Paul A. Lee - There Is a Garden in the Mind: A Memoir of Alan Chadwick and the Organic Movement in California

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Copyright 2013 by Paul A. Lee. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief reviews, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by
North Atlantic Books
P.O. Box 12327
Berkeley, California 94712

Cover design and photography scans by Dennis Letbetter
Cover photo by Elizabeth Kennard

There Is a Garden in the Mind: A Memoir of Alan Chadwick and the Organic Movement in California is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.

North Atlantic Books publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Lee, Paul A.
There is a garden in the mind : a memoir of Alan Chadwick and the organic movement in California / Paul A. Lee.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-1-58394-577-3
1. Chadwick, Alan, 1909-1980. 2. GardenersEnglandBiography. 3. GardenersCaliforniaBiography. 4. Organic gardeningCalifornia. 5. Organic farming. I. Title.
SB453.5.L44 2012
635.987092dc23
[B]

2012022634

v3.1

for Charlene

gardening partner for life

Unless indicated, photographs are of Alan Chadwick.

In the UCSC garden, around 1967 frontispiece

Nicolas Poussin, Et in Arcadia Ego (The Arcadian Shepherds)

Broadside for the Chadwick Garden, the Greenwood Press, 1972

Broadside on Goethes Italian Journey, the Greenwood Press, 1987

Paul Lee and his daughter, Jessica, on a walk to look for a garden site, 1967

The Chadwick coat of arms

The Chadwick plate

Chadwicks publicity photo as a professional actor

Double-digging in the UCSC garden, 1970

At UCSC, 1971

Reading Gary Snyders Smokey the Bear Sutra, Cowell College courtyard, UCSC

With an apprentice in the Chadwick Garden, 1971

Amidst the delphiniums and hollyhocks, 1971

Giving a lecture to UCSC students, around 1971

Chadwick on his Raleigh bike, UCSC, 1972

Chadwicks car

With apprentices Steve Kaffka and Steven Decatur, around 1970

Apprentices at lunch at the Garden Chalet, UCSC, 1970

Do you see these hands ?

With Francis Edmunds, principal of Emerson College, England, around 1970

A Chadwick lecture in the Quarry, UCSC, 1970

With Josephine Stauffacher, 1972

Talking to an apprentice, around 1972

Richard Wilson, 1973

With Richard Wilson and Gov. Ronald Reagan, 1974

With Richard Wilson, Page Smith, and Paul Lee, 1974

Poster for the United States School Garden Army, 1918

Broadside for the Land Reform Conference, the Greenwood Press, 1975

At East Harmony, West Virginia, around 1979

Broadside in honor of Alan Chadwick, the Greenwood Press, 1980

William Shakespeare, sonnet 15, broadside by the Greenwood Press, 2002

Broadside by Jim Robertson, Yolla Bolly Press, Covelo, California, 1980

and wear their brave state out of memory

Alan Chadwick genealogy

Alan Chadwicks garden is a garden in the mind as much as it is of the soil, and like all genuinely inspired creations it has the power to stir us to new dreams, to a new vision of what man and nature can do, together.

Page Smith

The vision that Alan Chadwick transmitted so freely and generously, tantamount to an economy of gift, has inspired and sustained me over the last four decades while I have worked on this book. Alan Chadwick planted a garden in my mind that has taken root and blossomed like the heritage roses he so loved. One of his favoritesMadam Carrirewhich we planted in his memory, is in bloom in my garden right now.

This book is a memoir of my experience as the founder of the Chadwick Garden at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the part I played in the subsequent gardens developed by Alan Chadwick at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center; Saratoga; Covelo; and New Harmony, West Virginia.

I concentrate on the story of the origins of the Chadwick Garden at the University of California, and then what it was like to work with Alan over the course of his gardening career. It is my story about what I have learned from this remarkable adventure. I have learned a lot since its inception over forty years ago, in 1967.

It is not a biography of Alan per se, even though I found out about Alans past from contact with relatives while writing this book. I leave the biography and a more concentrated appraisal of Alans ideas and methodshis French intensive and biodynamic systemfor someone else.

One of the reasons it has taken so long to organize my thoughts in print is the intellectual and scholarly construction the garden inspired me to work out after it opened up for me: what I came to appreciate as the deepest split in our culturethe physicalist/vitalist conflict, a scholarly retrieval in the philosophy of science. Physicalism stands for the ideology of positivist/reductionist scientism, and vitalism for the beleaguered and assumedly insupportable defense of the integrity of organic nature. This line of thought became so elaborated in my pursuit of it, nothing less than a critique of Western culture, taking me back to Galileo and what has been called the mathematization of nature, that I had a hard time attaching it to the story of a three- or four-acre garden plot. I was worried that it intruded on the story of the founding of the Chadwick Garden and the other gardens that followed, so I reduced the philosophical pursuit to a minimum; the gardens that Chadwick developed and the garden in my mind that developed as a response, hopefully, will complement one another in this telling without too much scholarly overload.

The roots of the organic movement in Chadwicks work began in Santa Cruz, at the University of California, in 1967, and ended with his death, in 1980, at the Zen Buddhist farm at Green Gulch, Muir Beach, California, where he had begun a production garden some years before and where he returned to die. The garden in my mind is a long excursus on what I have learned from my association with Chadwick and his gardens, and the split in the culture: industrial technocracy against organic nature, accounting for the current environmental crisis. This conflict was revealed to me when the idea of an organic garden was viewed negatively by some of the scientists on the campus when we started in the late 1960s. Aside from thinking an organic garden was a hippie plot to further embarrass them, they thought that organic was the exclusive property of organic chemistry. Organic, in this case, is equated with artificial synthesis; organic nature was reduced to the realm of the inorganic after it became possible to artificially synthesize anything organic from inorganic sources, once the chemistry is known. After all, as they say, chemicals are chemicals. That, for me, was the great eye-opener.