Journey to Eden

Eden is a garden in harmony with nature, a place of meandering paths along which we gather food for our dinner. My definition of Eden is also a garden without rows — a friendly wilderness without an obvious plan.

In contrast, our vegetable gardens and farms focus almost entirely on being friendly to humans, while excluding much of the natural world. Traditional gardens have implied boundary walls and are organized around a short list of plants that are OK, and a long list of plants that aren’t OK. Henry David Thoreau, the American philosopher, farmed beans while staying in a cabin on Walden Pond in the 1840s. After a year of assiduously ripping out every weed, he started thinking that it might be a good idea to plant for nature, too, by allotting a portion of his land to the birds and bees.

Nearly two centuries later, the consequence of humans thinking mostly about ourselves has brought