The Pedantic OrganicWhy Prince Charles and Al Gore make saving the Earth no fun.
Posted Friday, Sept. 28, 2007, at 7:24 AM ET
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StumbleUponThere's also useful stuff for less regally oriented gardeners. Following the prince's methods, I'm getting a tarp to put over my finished compost. The co-authors explain that nitrogen is the element most easily leached out by winter rains. And, like the prince's minions, come early spring I will spread the compost only an inch deep.
The prince and his staff do have to spray the beehives, a regulation of the Department of Food and Rural Affairs, so the honey can't be sold as organic. And his boxwoods have some distressing browning, a blight that gets trimmed off.
There's some deep thinking expressed in some of those hedges—thinking that reminds the reader of Al Gore's characteristic quirky moments. "Platonic (and a selection of Archimedean) Solids are replicated in topiarized yew," we are told. "These Solids are symmetrical mathematical shapes in which all sides are equal, all angles are the same and all faces are identical" (Page 101). This has to be a bitch to prune, even if you were allowed to use a fuel-consuming power hedge trimmer.
There's a much, much longer explanation of the Sacred Geometry in an appendix on which the prince insisted. It reminded me of the diagrams Gore drew as written up in Nicholas Lemann's 2000 New Yorker profile. They were completely incomprehensible.
These two Earth-savers can come close to goofy in their fascination with ideas. Who remembers the metaphor dinners? As vice president, Gore held three discussions at his residence, with thinkers including Carl Sagan and Deborah Tannen, to examine a supposedly vexing problem—that scientific metaphors were not entering the language sufficiently speedily. It didn't seem like that big a problem, if indeed it was true. Tipper Gore excused herself to go to Rwanda.
There's something of the mystic in both men, which can lead to their being cruelly lampooned in the press. " 'Stewardship' and 'husbandry,' " Prince Charles writes, "may be considered old-fashioned words, but they encapsulate precisely that sense of continuity of management that is in harmony with the perpetual natural laws and rhythms of the Universe of which we are an integral part."
The musing and preaching would be OK, and not worth commenting on, if it weren't for the fact that it makes organic gardening sound like something hard and complicated and no fun and above the common person.
In fact, it is astonishing how quickly the gardening public has turned to the organic methods that used to be thought of, quite incorrectly, as weird and complicated. Home gardeners and many farmers were quick to see that it's easier and cheaper not to buy and use pesticides and herbicides. The method boils down to this:
Let the birds eat the bugs.
Let the insects fight it out with each other.
Use compost to enrich the soil.
Since leaving public office, Vice President Gore has shed much of his former wooden self-consciousness. Poor Prince Charles, born rather than elected to public life, can never escape. The problem with either man's earnestness is that it becomes smothering instead of inspiring. You feel you have to sign up for something near religious and painfully solemn. I found myself seized by a brief but intense desire to buy a high-powered car—a car that has to come by plane from Italy and gets six miles per gallon. I saw myself driving around aimlessly, putting the top down and the air conditioning way up.
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