One of my favorite places to visit growing up was Platt’s Nursery just up the highway from our neighborhood, where its greenhouses were perched on one of the highest points in town. Mom would take us there each spring to pick out impatiens, petunias, and hanging baskets. When the family-owned business shut down a few years ago, it felt like a piece of our local community had died—or, at least, my corner of it.
I moved to Arkansas after Jared and I got married, only to discover there was a family-owned farm and nursery 1.2 miles from our house, just around the corner. I visited it often last spring, when I was still new to the community and going over the grooves of the area hoping they would become familiar. The nursery—with its long heathouses and tables of blooming things—felt like coming home, in a way.
One Saturday early in June, I went to a pick-your-own lavender event at the organic branch of the farm. It was a dark morning and pouring rain. The hoophouses were nearly empty, and when a gal in a hat pulled up in her side-by-side to shuttle me to the lavender field, she called me a brave soul. Brave, or a fool, I’m not sure. I was the only one cutting lavender that morning with a raincoat pulled over my head.
On our way back to the greenhouse, we sloshed through puddles and potholes down a dirt road between fields. She was the owner, she said. The surrounding land belonged to her family and had since the 1940s, when they sold strawberries to the government during the war. They built more hoophouses in the 70’s, when the nursery was founded. She wore a raincoat over her overalls and told me her daughter sings karaoke on Friday nights at local spots.
As we bumped down the road, the farmer pointed to a patch of sunflowers at the end of a field, their big, golden heads hanging in the rain.
“He sells at the farmer’s market,” she said.
Her own farm sells its produce out of mercantiles and grocery stores all over town. I know this because I’ve been buying plants from her business for over a year without realizing her gardens were just around the corner from my own. It felt like another touchpoint—a channel cut into the now-familiar landscape between the fruit on our table and the fields where they were grown.
There’s something very American about this. When an ordinary person can own their own place in a community, love it well, and reap its rewards—that is freedom. That’s the biblical landscape our country was built on and that stretches back to the great Reformers, beginning with the belief that you did not have to be a king or clergyman to hold the Scriptures in your hand. Those men believed that freedom belonged just as much to a boy who drove a plow as it did a priest. It was Martin Luther who said that God Himself will milk the cows through him whose vocation that is. There is dignity for the ordinary laborer, the farmer in the field, the small business owner who is trying to build the product and manage the books all at once.
Paul himself–that teaching, preaching apostle–was also a tentmaker by trade, who knew how to earn his own keep, and he encouraged the Thessalonian church to do the same:
“Now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living.” – 2 Thessalonians 3:12
Maybe we’ve forgotten it, maybe the big corporations and government would like us to sit back and think it’s untrue, but America is still a country of free, ordinary folks doing honest work with their own hands. They are operating local businesses, running the storefronts on Main Street, and growing their own lavender with an independence only God can give.
A few days before the Fourth this past week, I took my mom who was in town to that plant nursery down the road, where the flowers were still blooming like bursts of pink fireworks. We picked out a few plants, then rolled down the road to the produce stand of a family farm, where we bought tomatoes and visited with Mrs. Paula who always greets me by name.
It’s been 250 years of this very kind of thing—of sweet people in small towns, of locality, of family-owned plant nurseries and backyard gardens. Two hundred fifty years of spacious skies above fruited plains and the kind of freedom you can pluck up and taste wild-sweet in your mouth.
I haven’t seen all there is of America, but what I have seen is beautiful.
“A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned — this is the sum of good government.”
– Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 1801
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