In Genesis 2:5 it talks about the time before all the plants had grown. And why hadn't they grown? Because "the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground." That always puzzled me. Not the rain part, but the "man to till the ground" part. Did this mean that plants couldn't grow without our help? Nonsense, I thought.
And then my wife started this garden in our backyard and I learned different. The truth, it would seem,is that after millions of years of practice, nature is still really lousy at growing without our help.
We have these seeds, you see. I forget which particular plant they're supposed to turn into, but before they can be planted they have to be "germinated." And how do you germinate seeds? It turns out you plant the little suckers inside your house. We have these special planting things, they look like egg cartons made from really emphatic recycled material, the kind that looks like it's recycling right before your eyes which is pretty much what it's doing. The idea is to fill each compartment with dirt (preferably designer dirt, of course) and carefully plant the seeds.Once they start to grow we take them outside and plant the entire biodegradableegg carton in the ground.
Is this really the way the wilderness grew? Ridiculous.
On the other hand, there was Johnny Appleseed.
Actually, his name was John Chapman, born 1774 in Leominster, Massachusetts. His father was away from the family for long periods of time, first as a volunteer soldier in the Revolutionary War shortly after John's birth. During this time John's mother died and after the war Mr. Chapman remarried and began a new family.
In the 1790s, John, along with his half-brother Nathaniel, went west and by the 1800s Nathaniel was settling down to raise a family.
John, on the other hand, had become a convert to the Swedeborgian religion and a member of the General Convention of the New Jerusalem, the name by which it was incorporated in America. In fact, it was in an issue of the Society
for Printing, Publishing and Circulating the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, dated January 14, 1817, that we get one of our earliest reports on Johnny's activities:
There is in the western country a very extraordinary missionary of the New Jerusalem. A man has appeared who seems to be almost independent of corporeal wants and sufferings. He goes barefooted, can sleep anywhere, in house or out of house, and live upon the coarsest and most scanty fare. He has actually thawed ice with his bare feet. He procures what books he can of the New Church, travels into the remote settlements, and lends them wherever he can find readers, and sometimes divides a book into two or three parts for more extensive distribution and usefulness. This man for years past has been in the employment of bringing into cultivation, in numberless places in the wilderness, small patches (two or three acres) of ground, and then sowing apple seeds and rearing nurseries.
These become valuable as the settlements approximate, and the profits of the whole are intended
for the purpose of enabling him to print all the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and distribute them through the western settlements of the United States.
Although the story of Johnny Appleseed planting seeds all across the country is true, the image of him doing so freely and at his own expense is not entirely accurate. Johnny was essentially a nurseryman and while he apparently did give away seeds and seedlings, it was on condition of future payment. Still, the fact remains that he created thousands and thousands of apple orchards across the countryside.
So maybe the other thing is true too.
Maybe the wilderness does need us to keep it going.
For those interested, more information on Johnny Appleseed is available at these
sites:
Johnny
Appleseed's Biography from Pennsylvania State Department
