gardening ahead of the apocalypse

learning how to grow in the midst of looming decay

Rowena Cade, 1977

Gardening ahead of the apocalypse:¹

1. Inherit the garden in the middle of winter, when everything is crisp and dead and quiet. Look at each other like strangers.

2. Admit to yourself that you’re an utter novice, with a questionable track record in keeping houseplants alive. Try anyways.

3. Notice what it feels like to be a beginner at something. Notice how this feeling is familiar, after a year of serial firsts.

4. Spend the first spring and summer mostly just observing and noticing. Resist the urge to do too much, too soon, even when everything feels urgent. This garden has a long history before you.

5. Involve your daughter. Laugh together at the dirt, the way it isn’t so easy to hold, the way it slips through your fingers, just like time. Taste the dead leaves, but try not to swallow them. Take the lamb’s ears between her fingers and yours, like you did with your own mother in the California garden of your childhood, not much older than she is now. Feel their softness. Feel the gut-punch of panic about what the natural world will and won’t be, in her lifetime.

6. You are learning a new language. You’ve done this before. Learn the vocabulary of growing in the language of the land you’re growing on—in this case, Swedish. Så fröer och grodda och odla och vänta.

7. Dust off the pamphlet the Swedish government sent out to every household last fall: “If Crisis or War Comes.” Notice how the “if” feels stronger now than it did then. Read the instructions on page 17: “Grow things that are edible in your garden, on your balcony or on your windowsill.”

8. Wonder if taste matters in the apocalypse.

9. Take your friend’s advice, the one who grows the most stunning dahlias up the coast, to find the spot with the least wind and the most sun. Even if the space of protection and nourishment is only a sliver, sometimes that is enough.

10. Unfold the grow bags your great-uncle gave you to grow your own tomato plants, after showing you his on the sunny side of their home outside Los Angeles, just days before the fires torched the region (but somehow spared theirs).

11. Clip the tired old black currant bush just a few centimetres above the ground. It won’t fruit this summer but it should the next, and for some reason that feels like an investment in the future.

12. Wait.

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Related Reading —

The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing

Uprooting by Marchelle Farrell

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Why Women Grow by Alice Vincent

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Fellow gardeners (novice and expert and everything in between) and anyone thinking about what it means to grow, I’d love to hear from you:

1. Inspired by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s “Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse," from her fiction collection My Monticello — thanks to Rachel Yoder for the prompt in Off Assignment’s “Writing Motherhood.”