The Agriculture of the Garden of Eden

I

THE story of the Garden of Eden has been extensively used by those who would influence human action. But strange to say, one of its most evident lessons appears to have been overlooked. It is for the farmer that the well-known drama has the plainest teaching of all. The race has been subjected to needless toil because the agriculturist has left this part of Scripture entirely to the theologians. Regardless of theological differences we can agree that the agriculture of the Garden was good, because it supported the race comfortably and without labor. What more could it possibly do for mankind?

The inhabitants of Eden plainly lived without toil. They were born to that leisure for which we strive so fiercely in this work-a-day world. So far as the man was concerned, the sting of the expulsion was the fact that, he had to go forth and eat bread in the sweat of his face. Jehovah did not enforce this sentence at hard labor by putting a guard over Adam. Eve was not placed in charge, nor yet the wily serpent. The offender was merely driven forth from the Garden that was full of trees. The trees had made it Paradise. Every tree that was pleasant to the sight, and good for food was there. The inhabitants walked about in the comfortable shade and ate. When thirst arose, there were the juices of fruits and palm wine.

The spontaneous products of the Garden even supplied the first demand for clothes. On that bitter day of expulsion these erstwhile happy harvesters of tree-crops were driven forth from this rich and fruitful shade, driven to the fields to eat the herb of the field and to win bread by the sweat of their faces.

Since we are all more or less lazy, and only some of us are religious, it is forsooth amazing that our efforts at being restored to Paradise have been limited so exclusively to the domain of religion. This is the more peculiar because the religion has to be taken on faith, while the agriculture of Paradise could be seen and felt, and tasted, and that without labor. Even yet no one has striven to restore it for the relief of a weary world. It is high time the husbandman took up his Scripture.

Eden is a Babylonian tale, and Babylonia is a land of dates. It was so, long, long before Abraham went up toward Palestine out of Ur of the Chaldees. At a time which was to him mythological, the date tree had become sacred to his Semitic ancestors along the Euphrates. It is from this Babylonia that we now receive each autumn our argosies of dates wherewith to regale ourselves at Christmas time. To us they are sweetmeats, but to the dwellers in the land of dates they are a great staple of life.

Eden was in this land of date trees, and a visit to a date-growing oasis makes clear the whole story of the Garden and the expulsion. How terrible was the expulsion! Within was shade, of which the scriptural writers speak so often and so appreciatively, because they had it so little in their hot and arid landscape. Without, the shimmering heat, the withering sun, beating down almost like fire upon the dry and harvestless earth, with the white glare that arises from the bare and waterless soil. Into this they were driven to eat the herb of the field, which indeed they could not get without much sweat in their faces. Within the oasis was shade and water; food was there; and life without labor, or at least with little labor. It is thus to-day; thus has it been these many thousands of years. The fashioner of that allegory of old used the material at hand. Every listener in the group squatting about the first narrator of the fall and expulsion of man had been burned by that desert glare, soot bed by the shade of the fruitful tree, fed by its abundant crop — and shaken by fear of expulsion by the raider.

No episode in all the history of the land was so common as the raid of the nomads. From the treeless expanses they swooped down upon the dwellers in date gardens and drove them forth. The roving nomad was always strong in attack, the dweller in the garden was always easy prey. One cannot rightly guess the extent of the icons during which human history in Southwest Asia consisted of one long and essentially unvaried series of captures and possessions of the oasis gardens, these captures being followed by yet other captures and expulsions at the hand of other hungry victors. Hagars and Ishmaels without number, accompanied at times by equally hopeless men, had gone forth to wander, to dig, or to perish. This picture was in the legends, if not in the memory, of every household. The maker of the story of Eden used the material at hand. No other land could then or can yet rival the oasis in this picture it gives of the easy life and the burning contrast of expulsion.

II

This easy living in the oasis is made possible because of the workings of that wonderful engine of production — the date tree. That is the agricultural lesson from Eden — that we should go back a bit toward Paradise and learn to use trees, which are Nature’s greatest engines of food-production. For a few thousand years we have taken the expulsion and curse too literally, and have been living as the fallen Adam was told to — by digging and sweating and growing the herbs of the field. Trees should be made to work for us as they do for the Semite. Little do we of the West appreciate the potency, the almost automatic potency, of these botanic engines. No other type of agriculture produces food so easily.

Now, as for the last five or ten thousand seasons, the date-tree owner begins his year’s work in the springtime by climbing his tall trees to fertilize their blossoms. The ascent is easy because of the natural steps furnished by the notchings left by the stubs of the leaves of past years. The blossoms of the fruitful female palm are fertilized by a dust of pollen shaken from a sprig of male flowers in the hand of the husbandman. This economical device permits a very small proportion of male trees to suffice and the garden can be filled to crowding with the fecund female trees. Once the blooms are fertilized, little more is done for the tree but watering at rather frequent intervals, and this is often a light task, the mere diversion of a stream. Many of the palms are cultivated only one year in three, but with this small labor they are heavy yielders. The open feathery palm leaves permit much light to filter through, so that oranges, figs, and apricots grow beneath the palms, and garden vegetables can grow among these lesser fruit trees. The vegetables pay the cost, the rest is profit, and the high values are explained.

Thus the date garden leads all other kinds of agriculture in the amount of food produced, and this tree merits the title of King of Crops on the purely civil-service basis of leadership in performance. Small wonder that the prehistoric Semite called it sacred. Pound for pound, the date is as nutritious as bread, and when the harvest is weighed, it is threeto twenty-fold that of wheat. After a score of years or less, the best wheat lands are exhausted by continuous production; but we know that certain oases have yielded dates regularly since they were visited and described by Roman writers a score of centuries ago. They are to-day so prized that the Arab owner will refuse five thousand dollars in gold for an acre of good date garden. Its yield warrants the valuation. In May the oases housetops beside the date garden are covered with drying apricots; in July and again in September the figs are drying; in late autumn comes the great event of the year, the date harvest.

The first thing that self-respecting Arab families do is to fill goat-skins with dates packed solid, and store away enough of this staple article of diet to last until the next harvest. The harvests are very certain although of course they fluctuate in amount. The surplus dates are sold to caravan traders, who bring barley for the coarse loaf, animals for meat, and manufactures from over the sea. As the necessary vegetable gardens and other fruit trees cover but a fraction of the space, much of the palm area grows up in grass, which is pulled out and carried in bunches to feed the donkeys, and the cows and goats that furnish the milk-supply. Since the house of sun-dried bricks is small, and keeping it clean is no necessity, the secluded and unlettered woman has plenty of time to run the ancient spinning-wheel, and hand-loom. Her exercise she gets by carrying heavy water-jars from the spring or well at twilight. Such is the life of the oasis, unchanged these many thousand years since some inventive mind shaped from it the story of Adam and Eve.

III

I would not call the American people to go and live this life of the Arab in his oasis, but we can well and profitably ponder this pregnant fact. If the Arab had to cut down his trees and live by the crops we grow, — the herbs of the field, — famine would sweep the oases. By sheer starvation the population would shrink two thirds, four fifths, or possibly to an even greater extent. It is the tree as a source of support for mankind that I would emphasize.

There will be much food produced if we properly plant all our date territory down in Arizona at the mouth of the American Euphrates. We are already making a good start in that direction, but the lesson for America is far wider than dates, good and nutritious though they are. The date is not the only work tree of the Orient, There are many of them. So great is their service to man that the definition of a garden in Syria is a place where trees are grown, as was the Garden of Eden. The Syrian garden is full of trees, — walnut , almond, olive, carob, fig, apple, peach, pear, cherry, apricot, orange, pomegranate, and mulberry. Beneath and between the trees the vegetables and grains are grown.

The trees in this Syrian garden are an important and practically necessary part of the nutrition of the people. Combined with grain in the form of coarse bread, the tree-products make a balanced and wholesome ration. For large elements of the population, at least one meal a day is commonly composed of bread and walnuts. The walnut is rich in both protein and fat, so that this combination virtually duplicates in nutrition our occidental sandwich of bread, butter, and meat. The oil to which the scriptural writers so lovingly referred is still important in that land, and the olive tree that produces it is almost as useful to the Syrian as the cow is to the American. The cow gives butter and drink, and the olive tree gives butter and food. When the workman on the Mediterranean goes from home for a day’s labor, he often takes a pocketful of olives and a piece of bread for his lunch. Remove butter, breakfast bacon, and fat meat from our vocabulary, put olive oil in their place, and we shall begin to think the thoughts of Mediterranean cooks. Once cooks and palates are educated, the blood does not know the difference between the rich globules of fat that come to it. It is fat that the human system wants, and it makes no final difference whether it comes from butter, bacon, lard, olive, cocoanut, goose, or bear. Fat is fat, once it is in our blood. The source from which we shall get this fundamental of nutrition depends in part upon our bringing-up, but eventually our getting it depends upon the ease of winning it from our environment. From the standpoint of wholesomeness and digestibility, olive oil ranks so high that it is often prescribed for infants and invalids by American physicians.

Wherewithal shall we be fatted? The Syrian with the olive trees in the garden (which he has) rather than with cows in the lush pasture (which he has not) is all unintentionally pointing to us the way out of one of our new difficulties. The price of butter mounteth higher and yet higher, and we groan, but groans are not generally recognized in economic circles as good pricereducers. The truth is we have had cheap lard, cheap butter, and cheap bacon because we had cheap land for the beasts to live on, — cheap and plenty. The Federal government has been giving it away for a century, but for twenty years there has been little more than agricultural remnants to give, and the older lands are somewhat impoverished. Hence land and its products are now rising in price, and there does not seem to be much comfort in sight unless we change our methods. Prices suggest the coming change. Already good olive oil from across the sea is cheaper than butter in the towns and cities of our Atlantic seaboard. There is the vindication of the Syrian gardener. His gray-green olive trees with their hoary trunks centuries old are more efficient fat-makers than our stables of cows. If we would supply ourselves cheaply, we too must turn from the beast to the tree.

This change may be important for the development of the higher life of the race. The mind and spirit of man must surely rest under a handicap if he is bound by the slavery of attending upon the demands of dairy cattle. Morning and evening he must minister unto them, and also in between times. There is no escape on the Sabbath, or Christmas, or the Fourth of July, or even on Labor Day — day in and day out those beasts demand their souldeadening service. It is worse than the curse that was laid upon Adam when he was sent forth to dig the earth and eat the herb of the fields in the sweat of his face. How different with the olive-dresser! His trees require care to be sure, but there are whole weeks and months when they shift for themselves. The harvest is busy and long, but when it is over, there is the chance for rest, vacation, and the inviting of soul.

But whatever may be the advantage of occasional respite from labor, it can scarcely be said that the Syrian keeps olive trees rather than cows for that reason. He has been driven to it by his environment. The cow with her appetite for grass requires level meadows and rich pastures. The Syrian has neither. The strong point of his country is dry rocky hills, and it is upon this forbidding land that he plants his olives to get his butter by the aid of this remarkable tree stuck in the most unpromising corners of his garden. The poor cow would perish with the burning of her pastures, for the Syrian summer is one unmitigated drought from spring until autumn. The grass withers and assumes the dead brown of our deepest winter. Dust characterizes the parched landscape, but under it all, the olive, with its leaf, hairy on one side and glazed on the other, laughs at drought and brings its fat fruit through to autumn harvest. If the men in the Scripture lands have by the poverty of their environment been forced to get better devices than we now possess, may we not, by the application of our brains, become their copyists and apply at home the agricultural as well as spiritual lessons they have taught us?

IV

The lesson in brief is that crop-yielding trees may serve fundamental needs of great importance and make easier our hold upon life. We are newcomers on this continent. As Man’s history goes, we came here but yesterday, and we are still st rangers to the land and its best uses. We found a land of trees which we have destroyed in order to apply and produce the crops we brought rather than those that were best suited to the land and to our present needs.

In many places we are busily trying to grow the quickest yielding plants rather than those that yield best both for man and for the land. The wheat crop often yields less than would have been produced by some good tree crop, and a monument of misplaced wheat is often the gashed and gullied hillside that results. This is the most awful of all our wasteful sins because it is the most irreparable of our destructions. Fortunately this remorseless destruction may be avoided if we attack the problem with a scientific spirit, a broad view, and the willingness to do constructive things.

The trouble is that we have not taken tree crops seriously. In the autumn we go forth with our children and gather a few nuts as a kind of an outing, but it is little more important in our eyes than the collecting of pretty pebbles, and it has no appreciable influence on the family budget or the family’s nutrition. We pay some rather high prices at times for fruits, and they are tree crops, it is true, but what do they amount to from the nutritive standpoint in comparison to the trees of the Syrian garden? Our apples, peaches, pears, and grapes, our grapefruit, oranges, and lemons, are delightful and wholesome and needed, but they meet no major nutritive need. These needs of the body are protein for tissue, fat and carbohydrates for energy. Except for a small amount of sugar (and sugar is already one of the cheapest of our foods), our popular fruits may properly be compared to a refreshing drink or a succulent salad. The Syrian garden of trees produces major foods. The almond is high in protein, the great factor in meat. The walnut is high in both protein and fat; the oil of the olive is more nutritious than butter and far more nutritious than any flesh of animals. The fig is a real food, containing some protein and much carbo-hydrate, and a greater amount of nutriment per pound than bread.

In many parts of the Mediterranean basin, millions of people instinctively recognize the fact that the chestnut is high in starch, thus permitting it to become the substitute that it is for bread and for the potato. Even the acorn, with an analysis surprisingly like that of wheat, is used for food to some extent by many tens of thousands.

We need to change our attitude toward the trees as food-producers. We should broaden their gift from the class of salads and frills of nutrition, and make it the pièce de résistance, a substitute for some of the staples we find it so increasingly difficult to buy. Perhaps some one may be inclined to say that we are already using nuts as a meat substitute. We are. We already appreciate them so highly that they have risen to unreasonably high prices for which there is no excuse in the cost of production except for the time-element involved. We need many more of them. Meanwhile, all the money that we spend for nuts in a year in this country would not buy a pound of good beefsteak for each of us. In that connection we should not lose sight, of the fact that the pound of beefsteak is less nutritious than a pound of any of several kinds of nuts.

The Syrian with his garden of trees (like Eden) does not forget the beast. The prodigal son did eat the husks the swine fed on. Those husks were the sugary pods of the carob bean, a standard article of animal food in Mediterranean lands from that day to the present. At this very moment the rich green and bean-laden carob tree may be seen from Palestine to Portugal, from the edge of the Sahara to Syria and the Riviera. It occupies the arid and rocky corners which are not fit for other crops, and the beans sell for a cent a pound in competition with corn, for which they are a substitute in almost all its uses.

Mr. O. F. Cook, an economic botanist, has recently announced that agriculture in the Mediterranean basin began with tree crops like Eden, rather than with the herbs that predominated after the expulsion. About twenty of these crops are yet of importance, and the economic service that tree crops can render is well shown by the natives of northern Algeria. The ancient Berbers who still live in the mountain territory of Kabylia were never conquered by Roman, Goth, Vandal, Arab, or Turk. They made their first obeisance before the firearms of the French under the Second Empire. Through all these millenniums they have lived in their populous villages perched high on the tops of steep hills. Around them in all directions is a zone of trees, with pasture above, beginning at about three thousand feet, and the oft-conquered open valleys below. Here for unknown ages the Berber has lived among and from his trees. There are four staples of life in Kabylia — dried figs, olives, bread, and meat. For miles and miles and miles there is one unending succession of villages set in this open forest of figs and olives. Here and there the better spots are picked out for grain fields and a few carobs are grown to spice up the donkey’s diet of straw, and make a tidbit for the children (St. John’s bread, we call it). The sheep and goats which pasture beneath the trees furnish an occasional boiled or broiled joint, and the much more important wool for the inclusive flowing robe of Arab style.

A diet, of dried figs, coarse bread, olives, oil, and occasional meat, may seem to us somewhat monotonous, but it has long supported a vigorous race. A recent American agricultural explorer, Mr. Thomas Means, states that the population of this region is twentyfive times as dense where tree crops are the chief dependence as it is where the same people make their living on the same hills by depending upon the grains and grasses — the herbs of the field which have characterized our agriculture since the Fall.

If some one objects to tree crops on the ground that the examples here given are from Old World peoples with lower standards of life than ours, he should at once remember that the same peoples in the same countries live no better, and if anything not so well, when they try our type of agriculture. Nor is there any reason to think that tree crops would not aid effectively in maintaining our high standard of life.

There is small reason to doubt that the proper development of tree crops would greatly enrich and cheapen the food-supply of the American people and their domestic animals. The chief trouble seems to be that we have not thought about it. Most of the crop trees of value in Europe have been introduced into this country, such as the olive, fig, date, the acorn and cork oak, the walnut, pistache, and almond. Our native trees, such as the pecan, shagbark, mulberry, honey-locust, mesquite, and persimmon, offer great promise if properly selected, propagated, improved by plant-breeding, and tested by experiment. All this requires scientific work.

Now that we have spent, a quarter of a century developing the equipment for the promotion of agricultural science, the time has probably come when attention can be turned in part from the herb of the field to the more productive tree that has long made the Oriental garden so productive.