A Bit of Earth is about the garden, but it’s also about us—as we are made from dirt.
My gardening journey has been a tumultuous one. If you look at my garden at its peak, you’d say I’m pretty good at it now. We’ve just ended our harvest season, and I still have baskets of squash all over my house. We just pulled in all of the tomatoes before they freeze. Last week, our family had a workday in our yard and garden. The weather was amazing, and we worked to put the garden to bed for the winter and prep it for spring. Besides perhaps parenting, gardening is one of the best parallels I know for the Christian life. The act of gardening feels like a prayer, whether it’s one of frustration, confusion, or hope.
But in all honesty, my gardening journey has not been a pretty one. When we first moved out to the farm, there was already a large, established garden thanks to my in-laws who lived there before us. But I had two little kids and was pregnant with our third, and the garden was too big for me. On top of that, I had never had a garden before and didn’t know what I was doing.
My husband encouraged me to “just do it.” So I bought some seeds, marked out little rows, and started sticking them in the ground. I found out quickly that I did it wrong. I needed to use a plumb line, I guess because farmers like their gardens in tidy rows. My rows were wavy as if a toddler had planted them. It didn’t affect the crop at all—it just didn’t look nice. I tried to stay on top of the weeding, too, but I was also dealing with little kids who would pull up good plants and “try to help” as I was out there. If I could weed one row a day, it was a win; so I just couldn’t keep up. Once harvesting green beans started mid-summer, my ability to weed at all fell through.
Besides perhaps parenting, gardening is one of the best parallels I know for the Christian life.
On a big industrial farm like ours, the garden was set up in a prominent place so that contractors and sales people would see our beautiful garden as a reflection of the farmer.. Only my garden was never beautiful. And the pressure to keep it beautiful grew into a deep hatred for gardening in general. About ten years in, I announced I was quitting gardening for good.
I told my husband I was done. “Plant grass there. I hate it. I hate the pressure. I hate the rules. I don’t want it on display. I want to plant my seeds by twirling in a circle if I feel like it.” The experimenting was the fun part for me. But the rigid, “What will the neighbors think?” model of gardening was strangling me.
My husband didn’t want me to give up on gardening, so he carved out a new spot, hidden behind trees just next to the apple orchard. We called it my “experiment garden” where I could plant what I wanted just for fun, not for family needs. It had six french style beds in the ground, where I lined them haphazardly with bricks, and adjusted things every year how I wanted them. It became my canvas. I bought a gnome, and named him Gnorman.
Soon, my parents built me a fence around the garden, and I bought a metal archway for the entrance. Vines grow everywhere, and I stuff each bed full of all of my favorite vegetables—though one bed is just strawberries that come back each year. My garden is such a lush retreat now, and my husband jokes he wishes people could see how beautiful it is. I just needed the freedom to make all the mistakes and figure it out.
It’s with that background that I picked up Andrea Burke’s book, A Bit of Earth: A Year in the Garden with God. I’m not one for “cheesy devotionals” and probably the only reason I picked up the book at all is because I was familiar with Burke’s writing and knew it had depth. I also knew she’d give me Jesus.
The book is divided into seasons and starts in winter. The author is further on the path of gardening than me—she saves her seeds each year, which I still need to figure out how to do. I found myself breathing deeply through the beauty of her writing, underlining profound words that I want to go deep in my heart, and then pulling out my gardening journal at times to make notes for things I want to do myself. I planted garlic this fall for the first time, because of notes from this book. We’ll see if the scapes come up this spring.
As Burke walks through the process of gardening, in the ebbs and flows of each season, she can’t help but reflect on God’s work in her life and how it mirrors what she’s attempting to do. To be humbled, literally means to be low to the ground. The garden is a place to be humbled and reflect on life and death, struggle and loss, miracles and whimsy.
A Bit of Earth is about the garden, but it’s also about us—as we are made from dirt. We are God’s garden. Burke offers reflections about when things don’t go according to plan in her own garden and how God is the great gardener. Much like Robert Capon’s book Supper of the Lamb talks about cooking, and then drops incredible theological truths while standing in the kitchen, as though it were the most natural place to tie theology and real life together, Burke weaves together the struggle and beauty in gardening with God’s work in our lives:
“Almost twenty years ago, I managed to make a series of catastrophic mistakes that really blew my life up. I mean, I made a significant mess of things. After a few years of wandering and trying out the local pig slop, by the grace of God, I came home. Some well-meaning (or perhaps not) church person stopped me once to tell me that while I was certainly welcome back home, I shouldn’t expect to receive my status back as well-loved child of God. I had squandered my inheritance. I was not living the Plan B for my life, which God would still bless, but not nearly as much had I stayed faithful the whole time. Even as I write this, I realize that was probably not well-intentioned. It’s quite sinister to even type out.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about following God up to this point in my life, it is that God is not operating in plan A, plan B, plan M, or plan 2.0. He has a plan, a very detailed, specific timeline for us. He sees and knows all of the details and is able to sovereignly work all things together for our good and his glory. He is aware of what will grow us, what will make us strong, what soil we need, what rains we soak up. Nothing is outside of his care and attention. He is not a sky genie hoping that we ask for the right thing. He is joyfully arranging the details.”
The book weaves in and out of gardening tips, reflections on God, and poetry. Yet, it doesn’t have the gimmicky feel of other gardening books that are devotionals with a little gardening thrown in or gardening books sprinkled with a little bit about God.
No, this book aims at speaking truth as clearly and beautifully as possible, in whatever subject it weaves in and out of—dare I say, organically—almost as if it’s one united truth. It tries to capture the liturgy of the seasons in a gardener’s life, as a means of meditation on the goodness of God.
