by Sarah E. Benton
Contemporary pop culture with its consumerist values tends to associate gardening with the leisure of the elderly and those with antiquated preferences. However, many people in the current cultural landscape have shifted toward more agrarian sensibilities, whether consciously or unconsciously. Families are settling into life lived off the land, growing their own vegetables and raising their own livestock. Others retire to a few quiet acres of land in the country—not to mention the homesteaders that seem to be cropping up everywhere in rural America and on YouTube.
The recent revival in agrarian interests even inspired me to begin studying the gardens and gardeners of early American history. In fact, the inspiration for this essay blossomed from personal interest in colonial herb gardens. My work alongside gardeners and public historians has nourished an already deep love for creation that has prodded general questions about the Christian’s relationship to gardening. Gardening is the Biblical paragon of all work, manifesting itself to some degree in every culture. In the creation narrative, God gifts the garden to man. The gift of the garden requires man to create, cultivate, and preserve—three Biblical ideals to be pursued in all cultural work.
Purpose of Gardening
Before we consider how to engage the garden, we should work through why we should do so. Our reason for gardening informs and shapes our practices. We engage the garden because God has designed the relationship between man and the created order to be one of service, each serving the other for His glory. Man keeps and cultivates the ground, and, in turn, the ground produces fruit for him to eat. Andrew Peterson writes in The God of the Garden, “Humans were created to care for the world, and the world was created to be cared for.”[1] Peterson’s idea of creation care affirms the reason for gardening found in the story of creation.
The garden is a gift common to all humanity. It is to be enjoyed, but man’s enjoyment of the garden does not alter its inherent value. God assigns value to the garden; therefore, man values the garden. In Genesis 1, God gives man the cultural mandate, ordering him to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue the earth, and rule over its creatures. Following the cultural mandate, the Scriptures read: “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food” (Gen. 1:29–30, NASB).
The immediate context of keeping the garden is mankind’s responsibility to subdue the ground and rule over every living creature. That responsibility is repeated in Genesis 2 where we find that God formed man and planted him in a garden in Eden for him to “cultivate and keep” it (v. 15). The narrative in the garden is the foundation for cultural work, establishing man’s image-bearing and purpose in relation to the created order.
The form of cultural work in Genesis is a model set forth to inform all other forms of work. The vocation of gardener is not the only Biblical form of work. However, agrarian language appears throughout the Scriptures. Gardening is a practical example and a necessary mode of work. Human beings must eat, so work must be done to sow and harvest vegetation. The only way we can accomplish this goal is to garden well. We garden because gardening is one of ways by which Christians care for the gift of creation.
Creativity in the Garden
The creation narrative, in Genesis 1–3, presents the model of cultural work. Man has dominion over the earth, and he keeps the garden, but man is not God. We are created beings made lower than God, made in His image, and made to rule over the works of His hands. Dorothy Sayers, in The Mind of the Maker, argues that man is a creative being simply because he is made in the image of God, and common to both God and man is the “desire to make things.”[2] We cannot create in the same fashion God can. Man’s imagination and creativity does not have the power to create something from nothing. Man creates by rearranging.
Tending to a garden is a form of creation. Gardening, in the broadest sense, extends to garden design, choosing seeds, studying the land, weeding out what is harmful, and the physical act of tilling and preserving the garden. Designing the garden, choosing what plants to include and where to put them, requires imagination. Garden planning employs that natural desire to create things for the purpose of glorifying God. The example of the garden teaches adaptability, growth, versatility, beauty, and excellence in creativity. Gardening is an art form to be studied carefully, a study that is both practical and beneficial to the gardener.
Man uses the resources gifted to him by God in His creativity. Tending the ground is an act of creation to the extent that man creates something from something; to borrow the language of J. R. R. Tolkien, the creative act of man is “subcreation.”[3] The gardener uses soil, seeds, and water—things already created by God—to create more. Gardening is a richly Biblical idea that is valued by Christians as a metaphor to describe one’s relationship to God as bearing fruit, as well as a workable model that, by man’s labor and natural processes, produces physical vegetation. Agrarian life reminds us of our responsibility to fulfill God’s cultural mandate.
Cultivation of the Garden
Humanity engages in the mental aspects of work through creativity and imagination. The physical aspect of work is the cultivation of the ground. Cultivation, coming from the Latin cultus, the past participle of colo (meaning “to till”), refers to the care and preparation of the ground by digging or plowing.[4] Caring for the garden, by cultivation, is part of the Christian’s mandate in Genesis 1–2. Genesis 1:28 commissions man to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” He is to subdue the earth. In this passage subdue means “to bring (land) under cultivation” or “to put under rule.”[5] Genesis 2:15 continues that man is to cultivate and to “keep” the land. Man is the keeper rather than the owner; he is a steward.
Wendell Berry, discussing the idea of ownership verses stewardship, uses Leviticus 25 to explain the principle of stewardship in relation to creation. He argues that man is not sovereign over all of creation; his rule is subject to the authority of God. Accountability to God and responsibility toward the created order restrains the actions of fallen man. For this reason, Berry argues, “our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God’s gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.”[6] Keeping the ground is a matter of holiness and obedience. Cultivating the garden, by physically caring for the ground, is a command, and the misuse of God’s gifts is direct disobedience to the Maker.
Creation and cultivation are harmonious. The two actions go together; the charge to create and to cultivate complement each other. Thomas Bridgeman, who was a gardener, seedman, and florist, wrote a series of books published in the 1840s to aid the kitchen gardener in picking seeds, knowing the proper growing season, and learning how to garden well. He argued that gardening is an art to be continually practiced.[7] A garden must be looked after, and we are the gardeners tasked with its preservation.
Conclusion
The language used to describe agrarian life has rich application to the world of culture. Man uses his creative faculties to design and create. Through physical labor, mankind cultivates and keeps the ground. The Lord placed man in the Garden “to cultivate it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15). The garden is something to be cared for and preserved. The hope of this survey has been to demonstrate that, in the historical account of creation, gardening is a gift from God to man. Before us is the task to create and cultivate the created order. The earth has inherent value, given by God in Genesis. Man has a responsibility to the Maker of all things to care for the earth and to keep it. Gardening is one of the many ways that Christians engage with the world for the glory of the One Who created it.
About the Author: Sarah Benton works in public history at Historic Castalian Springs, the managing non-profit for state historic sites Cragfont, Wynnewood, and Hawthorn Hill. She has a BA in History from Welch College and is pursuing the MA in Humanities at Welch College. Sarah is an active member of Sylvan Park Free Will Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee. Her interests are history, hiking, gardening, philosophy, puzzles, and traditional folk music.
[1] Andrew Peterson, The God of the Garden: Thoughts on Creation, Culture, and the Kingdom (Nashville, TN: B&H, 2021), 5.
[2] Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 21–22.
[3] J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Tree and Leaf, Smith of Wootton Major, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorthelm’s Son (London: Unwin, 1975), 28, https://archive.org/details/treeleafsmithofw0000tolk/page/n5/mode/2up?q=sub.
[4] William Morris, ed., The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (New York: American Heritage and Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 321.
[5] Morris, 1281.
[6] Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2002), 308.
[7] Thomas Bridgeman, The Kitchen Gardener’s Instructor: A Catalogue with Practical Directions (Bedford, MA: Applewood, 2023), vi.
November 21, 2023
Beautifully stated.