Alan Chadwick

Alan Chadwick

The University of California at Santa Cruz opened in 1965. It had a number of experimental ideas, including pass/fail grades, residential colleges, and the innovative cross-disciplinary history of consciousness program. For Paul Lee, however, the university’s first few years, before it hardened into a research institution, were crystallized by the presence of Alan Chadwick and the gardens he made there. Lee taught philosophy and religious studies at Crown College until he was denied tenure. Lee had the idea that a student garden on the beautiful, open campus would be a good addition to interdisciplinary study. Within weeks of a walk Lee organized to look for a possible garden site, Alan Chadwick turned up.

Alan Chadwick had been a British naval officer and a Shakespearean actor but it was as a master gardener for the many gardens he began up and down the coast of California that he made his mark. He used a French intensive biodynamic gardening system which has its roots in Rudolf Steiner and Goethe. When Lee asked whether Chadwick would make a garden for the university, Chadwick went out, bought a spade and started digging without any discussion of contracts, salary or where it should be done!

Chadwick hated industrial farming and gardening, the tractors which had compacted the soil and the profit motive that set them in motion. He preached biological diversity instead of mono-cropping and used companion planting and other techniques to guard against pests. His theme was working with nature, learning its rhythms and mysteries. He was as Paul Lee writes, “the Pied Piper of the reaffirmation of the integrity of organic nature and its carefree abundance, and the lifestyle that went with it.”

Photo copyright by Gregory Haynes

As a person, Chadwick was flamboyant and imperious. Students who became his apprentices never forgot him. Beth Benjamin writes: “He had flaming temper tantrums, told tales, gave us dinner parties, fed us with his own bread and ham and cheese, threw dirt clods at us and laughed as he hid behind the compost piles. He taught us the joy of work, the discipline to persevere in order to make a dream come true, even when we were hot and tired, and the deliciousness of resting and drinking tea after such monumental labors.”

The high point of Chadwick’s residence at Santa Cruz was a series of lectures he gave which had the quality of a revivalist meeting. Chadwick called people back to their own nature and the nature around them, which, he pointed out, was under radical attack. But after about five years of working on the gardens, Chadwick was finished at the university. Paul Lee was told by a colleague, “do you know that [Chadwick’s] garden has done more to ruin the cause of science on this campus than anything else?” Chadwick packed his bags and went on to Saratoga and Green Gulch.

This story and much more is told in Paul Lee’s rambling book, There Is a Garden in the Mind. His insistence that the California organic movement began at UC Santa Cruz with Alan Chadwick is further described on his website. Peter Jorris and Greg Haynes have put together a rich website including many video memories of his dynamic personality and teaching at Alan-Chadwick.org. Alan Chadwick also appears in Wendy Johnson’s book Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate, in which she describes Chadwick’s contributions to the gardens at Green Gulch Zen Center just north of the Golden Gate. Chadwick died at Green Gulch in 1980.

For the purposes of my current novel, Pulled Into Nazareth, Chadwick impacts Line’s story when she and her husband move to Santa Cruz. Stephen is getting his doctorate in history and Line, though she has a small child in tow, works in the Chadwick garden before Chadwick leaves in 1972. Line is, of course, part of the choir. Alan has no need to preach to her! I first learned about Chadwick from my sister Solveig, a natural gardener who now does her gardening and birding in Yorkshire, England.