H.L.V. Fletcher’s Garden Riddle at Dusk: Nettles, Wisdom, and the Footprint of Eden

April 13, 2022

Dearest reader,

Today, we enjoy an excerpt from Harry Lutf Verne Fletcher's book of garden gossip called Purest Pleasure.

This delightful anecdote is from his chapter for April, and it includes an exchange with a 70-year-old friend and fellow gardener named Micah.

I had been working in the garden almost as long as the light lasted, and when dusk fell I went down to see Micah.

He had a sore throat and was treating it with boiled Nettles, and we got to talking about them. Everywhere now the young Nettles were growing, their strong new growth making a mat of rich green.

To most people, accustomed to think of them only as weeds, the sight is hateful, but I don't know.

As weeds I do not find them very hard to destroy; as herbs there are less handsome plants. It certainly makes an excellent green vegetable about this time of year, went the tips are young and tender. The Romans are said to have used it like Spinach.

Micah had a riddle to ask me. "What did Adam first plant in the Garden of Eden?"

I tried a number of plants and then gave up. "Well, what was it?"

He grinned triumphantly. "His foot, of course."!

What a delightful answer!

For truly, is this not the truth of all gardening?

Before the hoe or the spade comes the step into the soil.

A garden begins not with seed, but with presence—our willingness to stand upon the earth and belong to it.

So, dearest reader, as April quickens and the nettles return, shall we learn again from Fletcher and Micah?

Are weeds simply wild herbs in the wrong place—or exuberant guests reminding us that nature will not obey our tidy designs?

And when we walk out to our own plots, at dusk perhaps, tired but content, will we remember that first planting—that humble placing of the foot—in our own gardens of Eden?

After all, the nettles do not ask for our admiration, only our attention.

And that, I think, is the purest pleasure of all.