The Garden of Eden: How Does God Intend For Us to Use Plants?
In my work at my day job, I’m coming to realize how Appalachia, self-sufficiency, and privilege are intertwined
I’m often surprised by people who believe my efforts as a “polyamory writer” or “religion writer” are all that I do. Indeed, I barely have time for these meager-money-making “hobbies” and do so out of a genuine desire to share my story in hopes of helping other polyamorous Christians, exvangelicals, or moms. Over the past year and a half, my day job has been as an editor for a home improvement and gardening content website.
It’s work I enjoy quite deeply, though I wish it came with better pay and benefits. I don’t often bring it up publicly, as I don’t want to be subjected to a “Libs of TikTok” situation due to my far-left beliefs and polyamorous lifestyle. I am not the best homemaker or gardener myself, though I make genuine attempts at each, especially as I adjust to our 1960s-era home ownership. I also work in my yards of shade that once must have belonged to a hobby gardener due to the plants that have flourished throughout the four seasons after I first viewed the dead and decaying gardens and fell in love with the place over a year ago and began the home buying process.
My knowledge of gardening, homemaking, and interior design is mostly theoretical: I haven’t the time or money to devote to these endeavors as I would like. I admit that I am genuinely a good cook and host, a lover of entertainment and delicious and wholesome meals. But to get good at everything else, I would need my income matched or exceeded by Daniel and Ty so I could spend every day imagining seasonal refreshes, native decorations, and tending the garden beyond watering and occasional weeding.
Recently, my dear friend Dhivya (who, as it were, blogs over at fragments and maxims here on Substack) handed me a copy of The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing. This nonfiction book follows a woman as she restores an elaborate garden at an estate in the English countryside during the COVID pandemic, and she struggles against the inherent classism of home gardens, often walled off, and indeed of property ownership itself. She references all the British gardens of history and literature, touching upon the plantations of enslaved labor that created massive amounts of capital and labor, and a hunger for the rich that has not yet been satiated.
She notes how gardens are places of beauty and pleasure, and that those places are often shut off from a large majority of society, as white people and wealthy people are far more likely to have gardens than their counterparts — but that movements toward community gardens, public parks, and rebel gardening move in opposition to this.
Laing posited a bit of theology, as well, though she isn’t religious herself. For one, the idea of “paradise” as used to describe gardens of ancient civilizations, spoken of by Solomon and elsewhere, predates the word “paradise” as a synonym for “heaven.” The concepts of paradise, then, came from the existent gardens, not the other way around. For those of us deep in non-literalist theology, this could likely mean that the stories of Genesis are derived from the human desire for a wild garden of plants and food. Perhaps ancient Bible writers saw the palaces and gardens of kings and thought this was what God’s heaven was like. Maybe it is.
Maybe people yearned to walk around the natural world without the drudgery of the agricultural revolution in the dry soil of the Middle East, while people fight to this day over land and survival, the rich colonizers of Western legacy stomping upon the homes and land of the poor, the Palestinian, the Lebanese.
I imagine humanity in the crux of the Middle East, today, October 7, the anniversary of the Hamas attack, a tragedy followed by a modern holocaust and one in which I’ve seen the response from Israel grow more cruel by the day while nobody in my personal life seems all that bothered by an immense and constant loss of human life. An ongoing post-Eden tragedy: we are forever doomed to fight over land as the climate changes for reasons we brought upon ourselves. All our sins are our own fault, and the more privileged among us fight and claw their way out of the godly, fated retribution for these acts.
Perhaps the drive for wealth is just that: it’s not enough to have everything we need to be comfortable and happy and assured of our descendants’ fates as well. They want to have enough money to defeat God and avoid any consequences of their actions.
The Christian communists among us may fantasize they will meet their end in eternal hellfire after a lifetime spent destroying the poor, but as a universalist, I do not and unfortunately cannot believe this will be the case.
Recently, I spent a few days driving to Nashville, then my hometown of Cleveland, Tennessee, and then back again to my beloved Richmond, Virginia. I was accompanied by Ty, who had never seen my hometown. Our route was not affected by the Appalachian aftereffects of Hurricane Helene, an event that has been stirring in my mind every moment since I learned of the devastation against my people. But it was in my heart, in road signs, in “boil water” notices at random gas stations, in the rescue trucks from faraway counties heading to and fro in the direction I knew led toward Asheville and North Carolina.
Richmond, of course, is not Appalachian. I am Appalachian, at least halfway so on both of my father’s sides — my mother being born of central Florida swamp rednecks and proper Pentecostal church midwesterners of southern Illinois. Richmond is in the middling Virginia Piedmont region, nestled between the coastal Tidewater and mountainous Blue Ridge areas. I love it here, as I love the South and its people. But it’s not Appalachian. I was born in the Tennessee Valley, surrounded by Appalachia, and unaware of its joys until I had long left it.
I’ve seen Appalachia discussed more and more often in the news — thanks in part to this catastrophic event that is sure to uproot the region for decades, but also due to VP GOP candidate J.D. Vance’s role in bringing it to the forefront with his famous book, which annoys me so greatly I will not mention its name here.
Much is said of Appalachia’s self-sufficiency and government distrust, but it’s important to note that no region receives more government assistance than this famously red voting bloc. The reliance on single roads and the isolation away from big cities have become a downfall for rescue efforts. While this region is not known for its abundance of plants and gardens — a line from "Rocky Top Tennessee” states “Corn won’t grow at all on rocky top; dirt’s too rocky by far/that’s why all the folks on Rocky Top get their corn from a jar” — the recent homesteader and influencer types have shown that mountain gardens have their own capacities and beauties with little-known herbal concoctions.
I once watched a YouTube documentary on the life of Jim Hollis, who ran a mountain garden in Burnsville, North Carolina, for nearly all of his life. Here he grew both native plants and medicinal herbs from Chinese Traditional Medicine, and passed away last year, leaving his property, knowledge, and estate to a group of hippies, as far as I can tell. (A note: much of their garden was destroyed by the hurricane flooding, and if you would like to learn more and donate, they sure could use your help here.) I’d long been fascinated by Appalachia’s food, music, and cultural history, but I’d never thought much about its landscaping and garden history until I’d seen this documentary around the same time I started editing gardening pieces daily.
Leftists tend to organize themselves politically and via education, reading materials, creating unions, and forming protests. Some only have anger as a language for memes and walkouts and parades, others throw themselves at the mercy of the political system and beg Democrats on their hands and knees to offer a little money or attention toward a common good, while still, others stay focused on individual labor efforts against massive corporations.
Anarchists are the only ones who I have seen meaningfully address the role of gardening in mutual aid campaigns or community-based solutions, and I find that it seems quite insignificant to most leftists, especially those of us who don’t think of ourselves as hippies and likely have more in common politically with tankies than influencer adaptogen starchildren. I am bored by personal spiritualism, whether it comes from the strictest evangelical Protestant or the sacred divine goddess marketing team.
When I have the time to toil in my garden and watch the fruit of my efforts flounder under too much rain and too much shade (I often curse and wish for a few grand to remove even a few of the pine trees that are hindering my tomatoes from blooming) I realize what a privilege I have to have even had the funds to begin my garden in the first place: seeds, plants, soil, raised beds, and the many tools needed to tear down the English ivy and overgrown hedges and weeds the older gentleman let nature overtake much of his property.
I don’t know how yet to give back the profits of my labor in the garden or pass it down to others. I give away eggs from my chickens quite often, but I also “hoard” via fermenting, canning, and preserving: MY fruit, MY vegetables, MY eggs, all for MY family. I don’t have so much that I feel guilty; after all, my family is large enough to consume much of this and then some. But I do wonder how we can structure and shape a society around our ability to care for people around us.
The election season is next month, and while I do not think much will change meaningfully (for the positive, anyway) no matter who is president, still many others disagree with me and I listen to their positions with an open heart. I believe things are irreversibly bad and no politician has the bravery or perhaps the support to do what should be done. I long for a life away from the war machine, borders, meaningless national identities, and other lines drawn in the sand meant to separate humans away from each other. If the Garden of Eden was God’s intended paradise, where we cared for plants and each other, then certainly we have fallen away from it.
I am not certain how we can return it it — in Appalachia, perhaps people are coming to realize that, indeed, self-sufficiency is a myth and that even if the government fails, we still need each other. The seeds of community are starting to surface in the soil among the people, and ideological division is becoming as much of a privilege as wealth is in times of trouble.
I await community with open arms and ask myself what I can do here and now. How can we sow the kind of world that we wish to reap? I know, individually, I can do nothing. But with the people around me, perhaps, I can make the bounty available for everyone.