The God of the Garden

Thoughts on Creation, Culture, and the Kingdom

Andrew Peterson

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781087736952
• eBook ISBN: 9781087736969
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

There’s a strong biblical connection between people and trees. They both come from dirt. They’re both told to bear fruit. In fact, arboreal language is so often applied to humans that it’s easy to miss, whether we're talking about family trees, passing along our seed, cutting someone off like a branch, being rooted to a place, or bearing the fruit of the Spirit. It’s hard to deny that trees mean something, theologically speaking. This book is in many ways a memoir, but it’s also an attempt to wake up the reader to the glory of God shining through his creation.
One of the first commands to Adam and Eve was to “work and keep” the garden. Award-winning author and songwriter Andrew Peterson, being as honest as possible, shares a story of childhood, grief, redemption, and peace, by walking through a forest of memories: “I trust that by telling my story, you’ll encounter yours. Hopefully, like me, you’ll see that the God of the Garden is and has always been present, working and keeping what he loves.” Sometimes he plants, sometimes he prunes, but in his goodness he intends to reap a harvest of righteousness.

– I –

welcome to the chapter house

The Child is father of the Man;And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.

—William Wordsworth

This is a story about place.

It’s fitting, then, that the whole of this book was written in one place, surrounded by the same walls, the same smells, the same creaks and quirks and comforts. Because of my job, I’ve done a lot of traveling, so most of my songs and stories were written in all manner of places: coffeehouses, church fellowship halls, green rooms, airplanes, park benches, and recording studios. I’ve spent much of the last twenty-five years on the move. Due to COVID-19, early 2020 had me literally and figuratively grounded in a way that allowed me—forced me—to work in place: slowly, rhythmically, without the frantic pace to which I had grown accustomed. I had to exercise my imagination, casting thoughts far and wide, thoughts creeping like ivy beyond the confines of this place to other places in the distant past and the distant future, traveling not on an airplane or in a tour bus but in the pages of books and the memories kept by photographs.

Several weeks into the spring lockdown, as Jamie and I drifted off to sleep, I realized that I had spent more consecutive nights in my own bed than I had in more than twenty years. I was so happy. Yes, there were financial concerns; yes, there was a simmering anxiety brought on by that awful virus; yes, death and tragedy seemed to be ripping the world apart at the seams; yes, there were things we wanted to do but couldn’t. But I had never, since 1997 when we moved to Nashville, been home with my bride for every day of spring. I had never witnessed, from home, the way Lent blossomed into Easter. Nor had I ever been present for each heady day of high summer or its withering into the blaze of autumn. Certain birds came to the feeder at certain times. On walks to the lower pasture I came to expect the white flash of rabbits bounding into the brush in certain places. Among the many deer that passed through, one orphaned fawn hung around for weeks, brazenly grazing the patch of corn just beyond our car. I learned to spot box turtles standing frozen in the weeds and eyeing me with their severe yellow irises near the seasonal stream. The field of wildflowers lured butterflies and gold finches. The bees provided fifty pounds of honey. The pear tree produced, at last, exactly one edible pear. We got bowl after bowl of blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries, harvested on dewy mornings as the sun crested the hill. The chickens provided eggs; the raised beds provided kale and onions and cucumbers. And the cottage garden out front, with someone to tend it on a daily basis, exploded with firework displays of tulips, hyacinths, foxgloves, yarrow, coneflowers, delphiniums, catmint, Russian sage, hollyhocks, geraniums, lupines, and asters. The whole of the property seemed to enjoy being cared for by this amateur gardener tromping about. It responded favorably to me, and I to it. In short, I had never been so intimately connected to Place—to this place we call The Warren, utterly unique in all the wide world.

When we moved here about fourteen years ago, I dreamed that one day I’d find a way to build a little writing cabin. We homeschooled our kids (which really means Jamie homeschooled our kids), so it was difficult to find a quiet place in the house to write. Life was busy and money was tight, so building something was out of the question. I managed by working on books at the local coffeehouse and songs in our living room late at night after everyone else had gone to bed. Of the songs I wrote at home over the years, 99 percent of them were composed between midnight and 4:00 a.m. Then about five years ago, a friend came to visit from out of town. We gave her a tour of the property, and at the end she asked me, “But where do you work?” We laughed. I told her that I hoped to build a place someday, but we couldn’t afford it. It was clear that her wheels were turning. A few weeks later we got a check in the mail, along with a note that read, “This is for the foundation. Get started.”

She knew that if I just took the leap and poured the footers, I’d find a way to finish. She was right. Thanks to the help of several generous people, about a year later I completed construction on this little writing cottage called the Chapter House. I found an old $400 piano on Craigslist and settled it in the corner, and the first day I sat down to work on a song, I bowed my head and cried with thanksgiving. In this place called Nashville there’s a place called The Warren. And here at The Warren, just beyond the stone arch and the bed of tulips, there’s a place called the Chapter House. That’s where every sentence of this book was written.

The walls are insulated with books and hung with pictures. There’s the painting I picked up in Nome, Alaska. There’s the watercolor of St. Francis my son made for me. There on the piano sits the statue of Janner and Kalmar Wingfeather, a gift from my sculptor friend Scott. There’s a drawing table in the corner where I sketch trees. Next to the piano, a guitar with elvish inlay hangs on the wall. Below the window is an antique oaken kneeler from England, where I light a candle and pray on my better days. There’s not a single day that I don’t give thanks to God for this place within a place within a place that I love.

The better part of the Chapter House is made of trees. The ceiling, the floor, the front door, the bookshelves, the drawing table, the mantel, and the pine frame were once living trees. That means something. What also makes a house meaningful is the stories that it houses. Our bodies need a place to live, and the places we live need bodies to inhabit them. Humans were created to care for the world, and the world was created to be cared for. This story about place is framed by trees, but it isn’t just about trees. Trees are the framework by which these stories were written and understood—and if not understood, then at least explored. The trunks of several of the big trees here at The Warren bear 2x4 planks which were hammered in by my children, one over another, so they could reach the upper branches. The chapters in this book are like those 2x4s, made of trees and affixed to trees in order to reach the wondrous world of the overstory, and also to get a new and enlightening glimpse of the ground.

Trees need to be still in order to grow. We need to be still in order to see that God’s work in us and around us is often slow and quiet, patient and steady. It was in that stillness that I sat here in the Chapter House, watching through its windows as creation cycled through its changes, to delve into the soil of the past, to branch into the air of the present, and to strain toward the skies of the coming Kingdom.

And so it begins with a maple seed caught on a gust of wind, sailing up over the eaves of the Chapter House, past the Cumberland River, clear over the horse pastures of Kentucky, and into the wide plains of central Illinois. The seed pinwheels down to settle in the backyard of a small brick house where a little boy and his siblings play.

They have no idea how good they have it.

– II –

two maples, a dogwood, and the Thinking tree

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Appareled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

—William Wordsworth

Two maple trees.

One big and one little.

That’s what I remember first about my childhood in Monticello, Illinois. If you were location scouting for a film set in the quaintest, most idyllic version of small-town America, you could do a lot worse than Monticello. There was a town square with a Dairy Queen and a pizza place on the corner. We had fireflies in the summer and snow ploughs in the winter, softball games in the park and bullies on the playground. We even had tornadoes every so often, scouring miles and miles of corn fields, splintering old barns.

Our family lived in the parsonage, a humble house on the church property where the preacher lived rent-free. Looking at the little brick house from State Street, you’d see on its right a field of corn that bordered the side yard and stretched back for a few hundred yards. The cornfield border turned left and enclosed the backyard and the church building, then angled back to the road on the left, beyond the church, hemming us in every summer with a waving wall of green. In the backyard, between the house and the corn, stood the two maple trees: one big, and one little. I don’t know if they were planted at different times, or if perhaps one lost its upper limbs in a storm, but I have a hazy memory of referring to those maples as “big” and “little.”

There’s a good chance I never said it out loud, but all these years and miles away, if I close my eyes and picture Monticello, the first thing I see is those two leafy trees in the foreground of a sea of tall, green corn, corn stretching away forever beneath a vibrant blue dome. Another hazy memory: climbing a wooden ladder into the shadowy boughs to marvel at four sky-blue eggs cradled in their twiggy nest. It was 1980. I was seven.

Corn. Blue sky. Two maples, one big and one little. Those four things encapsulate the greater part of my childhood memory. I never found out who planted those trees, but if I had, I’d thank them. They’re as much a part of my history as that little house and the people who lived in it. There’s a scene in It’s a Wonderful Life where a drunk George Bailey crashes his car into a tree. The owner of the house yells at him and says, “My grandfather planted that tree!” It’s a small moment in a big story, but I always loved it. He might as well have said, “I’m rooted to this place. I’m a part of a larger story. I care about things that last, and about things handed down. I care about what grows and gives shade, about creation, and about the broad sweep of the ages.” These trees weren’t mine, but I wish they had been.

From a distance of forty years, I see that little boy climbing into the maple boughs to look at the eggs and I want to hug him. Even now, my heart swells a little and I clench my jaw to keep from crying for the sadness of what was lost, and lost so soon. Pain was sure to come, but I didn’t know it yet.

I recall a passive, almost mindless movement through the days, taking note of moments that strike me now as precious and undefiled, but were taken then as a matter of fact and no less wonderful because of it: a rabbit vanishing into the green shadows cast by the leafy wall of corn, sunlight warming the strawberry patch, the cat giving birth on a pile of laundry, the chattering spill of church members into the bright air of the parking lot after the service on Sunday, the muted walk to Lincoln Elementary School in the hushed world of a snowy morning. That chapter of my childhood cradled a profound innocence, which is why I now find it so baffling that I wholeheartedly invited such sin into my heart one day at school when on Book Day my friend smuggled one of his dad’s magazines from home; baffling that first and second grades were spent in abject terror of being called on or even looked at; baffling that the little golden boy I was could be so easily and willingly tarnished.

What happened? Try as I might, I can find nothing in the memory-scape of Monticello to explain it. The summer days gleamed with blue and green and gold, the nights with fireflies, the winters with moonlit snow. The two maples framed the backyard and offered their shade in June, their glory in October, their stark outlines in February, their russet buds in April. They were benevolent sentinels, watching as the little boy and his siblings slipped into the corn rows, as they chased the cocker spaniel, as they sledded on the snow pile in the parking lot. Always present, rooted to the ground in a way that suggests permanence, the maples were yet always changing, always plunging their roots deeper, stretching their branches higher and broader, fattening their trunks by a ring per year; always sway...

Table of contents

• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Matthew 18:2-3
• Chapter I: Welcome to the Chapter House
• Chapter II: Two Maples, a Dogwood, and the Thinking Tree
• Chapter III: Southern Ents
• Chapter IV: Family Trees
• Chapter V: Digging In
• Chapter VI: The Comforter Hath Found Me Here
• Chapter VII: The Enchanted Grove
• Chapter VIII: We Shall Be Led in Peace
• Chapter IX: Footpaths
• Chapter X: The Weeper in the Trees
• Chapter XI: Places and No-Places
• Chapter XII: A Stone’s Throw from Jerusalem
• Epilogue
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also by the Author
• Adorning the Dark: Andrew Peterson
• The Wingfeather Saga: Andrew Peterson