The Point of Gardens is Gardening

I’m humbled by the intuition that while the desert is full of gardens, a desert garden is a contradiction.

Gardening has saved my life. In my darkest moments, when I lie in bed, my senses shrouded by depression’s great dumbing down of experience, and night’s dark walls at dawn close in on me, and the light is scarce and dim, gardens have pulled me out, back into the day, back into the light. And not just gardens, but this garden.

I garden because I want to see a new shoestring acacia (Acacia stenophylla) settle in, or the patch of desert marigold (Baileya multiradiata) finally fill out, or the sprawling segments of an unknown Opuntia reach the heavenward spires of the medicinal San Pedro (Echinopsis pachanoi), and a scene of textures and colors combine to make it seem as if these plants had always been here.

But gardening in the Mojave is by no means easy. While my garden forces me into nature, and nature into my world, it does not always do so willingly.

I sometimes wonder if God has forsaken this land. The surest sign is the lack of rain, which in America possesses the peculiar property of falling only on the good. By this logic, the Mojave Desert must be very wicked, and its heart, Las Vegas, especially so.

But it stopped raining in Las Vegas well before legalized gambling, liberal divorce laws, and twenty-four-hour liquor stores. It stopped raining millennia ago. Surely the lack of rain is not a result of our wickedness. As if the God of Abraham, some 20,000 years ago, sent creosote and rain shadows as punishment for constructing a 20th-century city in the desert. Or perhaps it was not God’s foreknowledge at all, and the giant sloths that once roamed the valley were particularly sinful; their punishment drought and creosote.

I am told that it has not rained in our neighboring state, Utah, and that the governor there has told people to pray for rain (lest creosote move in). Perhaps Utahns are especially wicked, even without legalized gambling and twenty-four-hour liquor stores.

It might not occur to the Utah governor that God wants it to be dry. That the desert blossoming as a rose was a blip, an error. God prefers Utah revert to its post-Edenic state. But that doesn’t mean Utahns should give up on gardening any more than Nevadans should.

I have lived in deserts almost all my life. But this one is particularly arid.

Arid: likely from a Proto-Indo-European word that means to burn, to glow, and which forms the roots of words like ash, ardor, and aril—a seed’s covering, also the juicy seeds of the pomegranate (Punica granatum), which, according to the poet Eleanor Wilner, was Eden’s forbidden fruit.

I learned about Wilner’s Eden while reading Robert Pogue Harrison’s Gardens, and I was surprised he doesn’t mention that the idea of Eden germinated in the desert. When our biblical forebears looked out upon the scorched terrain of their habitation, they could not but have ached for abundant greenery, for fruit.

But as I wander my garden, I resist the urge to pine for Eden; resist, even, the urge to pray for rain.

When God considered what the Mojave would become, they held in mind a different kind of beauty, a wild and desert kind, both in itself and as warning: Take heed and be like the giant sloth, that your skies may turn an aching blue, and the creosote spread its clonal roots, its boughs giving pungent evergreen reminders of rain’s rare occurrence, and the cactus bloom just once, sometimes on just one day. That on the skeletal scaffolding of sweetbush may Chuckwallas warm in morning sun just before they are eaten by roadrunners, and may the hoot of the ground owl and the creep of the tortoise, the flit of the hummingbird and the blank stare of the mountain goat remind you that I have not forsaken you, just as the desert marigold unlocks its yellow rays, and the sacred datura unfolds each night. Though this place will never be Eden, it may, with your care, become a garden.

It seems that if God did not exactly see Las Vegas, Shakespeare certainly did. From As You Like It: “I prithee, shepherd, if that love or gold / Can in this desert place buy entertainment, / Bring us where we may rest and feed. / Here’s a young maid with travel much oppressed, / And faints for succor.” I couldn’t give you a better description of this great city, which, at its heart, is hospitality given form, filled as it is with “fresh array and entertainment.”

But it is not only in the city where we find succor and entertainment, we may likewise find it in our gardens.

I thought that all things had been savage here,
And therefore put I on the countenance
Of stern commandment. But whate’er you are
That in this desert inaccessible,
Under the shade of melancholy boughs,
Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time,
If ever you have looked on better days,
If ever been where bells have knolled to church,
If ever sat at any good man’s feast,
If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear
And know what ’tis to pity and be pitied,
Let gentleness my strong enforcement be,
In the which hope I blush and hide my sword.

When melancholy strips away all my interests, all my joy in living, when reading and TV and food have lost their animating essence, when relationships fade into the monotony of existence, when all pleasure in life vanishes, I put away my sword and reach for the trowel. Gardening is the only activity I know, even in the desert (where it is often the cause of much grief), that persists as a way through time’s “creeping hours.”

But sometimes I think to ask, as Celia did, “Why should this a desert be?” Many desert gardeners make this mistake, and we head to our gardens with both sword and shovel, the idea having germinated that our little plots require redemption, an act I can’t help but identify with pride. The desert gardener is nothing but hubris, attempting here what was meant only for gods. For turning soil and water into wandering grape vines, into wine.

Who am I to say that God got it wrong any more than the governor of Utah is? For those of us led into desert gardening, our greatest temptation is water. Often, it can stop us from even getting here, from accepting the fact of our conditions, from understanding that even though the desert is a vanishing Eden, it is still worth caring for.

Aspiring to Eden is the pride that comes before the fall. In the Mojave, to tempt God with rain is a kind of sin. Better instead this prayer: give me the strength to sow seeds that grow with little rain, the wisdom to arrange plants in ways that inspire, the strength to tend the garden when temperatures climb. Do not give me a garden; give me instead a place to garden.

A garden in the desert requires an excess of form and water that can only be supplied through the gardener’s constant and attentive care. You’ll find no Eden here. Which is to say that while desert gardens are rare, desert gardening, at least, is not. And for that I will be forever grateful.