Lecture by Alan Chadwick in New Market, Virginia, 1979
Lecture 8: Fertility, Part 1
An Introduction to Alan Chadwick's Lectures and a Glossary of Terms
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Quotes from Robert Graves, Lindsey Robb. Fertility is limitless, but cautions are necessary. Fertility is a marriage and a synergy of atmosphere and earth that deserves our reverence. Importance of technique, which becomes invisible if obeyed absolutely. Cultivation, stratification, fertilization, all combine to create fertility. Working in harmony with the elements. (10:29)
Full Text of this Lecture:
New Market, Virginia, 1979 Lecture 8
Fertility, Part 1
Fertility
Robert Graves in quotation:
“The decline of true taste for food is the beginning of a decline in a national culture as a whole. When people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose their personality and become the instruments of other people’s wills.”
And Lindsey Robb in quoting, Longius Sitius
“We have lost that essential unity with the soil. The break in this relationship is first indicated in the disregard for spiritual values, and sense of obligation and obedience to the creative powers of the universe.”
In contrast, On Perceiving the Violet
“…That the re-creation of the mind, which is taken thereby, cannot be but very good and honest. For they admonish and stir up a man to do that which is comely and honest. For through their beauty, color and exquisite form do bring remembrance of honesty, comeliness and all kind of virtues. So it would be unseemly and impossible, even though the observer were a criminal, to be able to look upon this and yet remain defiled.”
Fertility has no limits. It is a gift. And it is an endless elevé or reverse. But remember that the more fertile, the more elevé we introduce, the more danger and susceptible to elements and error. It requires guarding as it becomes gifted in creation. For a moment, I’m going to talk practically again. Fertility, altogether in the whole our lives connected with the horticulture, connected with the garden, connected with our art, with our craft is, of course, a marriage.
Now, you must perceive that when we dealt and looked a little into the cosmic, there were enormous keys there, and one in particular. That so much of the atmospheres, the gifts that we discover, receive and accept are by a form of marriage, and that there is a synergist in this always. And that they are the two energies: the energy of creation, and the energy of the recipient, which is always obedient to the leadership. And that you must regard fertility then as one of these energies of leadership and that you accept it with an obedience and reverence and obey its techniques, obey its requirements in order to bring it about, in order to make it elevé, for it is not static. It will increase all the time and can increase, as you comprehend, equally by miracle, instantaneously.
Therefore, when we spoke of the sun and the earth and this marriage that creates atmosphere, by which we say warmth and light, here you have a continuation of this performance, but multitudinous. The fertility is coming out of the energy of that marriage of atmosphere. And it is part of the destiny of humanity in particular, as the director of the orchestra, as a gardener or a farmer or an “oikos-nomialist” to invect this and create the elevé. It is endless, remember, and can go either way, like sedge, into the salt ocean or into the sweet land.
We discussed cultivation, fertilization and propagation in very minimal degree as utter basics. Fertility is the marriage of these, and it is the marriage of all other that comes out of that marriage in the creation of atmosphere. For the moment, I'm focusing somewhat on a conservatoiree of productivity in the garden, the production of garden, not only for the produce for the kitchen but the whole garden, of course.
So I want to bring to observation the utter obedience to technique. If you obey the technique to perfection, that technique will become invisible because it is a craft. And that is the Greek word, technae, technique which it has become. Technae means art, being the creation of God in everything, and craft being the method by which humanity brings it into performance in the visible world, very much the way in which we talk about seed and plants. Therefore, technae is art revealed in this world by craft, and that is the word technique. It combines those. It's a phrase.
Therefore, when we look at the subjects that we have slightly dealt with technically, we have talked about stratifications in these raised beds. We have talked about why it is a raised bed: to get motionibus exposing to revolutionibus. And that you have your drainage, which is one of the first implementations of acquiring revolutionibus. And so you are applying all of these techniques into a marriage which is all working towards the uplift of procedure of fertility. And that you will make stratifications after you have made you cultivations and you will add these fertilizations and stratifications and textures, and the performance of shapes and movements up to the surface of the soil, the skin of the earth, the area of discontinuity where it meets the air. And here you will have produced your plants in a likewise technical manner to produce the utmost fertility in their performance. And now you will either sow the seed or plant the plants in that formative, artistic bed of enormous technical procedure and thought and obedience, and you will plant it so that all the time the elements will be your friends and not your enemies.
[Text transcription 2015 by M. Crawford and G. Haynes]