Of Apple Trees and Roses

By Otto Friedrich

"Even if I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would continue to plant my apple trees." That is the statement of faith traditionally attributed to Martin Luther. Some skeptic recently challenged the world of scholarship to demonstrate exactly where Luther had ever made such a declaration, and nobody could find an exact source. Perhaps, like so many such pieties, the idea really came from Goethe. Or perhaps Thoreau. It does not greatly matter, for the statement itself is one of abiding hope and abiding truth.

Consider for a moment the blessings of the apple tree. First of all, it is beautiful, not with the upright pride of the pine or maple but with a gnarled and twisted strength that implies the stoic wisdom of many gales survived. And it flowers every spring, with a glowing white fragrance that attracts the inquiries of the honeybee. Once its leaves are out, it provides shelter for the larks and thrushes that sing from its branches. In due time, the fading flowers turn into apples, offering a thousand fulfillments: apple pie, apple cake, applesauce, apple cider, apple butter, apple jelly, apple dumplings, apple tarts, apple pandowdy. Cut into pieces, the apple tree can be carpentered into a table, or at the least its kindlings will give off a splendid flame. Left quite alone, the tree will blossom white again next spring.

Arnold Schoenberg, trying to explain why George Gershwin had been a natural composer, said that a true artist is like an apple tree, and when he feels the need, he bursts into flower without ever thinking about the market price of apples. Conversely, it would seem that an apple tree is a work of art, a rhapsody in green and white. And it grows -- this is the miracle -- from a little brown seed no more than half an inch long, of which there are half a dozen inside every apple core that you throw into the garbage pail.

Like Martin Luther (or somebody) -- richly aware that the world might end tomorrow -- I keep planting apple seeds and watching to see how they grow. Some never germinate at all, some pop up about an inch and then slowly shrivel. But there stands outside my window one apple tree that was once a seed and is now more than twice as tall as I am. All it took me to grow it was about 15 years of my life.

Almost every time I look at that tree, I say to myself one of the things that a man most wants to say: "I made that." I know this is not really true. God made it. Or it made itself. But I helped. I planted the seed in the ground. I watered it. I watched over it and admired its blind, thrusting determination to be and to grow. And that is all most of us can do for most of the things or the people we care about.

Like many gardeners, I am rather a bungler. I know very little about pH soil tests. I think I know how to prune a rosebush, but the rosebush may think otherwise. I learned from my father the basic rules of mulching and thinning -- how to stake out the tomatoes, how to make the peas climb up the chicken wire, how to bind up the raspberries -- but the techniques that worked in the fertile hills of Vermont do not necessarily work in the sands of Long Island. Most important of all, I do not have the time (or the energy) to play some character out of Tolstoy. I live by the 8:26 to Penn Station, and most of the time, my roses grow untended.

I say roses because I once had a passion to create a rose garden. I had a vision of something sheltered and beautiful and serene. I spent several years planting and nourishing these wonderfully named creatures -- Etoile de Hollande, Mister Lincoln, Duchesse de Brabant, Chrysler Imperial, Peace -- in a secluded spot among the oak trees that shadow the southern side of my house. I worked, I weeded, I watered, I fertilized, I pruned, I sprayed, I decaterpillarized, and I fondly admired what I had created (God and I). In 1971 I even wrote a little book, The Rose Garden. But to anyone who asks me now about my roses, I confess that the last relics stand out there under the oaks behind the rhododendrons.

I had committed the original sin of gardening, thinking I could impose my own will on my garden, thinking I could compel roses to grow in the shadows of oak trees. Believe me, you might more usefully invest your time in making water run uphill. Since I loved my oak trees and my roses equally -- and since only a large saw could give the roses their place in the sun -- I decided to let nature take its course, which is a political act. Charles de Gaulle once said that the secret of political success is to foresee what is going to happen and then to support it. That is why my splendid oak trees shed their leaves on the graveyard of my roses.

But that is no reason for sorrow. The wonder of gardening is not what is grown but the process of growing, being able to watch things growing and dying and being reborn. Perhaps the first real pleasure, though, is simply tactile -- the sense, when one bends on one's knees on a warm spring morning, of the vast solid mass under one's hands, the thick, flat rotundity of the earth. Or perhaps the first real pleasure is a vision of possibilities. Three yellow roses might look good here; there's room for some tomatoes over there, or perhaps a row of asters. People planting their first plots tend to be too practical, determined to labor over beans and carrots that the local supermarket provides just as well and far more cheaply (exceptions: peas and raspberries). It is undeniably fun to feed oneself from one's harvest, but remember that gardening is not supposed to be practical. If, on the other hand, you yearn to grow carrots (which do grow like weeds), then plant carrots. Plant whatever tastes good, whatever pleases you. Plant lawn grass. Plant garlic. Plant fig trees.

Remember, in short, that gardening is quite different from farming. The function of farming is to produce crops, food; the function of gardening, if it has one, is to delight the planter. Farming is essentially commerce; it exists for gain. Gardening is essentially art; it exists for itself. While the 20th century has turned farming into agribusiness, gardening rejects most of modernity's most cherished values. "More" and "faster" have little place in the garden, not to mention cost efficiency or the bottom line. It is to escape such things that one began digging.

The first law of gardening is not speed or efficiency but patience. Everything will come in its own time; just as spring follows winter, the first ! crocuses the first thaw. This is not an easy law to learn for people who think that everything can be bought. In the garden, virtually nothing can be bought, except a good shovel and good seeds, and time follows its own imperative. The second law, more subtle but no less important, is the value of proportion, of balance, what the French call mesure. Ideally, any gardener would like to serve nature, to participate and share in her mysteries, but he soon learns that nature as such is a constant state of aggression and destruction. Each plant reseeds itself a hundred times too often, and each garden struggles to become a weed patch. When we first dig into a terrain that we plan to make a garden, we assume the role of philosopher-king. While we learn that we cannot conquer nature, we also learn that we must make decisions of life or death. In a row of unthinned carrots, none ever grows to full size. Weeding is what we call our choices, our caring for what we want to care for, our rule of law.

At the end of Voltaire's Candide, when the hero and heroine have both been brutally mistreated, all their dreams and ideals shattered, Candide declares that the only thing still worth doing is to live in peace and "cultiver notre jardin" (to cultivate our garden). There have been times in recent years when saviors of the world have decried this as a rejection of humanity, a rejection of all one's duties to that humanity. I think not. I think that cultivating a garden is one of the best and happiest things to do in life, and I like to think that Martin Luther thought so too. Let the end of the world take care of itself.