Post 159.
When I moved to Crabapple Court in State College, from Hollidaysburg, and while I was still adjuncting at Penn State Altoona, when my son was a toddler, there was a lady who lived next door. She was in her 80s and loved her peach tree and kept a small container garden in her back yard. I helped her move some plants once and she gave me a small cherry-style tomato plant she told me her father had cultivated and passed onto her. I planted it in my no-till garden, and it produced delightful, rugged little tomatoes that year, and then volunteered again and again each year without replanting. This lady was suffering from depression, and her son would come in once a week from out of town to help her out. One summer, lightning took her peach tree and soon after she died in her home.
When I bought a house a few blocks away, I failed to take a tomato with me. My neighbor’s sister-in-law was moving into the house, so I figured I had time to grab one as it re-volunteered, but the house caught fire. The property was sold to a developer who built a huge house there and decimated my old garden plot. These locally cultivated tomatoes, an unknown lineage, with a history—from father to daughter over decades—were lost forever.
I look at my garden today, and some day my plants, which I have kept here will likely be discarded—the Maiden’s Blush, an old shrub rose with an intensely beautiful scent each Springtime (but only for about a week); the monastic fig tree that never blooms; the huge strawberries and mint that return each year, the raspberries and blackberries, which can look pretty chaotic to an outsider—as a new generation’s wants and needs replace mine. But there will be somebody who is gardening like me. Hopefully more than there are in my generation.
This is also how I think of my work on ecoliteracy. It pushes beyond where other ecoliteracy theorists have theorized ecoliteracy in many ways—especially into spirituality, commons, and deep ecology. A major ecological lesson is that we are born, we live, we die. None of these things happen without impact. None of them are recalled forever. So too, the auroch and dodo are lost forever. Their memory, explicit or implicit, lives on. I do not conduct scholarship because I have a tenure-line—I have never had one—but because it is what I do as much as those tomatoes did what they do, every year. They may never be tasted again, but I remember.
And now you remember too.
Daniel J. Shevock
Link to the image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tomato_seedling_-_geograph.org.uk_-_6732033.jpg
When I moved to Crabapple Court in State College, from Hollidaysburg, and while I was still adjuncting at Penn State Altoona, when my son was a toddler, there was a lady who lived next door. She was in her 80s and loved her peach tree and kept a small container garden in her back yard. I helped her move some plants once and she gave me a small cherry-style tomato plant she told me her father had cultivated and passed onto her. I planted it in my no-till garden, and it produced delightful, rugged little tomatoes that year, and then volunteered again and again each year without replanting. This lady was suffering from depression, and her son would come in once a week from out of town to help her out. One summer, lightning took her peach tree and soon after she died in her home.
When I bought a house a few blocks away, I failed to take a tomato with me. My neighbor’s sister-in-law was moving into the house, so I figured I had time to grab one as it re-volunteered, but the house caught fire. The property was sold to a developer who built a huge house there and decimated my old garden plot. These locally cultivated tomatoes, an unknown lineage, with a history—from father to daughter over decades—were lost forever.
I look at my garden today, and some day my plants, which I have kept here will likely be discarded—the Maiden’s Blush, an old shrub rose with an intensely beautiful scent each Springtime (but only for about a week); the monastic fig tree that never blooms; the huge strawberries and mint that return each year, the raspberries and blackberries, which can look pretty chaotic to an outsider—as a new generation’s wants and needs replace mine. But there will be somebody who is gardening like me. Hopefully more than there are in my generation.
This is also how I think of my work on ecoliteracy. It pushes beyond where other ecoliteracy theorists have theorized ecoliteracy in many ways—especially into spirituality, commons, and deep ecology. A major ecological lesson is that we are born, we live, we die. None of these things happen without impact. None of them are recalled forever. So too, the auroch and dodo are lost forever. Their memory, explicit or implicit, lives on. I do not conduct scholarship because I have a tenure-line—I have never had one—but because it is what I do as much as those tomatoes did what they do, every year. They may never be tasted again, but I remember.
And now you remember too.
Daniel J. Shevock
Link to the image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tomato_seedling_-_geograph.org.uk_-_6732033.jpg
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