I have been involved with gardening, especially the growing of food, all my life. Both grandfathers had extensive gardens, berry patches, fruit trees—they expected to grow a lot of what they ate. My parents were committed to modern supermarkets, but the inner need to raise food came roaring back in my generation. It is more than need; it is compulsion.
My wife and I moved into a building on the north side of an east-west alley. Between the building and the concrete edge of the alley was a strip of land about three feet deep, piled high with post-construction rubble—concrete chunks, lengths of two by four, rebar, and broken glass, with volunteer trees coming up between and among them. On the south side of the alley was nothing but a parking lot, an underground garage, and full-day sun: a bonanza of sunlight, rarely found in the city. And I could get water to the place from our building. With permission from the alderman, I set to work from the east end, about fifteen feet at a time, clearing the refuse, digging out trees. The soil that was left was awful—sand, pockets of gravel, the likelihood of mysterious toxins, and little fertility or organic material. I had no money for this project, so could not afford to hire a backhoe to dig it all out, or trucks to come in and dump loads of topsoil; I had to work with it, build it up bit by bit, year by year, with kitchen compost, bags of leaves and grass clippings from the neighborhood, coffee grounds from Starbuck’s, buckets of horse manure and bedding from the police stables. Even earthworms had to be collected elsewhere and planted in the dirt. Slowly, it changed into friable, usable soil—not the glorious rich black stuff I was used to from Minnesota and Iowa, but at least living soil. Over the years so much accumulated that I built a retaining well the height of two cinder blocks, to hold it in.
The first crop I planted was raspberries. Starting with two plants, I eventually ended up with a hedge about twenty-five feet long, which I struggle to keep under control, pruning back the old canes each fall, tying back the new canes so the cars and trucks don’t crush them as they drive down the alley. But there were no bees! No pollination. So I planted the next forty-five feet in flowers, including messy, native weedy types that would be mostly likely to attract said bees.
Over a period of years, I established the garden all the way to the street at the west end of the alley. I tried numerous crops: greens, tomatoes, peppers, bush beans, okra, broccoli, the usual suspects. But the neighbors could not keep their hands off my produce, growing right out where they could see and reach it. They stripped the raspberry bushes bare every morning, before I was even out of bed. The situation seemed hopeless, until we moved into a house of our own, with a fenced-in yard, just a block away; I reserved the alley garden for potatoes and onions (which are not intrinsically attractive to thieves), accepted my losses in the raspberries, and planted the other crops in my new, protected back yard.
Building the soil, enabling an environment in which satisfying growth could occur, producing something of deep, necessary worth, was very gratifying for me. I was establishing Chicago Chorale at the same time, and the garden-building profoundly shaped my thinking about the choir. Because I had a background in professional choirs, colleagues assumed I would aim to build a professional choir, and that my principle challenge would be fund-raising. But before I had ever been a paid chorister, I had sung in good choirs that were not paid. I believed in those choirs, what they did for their singers and for their audiences. And for me. In my gardening project I saw a blueprint for Chorale: work with the materials at hand. Build the group, train and rehearse them to perform first-rate repertoire with technique, discipline, and understanding, expect a professional commitment and level of performance from them. As I loved my garden, I loved my choir, built with those who were willing to sing well.
I learned under inspiring conductors along my way. Visionaries who were, themselves, builders and inventors, who ran with the opportunities they were given, and invented opportunities where none seemed to present themselves: Weston Noble, Margaret Hillis, Robert Shaw, Helmuth Rilling. I sought to learn their techniques, to emulate their conducting; I found them to be master gardeners, who built their soil, planted their worms, picked their own potato bugs, pulled their own weeds, wholeheartedly nurtured their gardens from the ground up. That is the most important lesson I learned from all four of them.
