11/04/2025
OLD WAYS (from my book for All Souls Day)đ"Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands" âLinda Hogan
Linda Hogan's old ways are those of her Chickasaw ancestors. Mine come from the landscapes of Italy, Ireland, and New England. They were emblazoned in our gardens, on our tables, and in our treatment of the land that supported us. They were passed down in recipes and prescriptions. In the way stones were fit together. In the way a dovetail joint expanded and contracted through hundreds of seasons.
Old ways are how my hands learned to follow a pattern, save a seed, make a cordial, and trace the lineage that makes up every fiber of my being. In centuries past, peopleâs lives were harder in many ways. But most were also richer in meaningful experiences gained by living lives connected to the seasons and the elements. Lives more vivid for the visceral interaction of handcraft and better connected for the legacy of handed-down skills.
Seeing these old ways as historical precedent and blending them with modern inquiry can help us to retrace familiar steps with new eyes. Look closely and analyze the memory embedded in fragments. We can find inspiration from the assured hands of a knitter, a calligrapher, a mason who came before us. Methods as simple as hanging out laundry or as complex as dyeing fabric with botanicals.
Although they can often be improved upon, old ways are guideposts that have helped us survive childbirth, illness, natural disasters, wars, and season after season of ordinary days. Why did particular herbs and spices become traditional medicines? Which heirloom seeds deliver the most flavorful, prolific, or disease-resistant produce? Old ways can shed some light, offering clues, like puzzle pieces, when weâre fitting stones back into an old farm wall or letting our hand be guided by earlier cuts when we prune an old orchard tree.
Old ways are the familiar artifacts that help us to explore an unwritten code, like talismans passed down to enhance and protect us. Ways so deeply embedded that they guide hand and heart to forge onward with minimal effort. Ways so old that only the wind and the trees can pronounce them. No matter how dark the days, old ways can help us succeed and regenerate, like a woodland begins anew after a devastating fire. Old ways hold memories evolved through countless seasons of ice ages, hunting and gathering, agriculture and industrialization, feast and famine.
As Rachel Carson reminds us, âThere is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of natureâthe assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.â For a multitude of reasons that vary all around the world, we have found ourselves at a necessary turning point in our relationship with the earth and each other. The gardenersâ spirit knows why we have to take care of place. We know it from our very roots, and they are our tonic, our life bloodâthe water we drink, the soil we till, the heirlooms we grow, and the air we breathe.
Old ways can speak to us. They can lend us confidence and skills to do things like forage, but like any other language, their translation can make a world of difference. Old ways are nuanced, and they call upon us to be attentive to the details. Place, population, seasonâand how our decisions play out in the larger communities around us. At its core, respect is inherent in the old ways. If we poison the earth, if we do not apply lessons learned, we can poison ourselves; but if we pay heed, we can know no greater nourishment than the wild greens gifted by nature and birthrightânurturing medicine, like the lingering savor of a grandmotherâs chicken soup.
In an age when our waters and landfills are choked with plastic, old ways remind us how to make a wooden cutting board, and why it is best to rub it with garlic or lemon when we are done. In a world with tidbits of food-like substances sealed in plastic to preserve shelf life, learning to pickle, ferment, and preserve foods that actually nourish our bodies becomes an act of resistance. At a time when chemical fertilizers are sterilizing the land and toxifying our lives, old ways remind us to compost, companion plant, and cultivate perennials that draw up nutrients from deep below the earthâs surface. They remind us how to eat a dandelion instead of pouring chemicals onto our lawn. In a world where we have sped up climate change and disease for the bottom line and profit margin, the answers we need (like dandelion) are blowing on the wind.
Old ways help us to roll up our sleeves and get things done. They help us to draw upon all the learning in the universe and the fifteen billion years of compost, in order to advance civilization and soil. It is our great fortune as gardeners and seed savers that we know how to get our hands dirty, how to take spent soil and rebuild systems. In The Same Ax, Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age (2000), Howard Mansfield concludes that whether itâs rebuilding an old farm tractor engine or reviving the village model of community organization, it must contain an element of renewalâlike fashioning a new handle for an ax broken so many times that there is little left of the original; yet its preservation communicates the spirit as well as the form of the original.
When I lived in Japan, I visited the Ise Jingu, a Shinto shrine some two thousand years old. But every twenty years, for at least the last thirteen hundred years, the most outdated building there is torn down and exactingly replicated. The process of regularly rebuilding the wooden structures, which would otherwise have been lost to the elements, helped preserve the original architecture; but even more importantly, it keeps the artisanal skills and processes (from harvesting and aging timber to timber framing and thatching structures) aliveâoften with the same lineage of artisans that built the shrine two millennia ago. In contrast, on recent visits to Boston, I have watched an almost entirely new city being built on the old waterfront piers. Dizzying skyscrapers built at sea level on centuries-old landfill. I am keenly aware that craftsmanship did little to inform these plans. It would seem that nobody was tasked with creating buildings and landscapes that could be seen as living, breathing organisms, or that could endure decades of climate change. Clearly, in this age of excess, the old adage âa rising tide lifts all boatsâ no longer pertains to all; and these sinking ships may well be left bankrupt for the rest of us to contend with, like so many other outmoded dams and toxic waste sites from coast to coast.
We are not living in the most detail-oriented of times. Science can surely help us to advance, but first we need to know the right questions to ask. And all too often, the patterns most deeply ingrained in our history evade us.
Old ways donât require that we remain stuck in the past. Many are best abandoned and good riddance, but most simply remind us of patterns that have kept us resilient, helping us to survive a history full of change. Historian Howard Zinn urges us to remain hopeful, to remember the times and places where people have âbehaved magnificentlyâ; doing so âgives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.â
The elders Iâve known who found ways to stay positive through changing times are role models to me. Itâs not that their lives were easy, but they never forgot all the ways that they were fortunate, and they made sure to acknowledge them as fervently as they worked for justice, equity, and beauty in the world. There is nothing political about taking care of the earth. Every person knows it in their conscience; and old ways can help to guide us as we cultivate food, flowers, forests, and ecosystems, starting with the plot of land beneath our feet. They are living histories, and they are marvelous little victories. Open up the recipe box, the jar of seeds, and share the craft. Our work is to radiate out as far as we can, like ancient seeds carried on the wind.
Traditional haying woodcut by Mary Azarian whose art illustrates my best-selling garden book *(Thank you!!!) https://www.amazon.com/Heirloom-Gardener-Traditional-Plants-Skills/dp/1604699930/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1WNCEOQ92GM7G&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.jrNsbNf-GBxfKvKVdqx0IwmJUoPGtJEzF79LccBSSVrU4ph7gSST9Mndc7tcSd5X0LzVAZErkDtYi0ez7GnzsaadklgAMwdtlByDnKAX6p8jOBs3l0pwdZUAgyWHeOHC99fo4lzJoAuPFkty2gDjv-IuPKaJkmHbp_F3cH1MhZQ7r6UXERSDy58xLZWZYNXkrSAmUtduhILsBSxSTOZt3busOIpdyGzcHdFjZZQVEXs.IqOWkDbLNaUblOTxz5nEfMIKaSwU0HpqqV90x9gqqLs&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+heirloom+gardener&qid=1761165681&sprefix=the+heirlo%2Caps%2C1165&sr=8-1
