Cast out from the garden. . .

"The garden is a place of many sacraments, an arena--at once as common as any room and as special as a church--where we can go not just to witness but to enact in a ritual way our abiding ties to the natural world. Abiding, yet by now badly attenuated, for civilization seems bent on breaking or at least forgetting our connections to the earth. But in the garden the old bonds are preserved, and not merely as symbols. So we eat from the vegetable patch, and, if we're paying attention, we're recalled to our dependence on the sun and the rain and the everyday leaf-by-leaf alchemy we call photosynthesis. Likewise, the poultice of comfrey leaves that lifts a wasp's sting from our skin returns us to a quasi-magic world of healing plants from which modern medicine would cast us out. Such sacraments are so benign that few of us have any trouble embracing them, even if they do sound a faintly pagan note. I'd guess that's because we're generally willing to be reminded that our bodies, at least, remain linked in such ways to the world of plants and animals, to nature's cycles." from The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan.