On the dead-end street where we lived when I was a small boy, all the old people had gardens. That was partly because all the old people were Italians. My grandfather had the most extensive garden. His was on the side of a hill, which he divided into four flat terraces with a path going up between them, and a chicken coop above them all. In these he planted tomatoes — and if there is a sharper and more invigorating smell than the leaves of a tomato vine when the fruit is ripe, I don’t know it — and beans, peas, carrots, cucumbers, celery, lettuce, radishes, corn, and melons, and he had a couple of plum trees and a grapevine besides. No flowers? Sure, he planted flowers, in the front of the house by the steps, especially petunias and marigolds — and now that I think of it, those have some powerful fragrances too. It’s not the smell of a rose that will bring me back to childhood, but tomato vines, marigolds, petunias, lilacs, and liquid shoe polish (all at once I am a boy again, shining my good shoes, as everybody did, before church on Sunday).
Nonno should have been a farmer. He told me he could put a seed in the ground and spit on it, and it would grow. I believe he could. Instead he worked on a road crew when he was a boy in Italy — his formal schooling ended with the second grade. When at age 18 he followed his father to America, he came to the same town in Pennsylvania where all his old neighbors had put down roots, and there he did what they did, which was to go down the coal mines. He hated that work. He was most in his element when he was playing pinochle or working the garden. He worked it the way they did in his town in Italy. That town, Tiriolo, perches on a mountain in Calabria. The families there farm the southwestern mountainside. They have sectioned it into terraces, and each family owns a long narrow strip from the top to several hundred feet below, so that everybody gets the benefit of the rainwater, which they collect in cisterns at the top and allow to run in furrows downhill. I’ve seen stout old Italian grandmas walking up that hill with big baskets of beans perched on their heads. People grew a lot of their own food because it was necessary, and so it was also in Pennsylvania where I lived, and then they continued doing so because they enjoyed it, and the food you got was a lot better than the stuff in the store. My grandfather, by the way, grew all his vegetables from seeds. And that brings us to our Word of the Week, garden.
It’s a fascinating word, and a fascinating thing to think of. We know about the Garden of Eden, right? The phrase “of Eden” specifies where the garden was located; Eden itself was much bigger, a whole region, maybe 30,000 square miles. What made it a garden, then? It’s not just that fruits and vegetables grew there. Milton has the right idea in Paradise Lost: it is enclosed. He imagines it as elevated high above the plains below, its wall a high and overhanging cliff. The Hebrew word gan, not related to our garden, suggests an enclosure. The same is true of ancient Iranian paradayjas, for something like a garden that is enclosed all the way around. The Greeks borrowed the Persian word, and that’s how we got the translation for Hebrew gan in the ancient Greek Septuagint as paradeisos, and the whole phrase “Garden of Eden” is rendered “Paradise of delight.”
In any case, it can’t be a garden unless it is protected from wild animals, or from battering winds and storms, or from squatters and other two-legged pests. In a garden, you have nature not in raw form, but tended and adapted to human needs and desires; you have the mind of man and the power of nature working in tandem to produce sweetness and beauty. A garden is not at all like something I’ve seen in Illinois, miles after miles of soybeans, the land owned by conglomerates. It’s also more than just the grass outside of your house, though Debra tells me that that’s one use of the word in England now — what in America we call the yard is there called the garden. A garden is protected, tended, loved. A home should be like a garden, not like a field of soybeans, or like an empty lawn in front of a government building. A school for children should also be like a garden, not like a factory or a prison.
I said that the word is fascinating, too, and let me talk about it a little. Most of our English words that came over with the Norman French derive ultimately from Latin. But often, the French and the Italians borrowed words from our cousins the Germans, so that when those words come into English, they’re as our own old words repackaged. We had the Old English word geard to denote a stretch of land; and earth, in Old English, was called the middangeard, the middle-yard, between heaven and hell, and that’s where Tolkien got his wonderful coinage, Middle Earth. In Old English, a g before a vowel pronounced in the front of the mouth was palatalized, turning into a hard y sound: hence we got our word yard. But in German, and in some English dialects up north, that didn’t happen. So an ancient Germanic word like gardan was borrowed into French and then into English via that route, without the change. Meanwhile, in most of France, that g before the vowel a turned into the zh sound they spell with a j, hence French jardin; in Italian, it turned into the harder j sound they spell with a gi- or ge-, hence Italian giardino. English retained both words, garden and yard, to denote somewhat different things: after all, a schoolyard needn’t have any flowers and fruit trees and vegetables. Scotland Yard sure doesn’t!
But in some northern dialects, the influence of the Norse prevailed, and we get from them the word garth, again for an enclosed area — apparently even for a little dam to catch fish! Now here’s a really odd thing about the word. It’s very likely that the German form was borrowed into the Slavic languages — many German words were, and that should be no surprise. But there it took root as a word for a big enclosure without any sense of planting things: gorod, for a town — that is, a big place with a wall all around it. So we have Russian Petrograd, Peter’s Town, and Nizhny Novgorod, Lower Newtown, and Serbian Beograd, which would be Belgrade in English, for White Fortress, and all those other names with -grad in them.
One last kicker. In Old English, what word did they use for a little kitchen garden or vegetable garden? It didn’t have geard in it. It was the wyrttun: the Wort-Town, the Root-Town! I rather like that, don’t you?
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