I’m rooting about in the dirt, making a general nuisance of myself about the flowers. The chrysanthemums—victims of my plan for transplantation—register distress mildly by bobbing their heads about, while an azalea bush looks on impassively. A flock of impatiens, sitting close by, remains obnoxiously sedate, despite the fact that their colorful spread is interrupted by an astonishingly long earthworm. 
  
There is another side to this picture—the backbreaking task of maintaining the spread of woods between the front of our house and the edge of the lake. For this we need do more than piffle in the well-tilled earth with a graceful hand rake; the thick, poison ivy-entwined brush demands a weed-whacker and the rabidly colonizing pine only bows before the crass might of a chainsaw. 
  
What is it about working outside that so soothes the soul? Does it resonate with the most primitive privileges and duties of man—that order to tend the earth? Or is it something baser, that impulse to tame the wilderness to our hands, by physical force if necessary? Perhaps it is a theatrical desire to harness nature that it might better fulfill the demands of the pathetic fallacy and look well when we are well and ill when we are ill? Or is it nothing more than an ingrained desire to reclaim the lost garden of Genesis? 
  
In a general way, the healthiness of hobbies, of leisure, has long served as an engaging philosophical subject. [One could imagine Aristotle dedicating an evening to contra dancing, all in an effort to keep the gray cells healthy and happy. Plato is perhaps less easy to imagine relaxing; he seems the sort of fellow impossible to dislodge from the pub at closing time, who would talk the ear off the Oldest Inhabitant.] For many, gardening is indeed a hobby, and a healthy one at that. Fresh air, sunlight, and a familiarity with roly-polies must be edifying. Beyond this, there is something essential to gardening that makes it a proper nurturer of both body and soul. 
 
This came to mind one day when I set to removing a vine that was tentatively threatening the integrity of a rosebush. It seemed a simple business—pulling back those straining leafy fingers from grateful branches. The most challenging part of it was the avoidance of thorns. I soon, found, however that there was much more to the problem. Those “fledgling” vines were in fact an unholy offshoot of the vine that had woven deeply under a wide stretch of ground. Moreover, this vine was the selfsame twisting monstrosity that was doing its best to strangle the oak and two pines ten feet off. To remove this fixture was not the work of a moment. 

I was struggling manfully and muttering dark imprecations under my breath (particularly against Andrew Marvell who, I felt, said a lot of nice things about “a green thought in a green shade”, but knew nothing about the arduous labors of a “skillful gard’ner”) when my mother came up, quietly observed for a moment, and then made this profound assessment of my altercation with the viny nemesis: It’s just like sin. 
  
The metaphor deserves some focused attention. Seeing life as a little piece of earth has the advantage of encompassing a wide range of personalities—the sandy desert, the pristine English garden, the rugged lawn. For any of these, the threat of invading weeds remains and the analogy of sin holds strong. 
  
You only see a little plot of the offensive growth. You think removal will be easy—in fact, the impulse to clear things is primarily born of a petty concern for appearances. Few people like to see a rosebush in an advanced stage of strangulation. Then you find that the vines of sin are a much more complicated business. The hidden network of roots is so deep, so intricate, and so interwoven, that you fear you will have to uproot the entire yard to be free of it. And yet, as progress is painfully made, you begin to look about you, and to realize that the reason this little daisy or that patch of grass never would grow was that strength was being sapped and timid roots smothered by the surrounding strength of the pervasive vine. 
  
Reclamation of the infested landscape can involve a wide range of tools—from a backhoe to a set of clippers. Sometimes weed killer does the trick. Other times the only option is rototilling. When a foundation of dramatic and backbreaking labor is laid, a routine of less crippling maintenance can be assumed. It took five of us to clear out the stock of rotten wood my little brothers amassed as a fort ten years ago, and a tractor to help us clear away the rotten stump left by builders three years before that. [Removal of the pile disclosed the hidden summerhouse of a small black snake, with which, being well versed in the appropriate Old Testament passages, we did not converse.] Now we water, weed, and plant as we will.
  
Here our vision must shift to encompass the other and more glorious side of the production: Moral and spiritual growth. [My brother, eager to help me develop this overdone metaphor, suggested that liming be representative of the grace of God, to which I replied, “Wouldn’t that be Miracle Grow?” He rejected this sprinkler-bound notion and began a long homily on the Biblical significance of water and hence of rain.] Indeed, the gradual flourishing of this garden is very like our human flourishing when the full potential for excellence—for beatitude—is embraced. 
 
Such is the life of virtue. Neglected, the land can easily become overgrown once more; still, even in such an unhappy lapse, the traces of reclamation remain, and can be reinvigorated. Our constant labors, sanctified by the Divine touch (here symbolized in the rain and sunlight as well as the Creator’s plan that prompts green growth in the first place), bear sumptuous fruit. 
  
At our home, the most obvious effect is seen in summertime, and goes beyond our bushy, flowery borders (endlessly delightful though they are). With the brush cleared and the vines uprooted, dead pine trees felled and a variegated host of deciduous trees free to dance in the breeze, sunlight streams through the woods, and we can stand on our front porch and admire an acres-wide lake. Both in picturesque and practical terms, it is a pleasing sight, for this lake is a source of many things—geothermal heat for our home, neighbor to our well, an always open bath for our pets. More than enough significance for a lake in central Virginia, one would think, and yet it is something more. 
  
It is not the boundless deep, and thus cannot aspire to be a classical symbol of eternity; but as it is and for what it is, the glistening surface, clear (from this distant vantage point at least) and brilliant in the sunlight or richly dappled in the rain, provides the final image in this belabored metaphor, and a proper backdrop representing the Divine Source, as essential to man as water is to his body, visible now through the flowers, trees, and bushes, happily purged as they are of brambles, weeds, and the sinister vine.