When did soil become a dirty word?

Paying respects to the most important – and under-appreciated – feature of our gardens

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Toddlers are not reliable witnesses. My son is about to turn three. He doesn’t stop talking, which is adorable. But making sense of what it is he is saying – or attempting to communicate – can be a challenge, even for the well-tuned parental ear. 

I collect him from nursery four afternoons a week. We both know the routine. He waves goodbye to the staff member at the door; he demands a snack for the journey home; I tell him he can have one if he gets into his pushchair; he reluctantly climbs into his pushchair; I strap him in and hand him his snack; he begins to reel off which of his little friends he played with, and what they got up to. 

Often some sort of bust-up or accident will make the headlines. Someone pushed someone; someone cried; someone told the teacher. That kind of thing. The trouble is, it’s nigh on impossible to get to the bottom of whether my son was the victim, the aggressor, a mere bystander, or none of the above and the whole thing is an invention of his imagination. 

The more questions you ask, the more confusing it becomes, as key characters switch roles; hurt knees become bonked heads; shared toys become stolen toys become broken toys; and seemingly important new objects – a red bike, say, or some sand – come into the narrative, only to disappear from subsequent retellings. My son, suffice to say, is unfamiliar with the dramatic principle of Chekhov’s gun.

I won’t even attempt to re-spin the yarn that he weaved for me yesterday evening – trying to remember the finer details has given me a headache. But the gleefully recounted event at the core of the story was this: “We threw dirt at the gate!”

His hands were clean, as were his fingernails and sleeves, so I have no idea whether it even happened. But it was his wording that struck me. It wasn’t earth that was lobbed at the gate, nor soil nor compost nor loam, but dirt.

There’s no denying that gardening is a dirty business. Pop out to water the tomatoes on the driest of summer’s days, and I’ll still end up smearing muddy footprints all over the kitchen floor. Even potting up a freshly rooted houseplant cutting can cause an inordinate amount of mess, as if someone has let off a compost bomb on the kitchen worktop. But still, to describe the ground beneath our feet as “dirt” is unduly pejorative. More than that: it’s downright disrespectful.

It says so much about our modern, sanitised society that soil has come to be described as dirt (not just by my son, I hasten to add). We expect our new clothes to be chemical-washed; our food to be shrink-wrapped and hermetically sealed. We value sterility so much that we have come to fear words like “bacteria” and “fungus”. We have, in other words, completely lost touch with reality, in all its natural, organic muckiness. 

We’ll admire a plant’s appearance, comment on the form of its flowers or the taste of its fruit, but when do we ever show our gratitude or appreciation for the thing that enabled it to have all of those attractive attributes in the first place?

“Healthy soil, healthy plants” is one of those horticultural truisms that you might be familiar with, a bit like “right plant, right place”. But the significance of that soundbite barely scratches the surface of the essential, fundamental role that soil plays in the life cycles of our plants. Soil doesn’t just give life, soil is life. 

One of the first things you’ll learn on any horticultural course is the constituent parts of a sort of ideal or textbook garden soil: 25% water, 25% air, 45% mineral particles (sand, silt and clay), and 5% organic matter. Rebalance this recipe in any direction and you’ll create entirely new ecosystems, where certain plants will thrive and others will wither and die. 

When we add compost or well-rotted manure to our garden beds, we are adding nutrients to the soil which our tomato vines, for example, will draw on to grow fat and flavourful. When we add handfuls of sand or perlite to our indoor potting mix, we are reducing fertility and improving drainage – in this substrate, a tomato would keel over within days, but now the conditions are right for a snake plant to thrive. Soil is sensitive, sensuous, almost magical in its life-giving powers. 

And this is why gardening – getting our hands dirty – has such a powerful effect on our stress levels and our state of mind. To feel the earth between our fingertips is to feel connected to a substance that enables the existence of the majority of life on this planet. To be deprived of this, to inhabit a world of concrete and plastic and antibacterial hand sanitiser dispensers at every turn, is to become dangerously disconnected from one of the most powerful forces on Earth. 

So go on, grab a handful of soil. Crumble it between your fingertips. Sprinkle it over your plants. Throw it at a gate. Appreciate it. Enjoy it. Just don’t call it dirt.

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Do you like to get your hands dirty? Or are you a gloves-on gardener? Go on, you can tell me – I won’t drag your name through the mud…

Picture credit: Sandie Clarke on Unsplash