Poetry in the garden

Auden writes that the gardeners say:

“Law … is the sun”:

Law is the one

All gardeners obey

Tomorrow, yesterday, today.

We obeyed the law when we placed our garden at the north end of the property, far from the tall, shade-casting conifers on the neighbor’s side of our southern property line.  Likewise when we placed the fruit trees north of the planting beds – so their canopies would not shade the flowers and vegetables –  and when we choose partially shady spots for sun sensitive or bolt-prone plants.  The plants themselves are law-abiding too, of course.  It’s a poetic exaggeration to say all flowers in time bend toward the sun, but it’s mostly true.  The mechanism is the opposite of what I would have thought, one of suppression instead of stimulation.  Many plants have a growth hormone in their stalks and stems that is inhibited by direct sunlight.  This hormone is more active on the shaded side of the stem, causing that side of the stem to grow more than the sunny side, so the plant grows sunward.

When there is not enough light and the hormone is not sufficiently controlled, plants get leggy.  This happened early last spring under the grow lights in the farmer’s plant nursery in our basement.  The lights were a poor replacement for the sun, and the plants suffered a bit for it.  It didn’t help that sometimes we forgot to turn on the lights and the poor seedlings experienced 36-hour nights.  The note we posted in the kitchen – “REMEMBER THE PLANTS” – got bigger each time such a lapse occurred.   

Sometimes, watching sunshine feeding daisies, I take the large view.  I think about the photons streaming into the leaves, having made the 93 million mile, eight minute trip from some unimaginably intense explosion on the sun.  I imagine the photons powering the leaf’s photosynthesis machines. I recall that the carbon that is the raw material fed into these machines was itself created in an explosion in a first generation star.  I reflect that I am myself made of star stuff.  And then, ennobled, I get called away to some new farm task.