Can man live by garden centers alone?
That question was implicit in one aspect of the public-health response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which, five years ago, had already begun its march to mow down Americans’ civil liberties and personal freedoms.
Half a decade ago—so long ago, so strangely fresh in memory—workers, students, worshipers, and pretty much everybody else whose post was deemed “nonessential” were instructed to cocoon themselves within their homes. As public health officials and the elected officials who putatively worked for them saw it, the population was akin to a juvenile delinquent who, upon getting in trouble with the teacher, is sent home to Mom with a suspension.
In addition to those who were restricted from their place of business, education, or worship, countless others were prohibited from the pleasures of everyday existence. In Ohio, where I make my home, a “stay-at-home” order from April 2020 not only forbade most gatherings numbering more than 10 persons but specifically shut down the operation of “all places of public amusement,” a litany that included movie theaters, theme parks, aquariums, zoos, museums, and, perhaps most ominously, funplexes. (I confess that I do not know what a “funplex” is, but if the government is outlawing it, I am in favor of its existence.) In the same order, restaurants were deemed “essential,” but in a qualification that is only comic in hindsight, the preparation and service of food had to be intended for “consumption off-premises”—resulting in an era defined by expensive meals that were boxed-up and unappetizingly “steamed” while being transported from the restaurant in question to their consumers’ home.
At least in my state, though, garden centers were among the lucky few entities given the nod to keep their doors open—or, as the case may be, their gates open.
No, we could not see a movie, attend a symphony concert, or dine in public with friends and family, but we could make purchases in furtherance of refreshing our flower bed or sprucing up our hedge—as though gardening, of all things, was somehow a compensation for the indefinite adjournment of modern civilization.
Somewhat to my chagrin, I can recall ambling through my local garden center, which, owing to the novelty of its fully operational status, seemed to be teeming with bored people in the spring and summer of 2020. This distressed me not because I was concerned about catching Covid—I was, even then, certain that all of us would eventually come down with the flu-like ailment—but because the garden center’s popularity suggested to me the ease with which people had been shepherded into an economic activity not of their choosing. Undoubtedly there were some bona-fide green thumbs milling among the arborvitae and maple trees, but there were surely many who were shopping at the garden center because it was open—and, like sufferers of Stockholm syndrome, we were glad for it.
In the public health apparatus that sprang up at the time of the pandemic, garden centers functioned as something like the opium of the masses: they were allowed to operate to appease a public that might have grown weary of not being able to go to school, to work, to a movie, to a zoo—whatever. But to paraphrase what Sir Thomas More said to Richard Rich in Robert Bolt’s great play (and movie), A Man for All Seasons: “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world—but for a garden center?”
Even more to my chagrin, I contributed to the charade that summer by ordering a truckload of plantings for my yard: three pear trees and four crabapple trees, if I recall correctly. Yet I could not fully enjoy these additions since my yard essentially died that summer: The water company in our area had requested that customers limit their water usage due to the hot temperatures. (More bureaucratic overreach!) As it turned out, I had planted some handsome trees in a barren yard that came to be infested by something called sod webworms. By the time this happened, Home Depot again permitted in-person shoppers in its stores, but the gentleman who counseled me on the state of my yard donned a mask—and so, to my shame, did I. It was that kind of year.
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Even the garden center, once a kind of mirage of freedom amid the striking lack of freedom that had overtaken the nation in 2020, did not remain free of signs of the mass hysteria over the contagion. At Christmastime, when I went to this same garden center to buy some wreaths, seemingly every customer and employee was masked. It was then that it first occurred to me that some of these maskers might even relish their face coverings to buffer them against the cold—a bleak normalization of masking.
My pandemic-era gardening, then, was a notable failure—and, to the extent that I partook in a regime that, through its lockdowns, had reduced all of society to a garden center, something to look back upon with real regret.
I admit I know next to nothing about how to properly care for a lawn, but since that’s the case, the next time the government imposes respiratory virus-induced tyranny, please don’t make me spend all my time at a garden center.
