Time Out of Mind

Or simply, lunacy.

As a young girl Kate Reid dreamed of working in Formula 1. In 2011, having achieved that dream, she gave it all up to pursue a new dream, to bake the perfect croissant. The result was Lune Croissanterie, which now has stores in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney. As a former aerospace engineer whose job was to make fast cars go faster, it comes as no surprise that there is fair bit of engineering going into these croissants. The magic happens in what they call The Cube, a climate-controlled glass box that leaves nothing to chance, allowing the perfect croissant to be made over and over and over again. Such has been the success of Lune that a few years back a New York Times’ headline asked “Is the World’s Best Croissant Made in Australia?”

Over the holiday break I started on a long held ambition; to grow my own food. I held no allusions of growing all my food, of going from supermarket dependent to self-sustaining citizen in one fell swoop. All I wanted to do was nurture something, see it grow and then eat it.

Results have been mixed. The lady at the nursery told me it’s impossible to kill coriander. I say “wanna bet?” That only took a week. The strawberry developed seven flowers, five of which became actual strawberries, four of which were attacked and maimed by unknown assailants. My wife ate the remaining strawberry. When I eagerly asked her what it tasted like she raised a pair of sad eyes then walked inside.

The Jalapeno plant has thus far borne two chillis. Both were a vibrant red, denoting heat and fire, but upon tasting I found that neither would move the Scoville Scale. They were fizzers when I wanted poppers. The lettuce and rocket looked full of flavour, but only the cabbage moths could tell you exactly what that flavour was.

Of the rest, the rosemary is in ICU and the chives a critical but stable condition. Only the basil, parsley and sage appear to be doing well, though not in any harvestable quantity.

Tree clocks have come into my life. The man behind the idea is experimental philosopher, artist and writer Jonathon Keats. The clocks are calibrated to measure time as experienced by trees, bristlecone pines to be exact. Keat’s clocks are real but, pleasingly, they are completely useless for organising human activity such as meetings and zoom calls. The value of the clocks is in their ability to prompt philosophical thought. What if we measured time in the same way that trees measure time?

Tree growth responds to a variety of environmental factors. By tying timekeeping to trees, we would also align ourselves and our lives to those same environmental factors. When trees grow faster, time will move faster, when their growth slows, time slows. Tree clocks would allow us to sync our lives with the environment in which we live, and serve to remind us that we are but one component of a vast, interconnected ecosystem.

It is a radical reinterpretation of time. Western civilisation has used time, and timekeeping, not to align our existence with nature, but as a weapon with which to subdue nature, as an attempt to dominate nature, to impose order, if not on a chaotic system, then upon a system which we lack the knowledge to understand.

We make our plans days, months and years in advance, fooling ourselves into an ephemeral certainty through the use of arbitrary hours and days and weeks. And none of these measures of time consider the timekeeping of the organisms with which we share the world.

This is most clear when we consider the production of our food, which is characterised by a need to produce more, faster. We intensively farm everything from salmon to chickens to tomatoes, ignoring their natural life cycles. We pump soils full of chemicals to make them more fertile, to produce more, quicker. We drain rivers of their water to irrigate cotton fields that cannot wait for the next rains, never considering the fate of the other organisms that are depending on that river flow.

We never count the cost of these short cuts, of these time hacks. And there is always a cost. To us and to those with which we share the planet.

Though adopting ‘tree time’ may seem like a radical concept, aligning our sense of time keeping, and our activities, with other organisms is one that is already employed by more developed creatures. As Keats writes, “Migratory birds must coordinate their yearly flights based on the expected availability of nutrients along routes that are thousands of miles long. The insects they devour must coordinate the end of their pupation to coincide with the budding of plants they eat. The needs of different species are different but co-dependent. And all of these processes take time, meaning that decisions must be made without direct knowledge of what other creatures have decided.”

For centuries, humans interacted with the world in this way. Time was kept and marked through observation of the world around us. The arrival of a migrating whale or bird, the blooming of flower, the falling of frost, were all signs that time had passed, and it was time to either sow, hunt, harvest or store.

This again from Keats, quoting Pliny the Elder, on the interplay between nature and time “…the little bee comes forth and announces that the bean is flowering, and the bean begins to flower to tempt her out. We will also give another sign of cold weather being ended: when you see the mulberry budding, after that you need not fear damage from cold.”

This knowledge is retained and used in indigenous cultures, and it still resides inside of us. It may go some way to explaining the love that some people have for gardening. By taking our timekeeping cues from the environment around us we integrate our lives with a wider world, we depend on it, are more grateful for it and are more careful with it.

Such a promising start…

I see in Lune Croissanterie the embodiment of what is wrong with food production more widely. With their engineered climate-controlled box, they are decoupling food production from the environment, ensuring that no environmental factors can impact upon their croissant making. The objective of course, is to replicate their croissanty perfection over and over and over again for commercial gain.

So much of our food production is like that. An effort to submit the environment to our will, to produce and harvest not what the land gives us but what we can drag from it by over-engineered force. But at what cost?

My little garden, by so determinedly dying on me, has provided me with pretty explicit feedback. My timing means nothing if it does not align with the timing of the garden and the environment it exists within. I must change if the garden is to grow and thrive. I must not cut myself off from the environment but open myself up to its rhythms and movements.

I must plant things when they need to be planted. I must water them when they need water, not when I have time between meetings. To have a successful garden, I must set my watch to the trees, I must cede my timekeeping to the world around me.

The food I produce from my little garden will not be consistent in either size or taste or quantity, but it will reflect the world I live in, that I am a part of, and it will be perfect.