ourselves by changing our surroundings like the shifting seasons; things we took for granted no longer apply, at least not in the same way. It may be comforting to cling to old ways of thinking, and allow the status quo to continue without question. However, well-timed change can do wonders.
Not too late to let in more light. In my garden, at least six weeks remain for the greens to catch up, and I may have a nice salad to go with some delicious sunchoke fritters in October.

"Community" Garden

Just this week, I heard something I had been dreading: more evidence that the community garden where I have my little patch of Eden (left) will be erased to make room for condos - large numbers of sterile, green-hating condos.
I have to get my hands on the documents (or the ones allowed into the public eye - I doubt everything will be available, she mutters cynically) before I can do anything, such as draft a protest letter, citing environmental impact, etc. But I am already discouraged by talk (with fellow gardeners) of the strict and blind adherence to ye olde Bottom Line exhibited by the city council. In order to attract more wealthy tax payers to the area, they will wipe out a large area of useful green space (not a vacant lot), and take with it the place where people like me find solace and a bit of actual sustenance, and where many young people congregate to play baseball in the nearby field. That will all be gone next year or the year after. I asked my informant whether there is any chance of swaying the council with an angry protest from the lot of us, and she said that the gardeners and local neighbors (who benefit from green space, and would suffer from increased traffic) are generally resigned to the fact that the council only thinks of money and will not engage in democratic discourse. Defeated before we begin.
Everyone - whether truly busy (see "Insidious Busyness" below) or gifted with ample time, such as many retirees - has been conditioned by big business to be an individual first, and later (if ever) part of a community.
The system is self-perpetuating, even without veering into illegal or unethical behavior. 

What do we do about it?
Stay tuned. I ain't finished with these self-serving, life-negating, community-blind fascists with dollar signs for eyes just yet.