A cottontail rabbit sits in a yard next to Arcadia Trail Park. Explore how Easter, spring and the garden interconnect as symbols of renewal, salvation and the agricultural roots of religion in this reflective opinion piece.
Bob Booth
Special to the Star-Telegram
Easter, spring and the garden are linked — forming a tapestry interwoven with ancient, historical, symbolic and religious meanings.
Spring is the season of salvation. The dead of winter is, metaphorically, the death of our souls: the time when plants die and animals go into hibernation. Life is on its knees. Even our thoughts change from active to reflective. Sometimes, when our light-deprived selves have exhausted our psychic pantry of serotonin, our deaths can seem actual.
By winter’s end we haven’t just taken stock of our situation, we’ve used most of it up.
Thus, Easter, spring and the garden represent thresholds: moving from a suspended state to new beginnings. In Easter, we enter a future of salvation; with spring, we emerge from a slumbering, gray season of scarcity to a season of vibrancy and fullness. With the garden, we experience the shift from poverty to plenty.
Now is the time we turn our focus to the future. Easter lets us look forward to salvation — spring to summer, to the garden that sustains us. In a passage from Philippians, St. Paul speaks of “forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead.”
Whether gardeners or not, and whether religious or secular, this time of year causes us all to feel the renewal of life: new hope, illumination, the uplifted spirit. We revel in longer days, marvels awaiting us out of doors, the pageants of colors, cantatas of birdsongs and elixirs of fragrance in the air.
Easter is not the only link between religion and the garden. The roots of religion are universally agricultural. Mankind’s earliest writings were, in one sense, agricultural manuals, or, in another sense, books of religious instruction. So entwined were the two concerns.
And the garden is not just a great metaphor — it is the first metaphor. From a biblical perspective, we all began in the garden. You might recall Adam, Eve and the matter of the apple of temptation, humankind’s original and greatest sin. Disobeying God’s strict instructions, Adam and Eve partook of the apple offered by their serpentine interlocutor.
God promptly exiled the couple from the paradisiacal Garden of Eden, and sentenced the pair, their descendants and all mankind — to what? Gardening! Yes, the never-ending punishment for our greatest sin is to become a gardener.
By casting out Adam and Eve, God gave his children the responsibility to create their own lives. Rather than lolling about the one heavenly garden, we’ve been working in our own earthly gardens ever since.
Though our worldly realm may have its cares and woes, diseases and pests, lives and deaths, we get to do it ourselves. And when reason fails us or fate strikes a stunning blow, we don’t so much pray to God as we talk to him. This is because it is God who asks the questions, challenging us every year in the spring.
Original sin was the beginning of reason. The point of reason is that mortals are, in effect, never saved. One has to save oneself with God looking on — which is how he helps. And after saving yourself, you must turn to help the weak and defenseless (aka your fellow human beings).
Nowhere is this spirit more eloquently expressed than in homes, communities and public spaces (including gardens). Brother helping brother; neighbor helping neighbor — what a miracle!
As Henry David Thoreau, once observed, “Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”
Happy Easter.
George Ball is executive chairman of W. Atlee Burpee Company and past president of the American Horticultural Society.
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