Cultivating a Garden on Mars: The Ultimate Challenge

The Garden of Even

Try cultivating
a vegetable garden
on Mars.

Step one:
Abandon everything
you have nourished
at home
for decades.

Step two:
Move everything
required for life
to a planet
without it.

Step three:
Call this
growth.

Step four:
Celebrate
your first radish.

Ignore
the plastic sky.
The imported soil.
Your garden
you left behind,
and seventeen thousand
other elements
imitating
home.

The radish
will appear
at all press conferences.

No comment.

Further Reading & Viewing: Life on Mars

• The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
  Stories of colonization, memory, loneliness, and what humanity carries from Earth.
• Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
  The first installment of a landmark trilogy exploring the settlement and transformation of Mars.
• Green Mars
  As Mars changes, debates over ecology, politics, and identity intensify.
• Blue Mars
  The conclusion of Robinson’s sweeping vision of a Martian civilization.
• The Martian by Andy Weir
  A stranded astronaut survives through ingenuity, science, and a little gardening.
• The Martian
  A cinematic adaptation of Weir’s novel that celebrates problem-solving and resilience.
• Red Planet
  A mission to Mars unfolds against the backdrop of environmental decline on Earth.
• Total Recall
  Mars becomes a setting for questions of memory, identity, power, and control.
• Mission to Mars
  A more hopeful vision that blends exploration, mystery, and humanity’s place in the cosmos.
• John Carter
  A pulpy adventure inspired by early Mars fiction and the dream of life on another world.