Sensuality in the Garden and the Earthly Sexuality of Corn

It has been pointed out to us several times by several people that James Baldwin, though undoubtedly a great writer, essayist, poet, speaker, commentator and playwright - was not a gardener. He had a garden where he lived in St. Paul-de-Vence and while he most certainly enjoyed and relished in its beauty, he hired a gardener who watered and tended the plants. No where in his writing that I know of has he ever disclosed an ambition to garden or be a gardener. Nonetheless, I have found myself responding to those who have questioned naming an outdoor learning center in honor of James Baldwin that, if he were alive today during this time of unprecidented ecological peril when environmental disaster wreaks havoc especially among the poor and powerless, that he would approve of the James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center and what we are attempting to achieve. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin dwells on an aspect of experience that he found supressed in his day and that I feel is still only emerging in our own. He wrote, “To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.” I think most gardeners would agree that gardening, growing, watering and caring for and nurturing plants is a sensual practice in the way Baldwin describes. Hence my delight and joy in reading about corn in Robin Wall Kimmerer's beautiful and wise book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants: "There is an earthly sexuality to a garden, and most of the students get drawn in to the revelation of fruit. I have them carefully open an ear of corn without disturbing the corn silk that plumes from the end. First the course outer husks are pulled away, then layer after layer of inner leaves, each thinner than the next until the last layer is exposed so thin and tightly pressed to the corn that the shape of the kerels show through it. As we draw aside the last layer, the sweet milky scent of corn rises from the exposed ear, rows upon rows of round yellow kernels. We look closely and follow an individual strand of corn silk. Outside the husk it is brown and curly, but inside it is colorless and crisply succulent, as if filled with water. Each little strand of silk connects a different kernel inside the husk to the world outside. A corncob is an ingenious sort of flower in which the silk is a greatly elongate flower pistil. One end of the silk waves in the breeze to collect pollen, while the other end attaches to the ovary. The silk is the water-filled conduit for sperm released from the pollen grains caught there. The corn sperm swim down the silken tube to the milky-white kernel - the ovary. Only when the corn kernels are so fertilized will they grow plump and yellow. A corncob is the mother of hundreds, as many children as there are kernels, each with potentially a different father. Is it any wonder she is called he Corn Mother?" Braiding Sweetgrass is filled with this kind of poetic description of plants and nature and is a book I would highly recommend to anyone seeking sensuality in nature and in gardens. It also reminds me of the pleasure that I receive from working in the garden, despite the heat, the sun, the sweat; I am happy to be one of James Baldwin's gardeners. And next time you bite into the luxuriously crisp sweetness, remember to enjoy the sensuality of this very generous flower we call corn.

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