For those of my friends and family who find peace and refreshment by digging in the dirt: here are Nathaniel Hawthorne's thoughts on gardening. When he and his wife were newly married, and had rented an old parsonage owned by the Emerson family, Henry David Thoreau planted a kitchen garden for a wedding gift. Hawthorne really, really liked it...
Not that it can be disputed, that the light toil, requisite to cultivate a moderately sized garden, imparts such zest to kitchen-vegetables as is never found in those of the market-gardener. Childless men, if the would know something of the bliss of paternity, should plant a seed...should plant it with their own hands, and nurse it from infancy to maturity, altogether by their own care...An hour or two of morning labor, was all that it required. But I used to visit and re-visit it, a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny, with a love that nobody could share nor conceive of, who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world...
Gazing at them, I felt that, by my agency, something worth living for had been done. A new substance as borne into the world. They were real and tangible existences, which the mind could seize hold of and rejoice in.
--Nathaniel Hawthorne, Preface to Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)
