Garden of Diversity

12/24/09 4:47 AM
thomasjasengardner
GARDEN OF DIVERSITY
While unearthing garden beets this fall, I looked upon nature’s indifference to color, shape, and size. The tall yellow corn, the orange carrots, the beige cantaloupe, and the Marion cane-berries are an appetizing rainbow in the black sandy soil. The marvel of nutritional harmony that vegetables provide is a uniqueness of genetic genomes. The intricacies of nature only equal the complications of the human gene.
The beet was encased in a deep serious red skin. Its fibrous core selflessly produces calcium, vitamin C, and anti-oxidants for human consumption. The building block of man’s existence is a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables. This garden of life has been the magic used by shamans, necromancers, brujerias, or sorcerers. Our great-grandmothers still use these natural recipes for fighting colds, healing muscles, and stopping headaches.
An epiphany overwhelmed me as I thought how a plant’s ordained source of medicine and nutrition could help overcome social apprehensions and pious rejections. If we shared the food of our ancestors; our mutual rejections and material loathing would be reduced to universal curiosity and unmitigated adventures. Our conspiracy theories of hate and mistrust would be dismissed by the conscious senses of tantalizing taste and fragrant smells.
If we view the foundation of food as a source of man’s superior advantage, then we should also take advantage of our cognitive ability to garden. The presence of cabbage, squash, and onion is in the diets of many cultures. Food remains unabashed by unabridged culinary presentations. All life benefits from the universal need of comfort from food. Exchanging the ethnic diets of our individual heritage does not compromise our social beliefs for public compassion and self-respect. Various people with the same values, dreams, and ideals present the same food in different ways.
Nature’s cornucopia is a delirious delicacy to every person in every country; regardless of color, creed, or religion. It is natures mission to compromise in order to prosper. While maintaining their individuality, plants cross-pollinated their complex knowledge to resist herbivores, insects, and blight. The potato grown around the world led to different subspecies. Each tuber identified as a potato by the host culture. In addition, the onion’s reputation for being in the diet of every culture is not happenstance.
Each part of the world has a love of red, green, or yellow or purple tomatoes. Beneath the different skins lies the same locum. This could not happen unless horticulture cooperated to nurture and cultivate nature to its best function. Can we humans collaborate to nurture and cultivate what lays beneath our skin, culture, or religion?
Like varieties of cultivated carrots, ethnic cultures too, must cognitively unite. To resist the diseases of environmental injustice, institutional racism, and economic depravity requires the same cooperation seen in functional plants. Plants used in ethnic menus, can function as ambassadors of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
As different cultures on campus, we must unite like different plants of the forest; and expound upon our capability to help each other grow towards these aforementioned sacred rights. Our indifferent gardening patterns in climatic weather, or mid-western sandy loam is no difference at all. Vegetables too, shape their environment to their communal needs. As students, faculty, and staff, we can do no less. We must join defenses to fight the ironies of hate and deceit that stifle our right to grow. Like gardeners, we should weed out active predation, exploitation, and oppression that stymie our communal reconciliation.
To be a plant is to rejoice in the photosynthesis of life. Yes, humans may consume root vegetables to get the same Vitamin D. However, the human body, like the vegetable plant, requires the smoothing delicacy from sunrays of hope and cool nights of inspiration. I believe this project comprises the elements necessary to prune societies garden from vestige weeds of past centuries. The self-preservation of plants was not a mistake. Neither should our own efforts be to fulfill our functional potential.

Malicious and benevolent.
I’m a last century boy.