*a submission to a local/regional arts magazine I have been published in regularly, to my joy and satisfaction! will this get in? only the shadow knows…thanks for being here, and for reading & following along…
As a kid, I always wanted a garden. We lived on a former dairy and cauliflower farm; we had an apple orchard, and a couple of pear trees planted decades previously by my grandparents. My dad showed me where the best blackberry patches were located all over the farm, and our apples were harvested for cider for years – but why didn’t we use a little bit of all this land for a garden? It seemed wasteful and even sinful to not grow something, anything, to make good use of all those acres. It still does.
My grandfather had completed and gifted my parents an oil painting of our house that featured the old kitchen garden front and center, stretching out across a bank that blanketed the first ten feet or so of our front lawn, facing the sun; it showed cabbages, lettuce, carrot, radish and beet greens among other growing things. Why not do that now? Didn’t anyone else in this house want a garden? Don’t you love how grandma planted purple iris by the side entrance, leading out to the barn? We could do more flowers, too! At least? Crickets. My dad was willing to consider the idea, but he was also working seven days a week, most of the time, so – sure, but a garden, kid? That’s a lot of work, y’know?
I didn’t know. How was I supposed to know when I’d never done it? Or seen anyone do it? Miss Connell and Miss Klapper were both gardeners, and my parents enjoyed excess vegetables occasionally in summer thanks to their efforts, but I was a child. I didn’t go there to hang out and ask questions about soil science; I only saw them during quick pit stops with my mom, dropping off books or magazines. Their garden was also behind their house; should I have run back there to take a gander? Children, mother said many, many times, were much better seen than heard. There was no way I would dare pester those two ladies with questions about gardening!
Dan and Kay – whose garden we passed on the way into town – might’ve been open to showing me a few of the ropes, but they had two uncomfortably odd sons I avoided as much as I could given that their parents were friends of mine. The family occasionally dined at our house; their daughter was unfriendly and slightly odd, too, almost as bad as my older sister. No way I was asking to go there!
Both the internet and Google didn’t yet exist, and the only equivalent we had was a full set of green and white covered Encyclopedia’s Britannica – which I loved to leaf through but – gardening? Too broad a topic. Maybe if there had been a handful of those clear sheets showing veggie gardens like they showed the body in layers – skeleton, muscles, organs, skin etc. made topsoil, temperature, seeds, planting depths and growing times – that would’ve helped, but there was no such thing.
There weren’t any garden shows I knew of on the single TV channel we received, stuck out there in rural Siberia-land in the dark times known as ‘pre-cable’. I didn’t want to pester my dad, either, who was often exhausted when his working days were done. My mother was a house cat sort of person, a reader and an intellectual for whom digging in the dirt, like going outside for any reason beyond getting into her car, was not happening. I do remember her lusting after Mountain Laurel bushes, which she finally obtained from an acquaintance in Dunraven, where they grew in native abundance, on a rocky hill facing the reservoir. My dad dug them in for her. They did okay, not great.
My siblings were also house cats for the most part, but I spent hours and hours outside, and was never happier. Gardening would’ve given me more reasons, more time out in the fresh air, which to this day makes me feel like a million bucks. Yes, I was and remain a reader myself, but being outdoors on a day either cloudy or sunny when the air is perfectly cool and temperate? Walking in the woods, especially in spring or the fall? Heaven.
Still, didn’t everybody love planting seeds in dirt as children, as grade schoolers? I sure did. And was there anything cooler than watching little green things sprout up through brown dirt? Not really. Not in my view. That garden out front or back or sideways at my childhood home never happened, but in college and during the many years I lived in New York City, I always had masses of indoor plants, one of which is still with me; it turns 36 this year, the lovely thing. I also have the African violet I inherited from my mother, who inherited from her mother-in-law, my beloved grandmother, which has exploded after literal decades in a shrunken state, a Sleeping Beauty trance broken by ‘just-right’ sunlight.
My first home in the Catskills was too shady for growing success, although one azalea bought for the house was placed perfectly for the morning sun. That sun-deprived location was a bit of a ‘yearning to grow things’ mistake on my part, but I’d been house hunting for ages; regardless, that little kid wanting a garden remained strong in me. I tried, planting blueberry bushes and four hydrangeas given to me by a beloved friend whose mom and grandmother cultivated a noteworthy garden at their home in Rye, N.Y., but my poor babies were neither fruitful nor happy. I did keep them alive, which counts? The hydrangeas still bloom, even as I’ve moved on.
Finally, after far too long, I am back on a small chip off the old farm block, a better set of ground entirely, into which I can plant seeds; my current home faces south, a necessary better fit for growing green and lovely things. There are still challenges, the best patches – where morning sun comes through – require an angled style of plotting. Still, six blueberry bushes planted and blooming, including the two, so forlorn at the last house, safely transplanted; 7 garden beds also inexpertly and sloppily filled and seeded or planted annually to my satisfaction and joy.
Because I joined the party so late, I don’t know the ins and outs of gardening by a whole lot, but the pleasure I get watching the plants and seeds I have put in make their way toward the sunlight makes me giddy, a kid again, watching tiny tender sprouts emerge in little white paper cups on the windowsill of Mrs. Birdsall’s room.
In summer, most of my mornings are spent watering, after which I harvest peas and beans and lettuce and blueberries with uncomplicated, sweaty joy.
Like my sunflowers, which I grow to feed the birds I’m determined will thrive, my imperfect garden provides me with simple, profound pleasure. And yes, because I am human, there are moment of self-congratulatory giddiness, because wow, look at me, the farmer in the dell! It’s almost as good a feeling as when a toddler decides you, you right there, are a good human and theirs for the whole afternoon, holding your hand while spurning the attention of other adults.
Whenever I have an interest the first thing I usually do is buy a bunch of books on the subject. Yes, I have a couple of gardening books, but they’ve barely been cracked. I enjoy gardening in part because I am not good or expert at it; because it is sloppily and imperfectly done by me, myself, and I; because I am that ignorant while wholly motivated by love and possibility. A need to always know how it’s done, to excel at everything, to be smart and on top of it, is exhausting, a losing game. Let experience be my teacher, including failures galore. It has served me well so far, whatever unforced errors I make.
I’m also teaching myself how to build crosswords, but – in part thanks to my flailing gardening experiments – I’m not buying any books to help me along. Like growing beautiful things to adorn or eat, I’m just gonna see what comes up, and how I do. Hey, I never said I was Martha Stewart; I’m also no Will Shortz.
Gardening, like water-coloring or basic carpentry, does not have to be done solely by those who know exactly what they’re doing. I haven’t killed anything, even if my squash never seem to come out right; eventually, maybe, I’ll get a few that don’t need a hacksaw to cut them up, on a year when conditions are so perfect even my ignorance can’t make a hash of it.
Author May Sarton wrote, “Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.” That seems about right, even when it’s imperfectly done.