The story of gardening

I am reading a big coffee table book called The story of Gardening. The book is very heavy and I've only managed to read a few chapters. Gardening can sometimes feel like an endless battle with nature or an all consuming passion that can never be quenched. Chapter 11 was about Gardens in China, under the various dynasties. It turns out the humble administrators garden was not that he liked gardening a small patch but that he just needed somewhere to escape the daily grind of work and write poetry. One of the Empresses constructed a huge pleasure garden, called a Summer Palace, the pinnacle of which was a stone ship, on a fake sea. It was so expensive that all the funds that were meant to go into maintaining a defence force or army (or REAL ships) for the kingdom all went into the Empress's garden instead. The dynasty then fell apart from typical govt overspending on luxury holiday junkets and foreign invaders, who might have been expected to gasp at the beautiful gardens but they were not exactly that type of well-heeled tourist. 

 I have had a real think about the wealth gap in this country and I wonder if I'm in danger of falling into the chasm where all failed gardens go. Although have they really failed? Well if they've been bulldozed and ripped out for houses maybe.

 It was a bright sunny day when garden club met up again at Thera's who had survived a flood and half her garden falling into the neighbouring gully. We all had a tour and I must say I'm impressed with what she's done, despite living next to a substation and having bambook creep into her property. There were so many plants (obviously garden club trades) and her trademark ceramics and everything looked lush (maybe thanks to a lot more water!) and cared for. She also didn't really have to contend with a non-gardener whacking her plants to submission, because he was always off at car rallies. The price to pay for having a boy-racer fiance? I noticed go-kart tires as planting pots, which we also have in the community garden even though now I'm a bit dubious of growing edible things in petroleum.

 On the following Sunday checked out the Sunflower Farm in Waikmauku. Its open Fridays to Sundays to the public when the sunflowers are in bloom, and you can cut them for $3 a stem. There's also a cover charge to enter, as I'm supposing they don't want hordes decimating their crop as has what's happened to the blueberry growers. There was a sort of maze you could enter, but otherwise its masses of sunflowers and bees in one big block of land. Monoculture of course. Behind the bamboo hedge, row open row of celery was growing with sprinklers, and another field beyond lay fallow, the brown earth ready for a late summer sowing of something. Not like sunflowers just growing by the fence, these were in their thousands as far as the eye could see. As we'd had the ride in the middle of the day of course it was super sunny, and my friend/driver Shar was wilting in the heat. 

I'm a suburbanite and not used to mass farms, and get a bit antsy when driving out to the countryside and seeing fields upon fields of grassland and haybales and no trees. I keep thinking wow to have so much land is a gift, but I'm under no illusion that horticultural and agricultural production is a cut-throat business, hard work, noisy and often monotonous. Strawberry fields present the same, another friend said she'd hated picking strawberries as it was endless picking picking picking, bending down and picking, then weighing and packing, but that's only because some capitalist has decided that to sell them and make some money for a supermarket contract is better than to have them in growers hands. Consequently trays and trays of unripe strawberries for sale in said supermarkets.

 It should be more fun going to a supermarket and seeing the array of vegetables and fruit from all around the world shipped and stored and already picked for you and waiting to be plastic bagged (or finally, paper bagged) and then taken home to sit in your fruit bowl but I've become a bit desensistised to it all. You aren't allowed to taste them there, and who knows what sprays have got them to that point. After you've grown your own, it's all a bit disconcerting to see them all wrapped and barcoded and on shelves under florescent lights. Fruit picking, like fishing is just not the same when it's  done in a supermarket.