A GARDENER AT THE END OF THE WORLD

An essayist explores how the first year of a global pandemic turned her gardening hobby into an extended reflection on the ways that the spread of food and disease has shaped human history.

Kelley, the author of Foodtopia, opens with a contemplation of the “gorgeous possibility” held by the seed packets she bought in January 2020 for the spring growing season in Maine. Three months later, the author was suddenly plunged into the uncertainties created by the pandemic. Lockdowns and her own cancer-compromised immune system forced Kelley to stay at home. In addition to tending her garden on the grim days that followed each other in formless succession, the author researched past pandemics to understand Covid-19’s effects on a present in which truths—even scientific ones—had become relative. Soon Kelley began meditating on the interconnectedness of seeds and disease. She learned that the viruses that had caused all major plagues throughout history had a penchant for “hitching rides” from human and other animal hosts. So did seeds, which humans exported and imported, as Columbus did when he brought onions and garlic to Hispaniola, some seeds of which returned to Europe on ships infected with the bacteria that would cause the great syphilis epidemic of the late 15th century. Kelley further notes that language itself developed in ways that suggest a kinship between seeds and viruses. By the mid-1800s, for example, the word “germ”—originally derived from germen, the Latin word for “seed” or “sprout”—came to be associated with germ theory, the idea that microorganisms could invade a body, replicate within it, and cause illness. Interweaving elegantly pastoral descriptions of a far-flung northern landscape haunted by climate change, Kelley transforms musings about a gardening hobby into a rich—and richly instructive—historical journey through human history.

An eloquent and thought-provoking narrative.