INCREDIBLE LUNATIC OF THE FUTURE

An Appreciation of the Life and Alchemical Horticulture of Alan Chadwick

We are the living links in a life force that moves and plays around and through us, binding the deepest soils with the farthest stars. 

- Chadwick

Alan Chadwick was born into the 'Old World' of British aristocracy on July 27th 1909 in the town of St Leonards-by-the-Sea. On that day, the Sun and Venus were shining in the proud sign of Leo, the Moon was in mystical Scorpio, Mercury in contemplative Cancer, the malefics Mars and Saturn were in tempestuous Aries, and philosophical Jupiter was in the earthy and practical Virgo. Out of this configuration, a strange and unpredictable fate awaited him. He was destined to become, as the author of Small is Beautiful E.M. Schumacher once called him "the greatest horticulturalist of the twentieth century", a seminal pioneer of American modern organic gardening, an inspiration of what became known as 'California Cuisine' and an exponent of an extraordinary system of "horticultural alchemy" far ahead of its time. 

* * * 

Alan was the oldest son of an illustrious and ancient family with a heritage going back to at least the 1300s. It was a Victorian world of privilege and tradition largely sheltered from the upheavals of modernity. He spent his childhood on the family's large rural estate consisting of manor, farmland, copses and formal gardens. His mother, Elizabeth, however, was an urbane and creative woman with wide interests extending beyond their life of rural comfort. She moved in a circle of intellectuals and artists. She also had deep spiritual inclinations and, like other progressive women of her time, became a member of the Theosophical Society and then, when a split occurred in the Society in 1913, the Anthroposophical Society under the leadership and inspiration of the Austrian philosopher and pedagogue Rudolf Steiner, whom she came to know personally. When Steiner went to England to teach and give lectures, she enlisted him as a personal tutor for her son. This was to be a decisive event in Alan's life. Towards the end of his days he would say that "Steiner planted seeds in me that are germinating still..." The encounter was only brief. It is said that Steiner was "too intense" for him. He never considered himself a devotee of Steiner, but Steiner's influence was nevertheless decisive. Chadwick once said, "I am not a follower of Steiner. I am a child of Steiner". He saw himself and his work as a true and faithful development of Steiner's spirit, and in particular of Steiner's "biodynamic" methods of farming.

It was through Steiner's tuition, too, that the young Chadwick developed a deep interest in literature and theatre. Amongst friends of his mother were such people as T.S. Eliot and George Bernard Shaw. Alan attended public schools in England and Switzerland but was not academically inclined. Tall and athletic, he became a champion skier and ice skater. Also shy, awkward and sensitive, he studied flower painting and watercolour technique as well as classical violin. But the passion that first absorbed him was the theatre. Turning his back on his inheritance, he took to the road and a career as a Shakespearean actor performing with small itinerant theatre companies. It was a career that he subsequently pursued for over thirty years. Gardening was only a side interest in which he found renewal and refreshment, although over the decades he developed a prodigious knowledge of plants and mastered classical horticultural techniques, following such English landscape masters as Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton. Importantly, he also learnt the modern French horticultural method known as 'French intensive gardening' that the French had developed to get them through hard times. This was a method characterized by close plantings to allow for high yields of crops in small areas. Along with Steiner's methods, it was to become a feature of Chadwick's own system that he often called "biodynamic/french intensive".

The outbreak of World War Two brought profound disruption to his charmed life. Although an avowed pacifist and a conscientious objector, he found himself in the British Navy in command of a mine sweeper. Over four years he saw much death and destruction. He described it as a disillusioning experience. "It absolutely capsized my attitude to civilization," he said. By the end of the War "I had nothing left to play, no cards left to play with humanity." By nature he was a socially uncomfortable man. He didn't have a high opinion of human beings and he found the realities of mechanized modernity intolerable. The War hardened his views. At the close of the War he wanted to flee Europe and never return. He headed for South Africa to take a role in a traveling production of 'A Streetcar Named Desire' but even in that his mood was misanthropic. While the rest of the troupe lived in their caravans, Alan would keep to himself, sleeping in a tent pitched far away from the camp. By all accounts, he was a man of broken spirit. He had also injured his back during the War, a calamity for a man who, in his youth, had been so athletic and adventurous. Despairing about the state of the world in the aftermath of the War, he had become a fringe dweller in the strange land of southern Africa.

In was in South Africa, however, that he met a woman who would change his life. Few people ever became close to Alan: he was that odd combination, a performer and a loner. She became his inspiration and his muse. Their relationship was Platonic, but they gave each other comfort and companionship and together hit upon a plan to save the world from the monstrosities of industrial militarism. Her name was Countess Freya von Malkte, the widow of Helmut Malkte, a German army officer who had been executed by the Nazis in 1945 for plotting to assassinate Hitler. When she met Chadwick, Countess von Malkte was mourning the loss of her husband and the devastation of her homeland. It seems that it is she who encouraged Chadwick to move into a career in horticulture. Their response to the post-War impasse was to hatch a scheme to slowly transform the world through ‘gardens of peace’. Through her, most likely, Chadwick secured a job redesigning the Admiralty Gardens in Capetown, his first major horticultural project. Later, she enticed him to follow her to the United States and to take up a position as gardener in a project sponsored by the University of California in Santa Cruz, an opportunity she organized for him. Chadwick had been heading to New Zealand where one of his relatives, Richard Seddon, had once been Prime Minister. Freya von Malkte invited him to the USA. He was reluctant. She persuaded him. He arrived in California in 1967 and it was in America that he was to make his mark.

Coming from another time and place, an aristocratic thespian with a short temper and little time for people, Chadwick was a strange visitation upon a California then in the grip of psychedelia and “Flower Power”. The University garden project was experimental, if not subversive. Amongst academics, it was promoted by Dr Paul Lee, a champion of the vitalist tradition in opposition to the scientific establishment or what Lee called “physicalism”. Lee relates that Chadwick arrived one day, accepted the job, went to the hardware store that afternoon, bought a spade and went to work on an area of destitute land covered in poison oak. Despite his bad back, he worked sunrise to sundown for nearly two years transforming the site into a large organic garden. This “performance”, as Chadwick would call it, soon attracted attention. The garden was not modest or unremarkable. Using his unique synthesis of techniques, he accomplished a many-acre miracle. It was an extraordinary garden, a paradise of vitality. At this time Alan Chadwick was fifty-eight years old. In truth, he wasn’t a great actor. But he was a great, great gardener. At Santa Cruz he came to his calling.

Soon people came to his garden wanting him to explain his methods. To some extent this was an unexpected and unwelcome development. His temperament was ill-suited to teaching, but he took on apprentices and started giving regular talks to a growing audience nevertheless. In these talks he explained “biodynamic/French intensive” gardening not in terms of conventional organic chemistry - nitrogen, potassium, and so on - but in terms of his own distinct cosmology that he described as “alchemistic.” For Chadwick, horticulture was a spiritual endeavor, an encounter with the secrets of nature and the wisdom of God. He took immediate inspiration from Steiner, and adopted some of Steiner’s terminology, but he believed that Steiner stood in a long, continuous tradition going back to the ancient Greeks. Largely self-taught, and therefore eclectic, Chadwick wove together a philosophy of gardening based in the ancient system of the four elements and the three principles of alchemy, drawing upon Plato, Xenophon, Pliny, Ptolemy, Paracelsus and others. Much of his learning came from classical horticultural texts. He learnt Greek myth from the theatre but also from exploring the meaning of the botanical names of plants. This was the theoria that accompanied his practical methods. He didn’t care much for the hippys, and he couldn’t fathom why it was that the long-haired and unkempt youth of the campus were receptive to his nature-affirming spirituality – and he never claimed the guru role - but he developed and played to a following, an audience for new performances.

Chadwick’s ideas were revolutionary at the time. It was the climax of the anti-Vietnam era, flowers and peace. Chadwick’s amazing garden was a symbol defying the “grey culture” of industrial/technological America. He emphasized herbs at a time when herbs were rare in bland middle-class cuisine. He preached the virtues of fresh produce in an age when tinned food was supreme. His horticultural methods were innovative and sophisticated when organic gardening in America was crude and underdeveloped. His apprenticeship system changed the way horticulture was taught in America. He was a stranger in a strange land – cantankerous and difficult – but in Santa Cruz he became a man with a mission, a purpose in life. He once explained that he had spent most of his life in the “selfish pursuit of beauty”; unwittingly he now found that he was called upon to teach others and to show the beauty to them. He brought a message of visionary ecology:

Our requirements of living must be connected with exuberant childishness, an exuberant simplicity, an adoration of the great depths of simplicity in Nature. – p. 255

The garden at Santa Cruz was the first of many gardens that he created in America. He founded an organic garden for the Zen Centre of San Francisco, then moved to the East Coast and established a garden in Virginia. It was only in the last few years of his life that his students began recording his talks. Self-consciously Socratic, he frowned upon the “verbosity” of too much book learning and wrote little or nothing. He was a story-teller with an eccentric repertoire and a unique style. Recordings of some 270 of his talks survive today, and constitute his legacy; that is, aside from the many people who were inspired by him and the many students who have continued his horticultural work. He died of cancer in May 1980. He always claimed to be a Roman Catholic. He was buried at the rural property of the Zen Centre in San Francisco and a stupa was erected over his grave.

*** 

The horticulture of Alan Chadwick speaks for itself. It is an eminently rational, logical, clean system of high yielding optimum organic gardening. Chadwick set out to out-perform industrial agriculture using nothing but traditional hand tools. He was a craftsman. “Craft,” he said, “completes the art of God.” One of his students, John Jeavons, has streamlined the system into “biointensive” gardening which is used in a network of successful community projects in Third World countries. Jeavons has stripped away Chadwick’s spiritual vision and his “alchemy” and revealed that the actual horticultural method that Chadwick developed, leaving aside the theory, was one of profound utility. There is no question; Chadwick’s system works. Chadwick himself, though, said he was not setting out to “feed the millions”, in the first instance, but rather to bring beauty to the world, a Platonic enterprise arising out of an adoration of Beauty from which abundance is merely an overflow. His ultimate objective was to transform the earth into the garden of Eden. This vision was, for him, inseparable from the method. He felt he had achieved, he once said, a “huge marriage of vision and practice.” He means the alchemical marriage of spirit and matter. As he says,

Much of this was understood in the days when talking was very little and doing was quite a lot. There was the practice of alchemy.

His main contention, alchemically speaking, is that life can be drawn endlessly from the “invisible” in defiance of the laws of quantitative physics. He had discovered a cornucopia.

The pedigree of Chadwick’s approach to nature goes through Steiner to Goethe to Paracelsus and the alchemical science of Germanic romanticism, and then to the ancient Greeks. He has a deep appreciation of the cycles of the seasons and a reverence for the ever-changing flow and metamorphosis of nature. He explains the phenomenon of nature in terms of a threefold model: there is only One Reality but it consists of a visible and an invisible world, with an intermediate realm in between. This intermediate realm is of utmost importance. It is through it that the invisible manifests – miraculously – in the visible world. This is the role of soil between earth and air. It is also the realm of elemental beings, gnomes and sylphs and fairies, creatures of the inter-realm. In one of his talks he said:

Of course there are elves and fairies and undines! They are names. Names for what? For the magic that the four elements – earth, fire, air, water – bring about in the perpetual marriage of the invisible into the visible.

And for Chadwick, it is also the magic of theatre. A garden is a performance. A flower is a performance. The world is a stage. The underpinning metaphor in all of Chadwick’s metaphysics is: there is the lit stage and the dark theatre, and between them the proscenium. It is through the filter of the proscenium that the magical transformations happen. This, above all, is the key to understanding Chadwick.

It is also the model underpinning his method of observation which he described in the formula: “contrata – medito – contemplatio”. Concentration. Meditation. Contemplation. He refers to the archetypal realm as “idée” which man approaches through the exercise of “image”. He speaks of a phenomenon he calls “eleve”, spiritual uplift, which is a quality that can be brought to soil:

I am talking about an eleve of fertility, not necessarily a quantity of fertility. You can get it in gravel, you can get it in rock on the mountains, where all the trees will grow perfectly. I am not talking about quantity. I am talking about an eleve of fertility.

At the head of his stellar cosmology is the “revolutioninbus” consisting of the “prima mobile” and “secundus mobile.” He understands the plant world to be the sub-lunary manifestation of the planets, no less than are the metals. In fact, he had developed a quite comprehensive system of horticultural alchemy within his own cosmological framework in which he understands the planets shaping plants and flowers. He combines this, moreover, with an account of the archangelic orders and their manifestation in the seasons and the moods of the earth. The passage of the four seasons, in Chadwick, is the passing of the Grail between the four great Archangels. He amplifies this with illustrations of his teachings from an alchemical reading of the European Grail myths. There is a fifth Archangel in Chadwick’s system, to which he alludes, but about which he will not speak; he merely calls it “The Dove”, the greatest of all mysteries.

For Chadwick horticulture became his mode of understanding and expression. It was all-embracing:

Horticulture is the greatest of all crafts, the art of the creation of God…the garden leads into the whole of the vision of Nature.

His vision, which he shared almost as a pact with Countess von Maltke, was of a world and a mankind transformed by gardens. Chadwick made a good start. We should remember that this was in the context of the Cold War and an imminent World War Three. The United States and Russia were poised for nuclear oblivion and were engaged in obscene proxy wars around the globe. It was as a response to this that Alan Chadwick took up his spade and started a garden. He could envisage an alternative world. He believed that man could opt for Eden.

Have we not got expressways with millions of flying boxes? It is always possible to have the Garden of Eden.

In part, drawing upon Xenophon’s Socratic dialogue ‘Economy’ (Oikos nomia) he envisaged a Ghandian village-scale agriculture, but he understood it as a natural part of the alchemical tradition in which he saw himself:

Paracelsus said that the destiny and the duty of the gardener in living to produce his food, to produce his family, is to place his hand in paradise.

*** 

If it wasn’t for the symphonic wonder of his gardens, his prowess and his practical genius, Alan Chadwick might be easily dismissed as a crazy nature kook. He understood this. He once talked about how, when he was a teenager, other boys would tease him about being tutored by “that crank Rudolf Steiner.” Chadwick was a man who always found himself painfully different to everybody else. His world-view, his vision, was perfectly clear to him, however. A garden – like a stage - is a place of mystery. His fate, in the end, was to be the man who would expose something of that mystery to others. Just exposure to it would be transforming, he believed. As in alchemy, it is not the transmutation of metals but rather the transmutation of the alchemist that is important. Chadwick said:

The garden is all secrets. The whole miracle of the garden is made up of secrets, and I’ve been granted the chance to expose a few others to this incredible thing which, itself, is the teacher. It is, you see – though many people find the idea amusing – the garden that makes the gardener.

Gardening, for Chadwick, was an arena for transformations. He said, “Self must go if you wish to be a gardener.”

In one of his recorded talks, after Chadwick has expounded with Shakespearean flourish about his vision of a world of enchanted gardens, a member of the audience asks whether he was proposing reducing people to peasants and a peasant’s life. Chadwick, in revere - playing up to an audience that would often wonder if he was mad - exclaims: I am an incredible lunatic of the future! He was not proposing a return to the past. He could see the road ahead. In California, in the late 1960s and early 70s, there was a modern watershed and a new ecological consciousness, a new concern for natural farming, fresh food, reverence for nature and healthy living emerged. Alan Chadwick was in the middle of it. Although he had been born as a relic of an ‘Old World’ which had then been demolished by two appalling wars, Chadwick in America had somehow managed to become a man of the future.

I am an incredible lunatic of the future. Oh garden that I see! It is the most incredible garden. A pomegranate, it’s all made of emeralds and rubies. But that is a secret. You wouldn’t understand it. It will reveal itself…

R. Blackhirst

[A version of this article appeared in the weighty volume Alchemical Traditions (ed. Aaron Cheak), Numen Books. ]

- Chadwick