Late in the year, all but the most efficient gardeners will be giving things away. As the first frost looms, tomatoes and herbs come out of the garden in masses. One can only make so much pesto or sauce, and so the last of the produce goes in some box to garnish an office kitchen or a church hall. I have enjoyed giving away even something as humble as the leaves from my fig trees, which have an incredible aroma that’s easily infused into syrups, baked fruit, or herbal tea.
It’s a good time for giving away live plants, too. Herbs and clumping perennials divide well at this time of year, when their growth period is mostly over but the ground still holds some warmth. As the weather gets colder, hardwood cuttings become an easily-shared propagation possibility.
In the early years of my gardening, producing small yields and weak plants in poor soil, these exercises of generosity weren’t possible. Every leaf of lettuce was a precious achievement; every elderberry cutting something to be stuck back into the ground as a hedge against the failure of my existing bushes. Now, we have the abundance to give some of the products of our garden away. It’s a gift—to have the capacity to give.
On that note, dear readers, if you would like some cuttings from my elderberry or fig plants, do please let me know.
Gardeners can easily view our land from a perspective of scarcity rather than abundance. And indeed, our plots are indeed limited in scope and carrying capacity; we cannot and should not aim to extract every bit of production from the site. In principle, however, if we can mimic the regenerative processes of an ecosystem, we need not choose between abundance and renewal—we can feed ourselves while also returning life to the soil. As Wendell Berry has written, “some things, though limited, are inexhaustible.”
Plants want to make more plants. All the gardener really does is facilitate that process, meaning that having an abundance of fruit or divisions or cuttings ought to be the default state, not the exception.
For this reason, a good gardener should never just feed the gardener. There should always be excess, always be seeds and divisions and extra zucchini. In this way, a garden by its nature creates the possibility of a form of gift-giving, common to many traditional societies, known as potlatch. Here’s how Lewis Hyde explains it:
At its simplest a potlatch was a feast lasting several days given by a member of a tribe who wanted his rank in the group to be publicly recognized. Marcel Mauss translates the verb “potlatch” as “to nourish,” or “to consume.” Used as a noun, a “potlatch” is a feeder, or “place to be satiated.” Potlatches included durable goods, but the point of the festival was to have these perish as if they were food. Houses were burned; ceremonial objects were broken and thrown into the sea. One of the potlatch tribes, the Haida, called their feasting “killing wealth.”
It’s always tempting, if one grows a garden out of a desire to contribute to one’s domestic economy, to try to practice maximal efficiency—to keep the wealth, to feed the family. The logic of our monetized economy often drives us toward this, spurring us toward investment and return rather than waste and squander. But to treat the garden this way is to miss the opportunity to participate in potlatch.
The key role of potlatch is to enable relationship. Hyde again: “The gift is an emanation of Eros.” Gifts create bonds of love, and the more impractical, the more “wasteful” they become, the greater their relational productivity. This is why Mom wasn’t thrilled with the new whisk for her birthday, or why you never wanted socks at Christmas—a good gift is a gift that involves some squander. And yet even “when the gift is used, it is not used up. Quite the opposite, in fact: the gift that is not used will be lost.” Accordingly, to give away the products of the garden is to ensure its continued abundance.
We have few aspects of life that operate that way in our modern financial economy—few sources of true unnecessary abundance, from which we can give without ourselves losing anything. Yet this is how the garden works. If I divide my chive plant or dig up a comfrey root for a friend, I have lost nothing, and I may even invigorate the plant. The gift that leaves me ends up, for me, as nothing but gain.
I’m keeping this principle in mind as we edge toward Thanksgiving and Christmas, the season of excessive consumption and indulgent gifts. Most thoughtful people on some level abominate the modern American commercial excess surrounding the season, so far from the rich simplicity of the gifts of the Magi. And for a certain class of parents, among whom I emphatically belong, the barrage of plastic junk hurled at our kids during the season can be a source of frustration—particularly as it seems that many of these hideous objects will meet their end rather quickly in the trash or the Goodwill bin. Yet thinking about potlatch and the abundance of the garden calms me, somewhat. Maybe killing some of the wealth is part of the point. Maybe consuming our resources doesn’t always mean using them up. Maybe not all waste is wasted.