A Gardener at the End of the World

March

Ilive near the end of the earth, half a mile from the tip of a thirteen-mile-long peninsula in Maine. This close to the point, terra firma spans less than a quarter of a mile, a sliver separating the Atlantic Ocean to the east from the Georges River to the west.

Much of the peninsula is granite ledge; scattered outcroppings offer intimations of the mass beneath. Tip-ups of spruces felled by storms often reveal they’ve been standing atop scant inches of soil, their roots stretching horizontally in search of nutrients. As the soil here is both shallow and sandy, we grow vegetables and herbs in raised beds filled with trucked-in loam and homemade compost. The beds are edged with still more granite, the blocks heavy enough to stay put without mortar. Their sun-warmed mass helps heat the soil in spring and delays the hard freeze in fall, adding extra time to our short growing season.

All but one of the vegetable beds sit alongside the driveway, between the road and the house, sited to get the best sun. Originally, we had eight large rectangular beds, each around six feet by twenty feet. But a few years ago, we reconfigured them so we could add a greenhouse. A brazen cat makes starting seeds in the house fraught; plus, some of the plants we want to grow need more consistent conditions than Maine can provide.

A tamarack is beginning to overshadow the bed closest to the road. The last few autumns, after its needles gleamed gold then dried down to rusty orange, so many landed in that bed that its soil is a little more acidic than the others’. Though we lime it each spring, horsetail has taken root there and is tenacious. Forebears of this ancient weed once grew as tall as trees, as thick as forests; its stunted progeny seem determined to prove their vigor.

Immediately north of the main beds, behind the greenhouse, is a narrow bed oriented perpendicular to the rest. A decade ago, I planted arctic kiwis in a small section abutting the tool shed that, in turn, sits beside the compost bins. A sun-grayed cedar pergola stretches over the shed and bins. As the kiwi vines began to climb, we guided them up some trellising, toward the pergola. Each spring, when new vines splay in all directions, we fasten the wildest to others who are better trained. The canopy now stretches three-quarters of the way across the pergola and has become a haven to pollinators and tiny birds. When the kiwi flowers, the air there is filled with their flutter, thrum, and whir. Once flowers give way to fruit, the insects depart in search of purple, but the small birds stay all summer.

Between the garden and the house are five apple trees. We started with twenty-two, me dreaming of an orchard of heirlooms; only those in the lee of the house survived. I think the combination of salty air and foggy days was too much for the whips. On the other side of the house are two small beds. The narrower one contains a single row of scallions, the wider one herbs and medicinal plants; I added a few flowers to it last year because beauty also nourishes.

During the first week of January, I ordered seeds for this year’s garden. When they’d all arrived, I put the packages on the dining room table, organized them by type to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. The leafy greens got stacked together, the beans, the peas, the tomatoes, the flowers. The melons, carrots, beets, and cukes had fewer packets in their piles. Over the years, I’ve winnowed out some crops completely, like radishes, sweet peppers, and eggplant. On the table, the garden is perfect; each of those packets of potential is just that⁠—gorgeous possibility uncompromised by too much rain or not enough, by flea beetles or weasels or deer, by a gardener with other obligations who falls behind on weeding.

Several weeks after that, on February 11, I had a meeting with the school superintendent for Saint George and a woman from our school board; I’ve been consulting with them about ways to bring more adult education options to the peninsula, and we were going over my findings. Shasta, the board member, mentioned that her son was obsessed with news about a virulent virus in China.

He’s terrified it’ll come here.

Get him a cool face mask, I suggested. They’re supposed to protect against it.

He’d never wear one.

Look, the superintendent interjected, turning his laptop so we could see the screen. He scrolled slowly, showing us face masks adorned with images of animals, military camouflage, superheroes.

Heck, I’d wear that one, he said, pausing on one with a dragon, the school mascot.

We all laughed.

While we were chuckling in Maine, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was giving a sobering speech in Geneva, Switzerland, thirty-five hundred miles away. He announced that the official name for the disease caused by the novel coronavirus would be COVID-19. Explaining the rationale for this designation, he said, Having a name matters to prevent the use of other names that can be inaccurate or stigmatizing. Though nearly all the known cases were still occurring near Wuhan, WHO policy prohibits references to places not only because doing so stigmatizes, but also because viruses inevitably disperse.

A few days later, Ghebreyesus called on social media companies, news organizations, and governments to push back on those spreading misinformation because the glut of fake news was generating an infodemic. He warned that nations needed to adopt policies that were consistent and science-driven; otherwise, we would be headed down a dark path that leads nowhere but division and disharmony.

Three weeks after that, the WHO declared the coronavirus a global pandemic. Their scientists believed outbreaks would be driven by something called superspreading. They worried residents of liberal democracies would be unwilling to comply with necessary containment strategies and that developing countries lacked adequate public health infrastructure to combat it. They hoped to see COVID-19 spontaneously petering out but feared that it would follow a more sinister path such as the 1918 Spanish influenza and take root in populations worldwide.

And yesterday, March 15, after the third confirmed case here in Maine, the governor issued a state of emergency order. All nonessential businesses must close, schools must stop holding classes in-person, and gatherings are limited to no more than fifty people. Already, even mundane aspects of life feel fraught. The supply chains for everything from hand sanitizers to baking flour, paper towels to baby chicks, are stuttering or failing. Instagram is full of pictures of empty grocery store shelves, something I’ve never before seen in the US.

To quiet my rising anxiety, I’ve been spending a fair bit of time in the greenhouse watching seeds germinate⁠—which is more interesting than it may sound. Luckily, my midwinter plant lust had been acute; when I ordered seeds, I’d impulsively added two warming mats to an online shopping cart. So, three weeks before I normally start the seeds, and a solid six weeks before I could have planted any in the ground, I start some seed trays. Outdoors, it’s 42 degrees, spitty and raw. But in the greenhouse, it’s 52, and the surface of the warming mats reaches a comfortable 70 degrees. These mats don’t warm the air; they just keep the soil in the seed trays warm. After planting dozens and dozens of beans, cucumbers, nasturtiums, and tomatoes in the seedling trays, giving them water, and settling a clear plastic dome over each tray, I fill a three-gallon grow bag with compost and loam and plant some spinach and arugula in it. With only two mats and limited sunshine, I need to move the trays and bag every few days to give the seeds equal time in the prime warmth and light locations.

In less than a week, arugula seed coats sit, cracked, atop thin, pale stalks half an inch above the soil. As soon as they push the last vestiges of their seed coats aside, the cotyledons unfurl, lobed leaves more clover-shaped than arugula-spiked. They will provide nutrients until the plants grow true leaves. The spinaches come next, their cotyledons long and narrow like slender pairs of grass blades. The seed coats get stuck on the leaf tips, squeezing them together until they have heft enough to spring free. Green beans break through the soil bent over, pale stem napes emerging first. After they right themselves and a pair of thick first leaves emerge, the discarded seed coats grow so translucent I mistake them for water droplets.

Though I’ve grown vegetables for more than twenty years, I never focused so closely on these details as I do now. The pandemic is transforming the world’s usual dimensions, contracting space and expanding time. At high risk for getting sick, I’m afraid to leave home, so planning, planting, and tending to seedlings has taken on extra significance. And with grocery store shelves often empty, knowing we have food stored in seed form is reassuring. I set out to make my pandemic garden thrive.

The warming mats help many of the plants get an early start, but not all of them. Out of a dozen edamame seeds, only one germinated, dying before it was hale enough to pot up. I don’t know why the edamame wasn’t happy, though I do know seeds sense when the environment is likely to support their well-being and when it probably won’t. Until conditions are close to optimal, they remain dormant. Along with warm-ish soil, seeds need water and oxygen. Some impose more conditions, like a set number of hours of daylight or a minimum air temperature; others require fire or need to freeze.

A few species of pine, for instance, have cones coated with dense resin. Only if fire melts the resin can the seeds tumble free. Byblis, a carnivorous plant native to Australia, germinates only after being exposed to smoke from a bush fire. Maine doesn’t have fire-loving plants. Here, plants have adapted to endure⁠—and sometimes even rely on⁠—cold winters. Butterfly bush, rudbeckia, lavender, and verbena all have to overwinter in the ground (or be duped into thinking they did) to germinate; cycles of freezing and thawing gradually soften their tough seed coats, making them permeable. Since softening takes more than one freeze-and-thaw cycle, an autumn cold snap doesn’t prompt them to germinate, only to be killed when winter arrives.

A hundred and forty million years of evolution have given seeds the tools to wait out uncertain conditions and to recognize when the world is welcoming. I’m taking my cues from them now.

My inbox brims with queries from garden-agnostic friends. Do I think they should learn to garden? Is it too late? What should they grow? For folks in New England, mid-March is still plenty early, I tell them, add that they should order seeds right away all the same. Small seed companies are overwhelmed; their pandemic-strained staffs are struggling to fill the unexpected glut of orders. Even large companies are getting swamped. Some are blocking the online shopping feature on their websites for a day or two each week so they can focus on filling existing orders. Seeds for popular items like tomatoes, beans, squashes, and lettuce are mostly sold out. And the overburdened postal system is taking longer than usual to deliver everything.

Of course I want my friends to grow food; I can’t think of a better way to manage the stress and uncertainty and general craziness of this moment. At the same time, though, I keep thinking about what happened the last time there was a massive influx of home gardeners. In 2009, during the Great Recession, seven million Americans started gardens for the first time, swelling the ranks of home growers by 20 percent. Hurrying to meet increased demand, Walmart, Kmart, Lowe’s, and Home Depot sourced seedlings from industrial breeders in the South. As spring made its way up the Eastern Seaboard, thousands and thousands of seedlings for peppers, tomatoes, squashes, cucumbers, and other popular vegetables were trucked north. Many of the young tomato plants were infected with Phytophthora infestans, a water mold that causes late blight on tomato and potato plants. It’s the mold that caused the Great Famine in Ireland during the 1840s.

P. infestans is wicked; it spreads spores so effectively they can infect plants forty miles away. And, once established, the blight kills quickly. First a few spots appear on the plant’s low leaves; they don’t seem ominous, look like those caused by overwatering. But in a day or two, the mold spreads, as do more spores. Soon, the entire plant⁠—along with almost every tomato in the garden or farm field⁠—turns brown and dies. Organic gardeners and farmers have no recourse except to tear out affected plants, burn them or bag them up, and make sure not to plant tomatoes or potatoes in those beds for at least three years.

That August, the chef and good-food advocate Dan Barber published a frustration-laden opinion piece in the New York Times, laying much of the blame for the blight on naive home gardeners who bought seedlings from far away. I’m more inclined to blame the suppliers, since they were the ones who sold the infected plants. But I do agree with his larger point: When you start a garden, no matter how small, you become part of an agricultural network that binds you to other farmers and gardeners, Barber wrote, adding that late blight spores are a perfect illustration of agriculture’s weblike connections. The tomato plant on the window sill, the backyard garden and the industrial tomato farm are, to be a bit reductive about it, one very large farm.

Living near the bottom of a peninsula, growing tomatoes started in Maine, I hoped my garden might be spared. Then my friend Susan, who lives just a few miles north of us, found blight in her garden. A day later, I heard it had infected the small nursery up the street. Inspecting my plants that afternoon, I spied a couple questionable spots, pulled the plants just in case. If it was late blight, maybe finding it right away and sacrificing the infected plants would protect the rest. It didn’t; the tomatoes all died.

This year, our roles are reversed: the garden plants are helping me as another plague encroaches.

Tending so many seedlings helps give my days a shape and logic. Even so, being unable to travel feels grueling. Finding food for body and spirit was much easier when we could visit family and friends, see colleagues in person, go to stores. Now, each errand must be preplanned. My husband, Rob, picks up boxes of preordered groceries curbside, gets medicine at the pharmacy’s drive-through window, goes to the post office just once a week. We lean into online retail as never before, stay in touch with folks via Zoom. We’re making do, but I rue the lost spontaneous⁠—miss running into friends and acquaintances, spotting something special on sale, speaking to strangers.

In the past, I couldn’t always go where I wanted, of course. I’ve been frightened into abandoning city walks and rural hikes, turned away at the gates of military bases and private communities, hustled back to a tour bus in Cuba, and saved by a taxi driver in Amsterdam. But much more often, I’ve moved freely. The philosopher Hannah Arendt calls freedom of movement the oldest and also the most elementary individual liberty. It’s the one taken away when people are punished⁠—when children are grounded or lawbreakers imprisoned. The one border policies and patrols regulate, deciding the fates of those who want to migrate.

What’s freeing for humans is fundamental to life. Before life began, movement on earth was compelled, a pure product of physical forces. As asteroids and other planets collided with earth, smashed bits scattered. Volcanoes spewed gases and forced molten rock from deep within to the earth’s surface. The moon, formed of aggregating debris, got caught in earth’s orbit. In turn, it tugged hard enough to trigger tides. Gravity and electromagnetism determined which whats went where.

Then came life. Long before organisms expressed preferences, simple cells made clear that life itself has wants⁠—persistence chief among them. But if a body stays in one place, its home site eventually runs out of resources. Soil becomes depleted of nutrients, nearby prey are all consumed, refrigerators and cupboards are emptied. So, living beings have evolved mechanisms for dispersing; legs and wings and flagella make moving easy. For sessile species, those who must stay put, evolution has ensured the next generations can leave.

Based on the varied and brilliant array of ways they launch their progeny into the world, I deem angiosperms supreme. Not only that, this huge group⁠—which is comprised of flowering plants with true seeds⁠—has also evolved ways to preserve their genes for long periods of time and to have long-distance sex, both of which vastly increase their chances of survival. Some angiosperms need only time and sunshine to disperse their seeds. They are plants with double-layered fruit walls, like okra, in which the fibers of the two layers aren’t aligned. As the walls dry, tension develops between the layers; when the tension becomes acute, the walls break apart, opening the fruit and flinging the seeds anywhere from a few feet (for okra) to as far as two hundred feet (for the African tree Tetraberlinia moreliana). Others⁠—like touch-me-nots and squirting cucumbers⁠—send seeds flying if something as small as a water droplet lands on them when they’re ripe. To my lexical delight, such forceful seed ejection is called ballistochory.

The many, many species of angiosperms who can’t go ballistic have also evolved clever dispersal methods, though they must rely on assistance from wind or water or animals. The helicopter wings on maple seeds create mini tornadoes to keep them aloft, and the floss attached to dandelion and milkweed seeds acts like a parachute, carrying the seeds on a breeze. Water lily seeds have a temporary coat with air pockets that keep them afloat; by the time their coatings disintegrate and the seeds sink to the muddy bottom of a pond, they are far enough from home that they won’t compete with their parents for resources. Buoyant coconuts, on the other hand, can float hundreds of miles without getting waterlogged. Burring plants get animals to move their seeds by encasing them in barb-covered sacks that stick to hair and fur. Most flowering plants use less aggressive measures; they rely on color, scent, flavor, or nutritiousness to attract an animal’s attention, often benefitting their benefactors.

Winterberries, for instance, redden up in autumn when so many other plants are fading. Midwinter, the