What My Garden Taught Me
I’d like to say that 40 years of gardening produced a masterpiece, one worthy of being featured during Virginia Garden Week. But I can’t. Seeing my garden, you’d understand. My horticultural limitations were revealed in polite laughter when I asked in a class what I could plant that deer won’t eat. The fact that I can’t remember the Latin name of any plant is further evidence of the wide gulf between me and master gardeners.
You wouldn’t learn much from visiting my garden, but I have. Some lessons are about nurturing plants – and some are about nurturing people.
I learned from several stunted plants the importance of amending clay soil. When my Russian Sage’s growth lagged, I had only myself to blame. When plants failed to live up to their potential, I had to ask what I was doing (or not doing) that got in their way. The pictures in the White Flower Farm catalogue were taken by people who know this. Everything needs the right nutrients and sunlight, just as every person needs the right amount of human nourishment and being in the metaphoric sun of others. Neither plants nor people inevitably conform to our image of who they should be. At best, I just create the conditions and opportunity for their flowering.
My Black-Eyed Susans never stayed only where I planted them, jumping throughout my garden, even coming up in my gravel driveway. The heavenly smelling Lily-of-the-Valley spread their roots into Bleeding Heart beds, and Calla Lilies turned up ten feet from where I put them. What I didn’t know about plant roots is a lot. Yet it’s also the garden’s serendipity that makes it so interesting. Efforts to over-control plants just don’t work. Accepting that leads to years of delightful surprises – and with people too.
Gardening requires patience, which for an impatient person like me was a problem. Wanting a full-looking garden fast, I planted things too close together. The competing plants became distorted versions of what they could be, dwarfed and almost hidden. I learned that wanting things to mature too quickly was the path to immaturity.
I know every gardener runs into problems. I didn’t know what a vole was until my tulips never came up and the Dusty Miller had big holes under its wilted leaves. Like the underground creatures in the film Tremors, you only know a vole has been there when your plant no longer is. Deer ate Iris buds just as they were ready to bloom. They were no doubt amused that I thought I could keep them away by hanging bars of Irish Spring soap, with its strong scent, from nearby trees, especially because I didn’t take the soap bars out of their boxes. I consoled myself with the realization that wildlife appreciated the meals I prepared for them. In the end, that seems as important as a “to-die-for” garden.
Gardens are, of course, mini-climates housing micro-climates. Lacking that understanding, I would plant too soon, in the wrong place, over- or under-water and watch the sun melt plants that needed shade or hardly reach those that needed more. Gardening, if nothing else, is a shaper of humility. If you don’t learn that lesson from cultivating anything, you continue to frustrate yourself - and not just in flower beds.
Despite the plants I killed and the mulch I left so long it produced Shotgun Mold - spores that stick like cement on siding and fences – I’ve harvested more than I deserved. Even when winter escorts my perennials into their underground sanctuary, I take pleasure knowing what will come with spring. The first opening of a daffodil, the intoxicating smell of a lilac, the buzz of bumblebees around flowering salvia fill me with joy. Even the odd-looking, rusted iron pig once again placed amidst the Lamb’s Ear brings a warm smile. A garden is, in the end, about emotions. Just as beloved people stimulate the pleasure centers in my brain, being in my garden builds my emotional connection to the earth. Even bad gardeners can find heaven in what flowers in their meager fields. I should know.
Thomas Jefferson said the “greatest service which can be rendered to any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.” Clearly, I needed other ways to render service. Yet I relate to Wendell Berry’s poem, The Current, whose opening lines so beautifully capture my relationship to the earth:
Having once put his hand into the ground,
seeding there what he hopes will outlast him,
a man has made a marriage with his place,
and if he leaves it his flesh will ache to go back.
I hope my garden, of middling success as it is, will bequeath some magnificence and perhaps some life lessons to whoever inherits it. Berry knows that desire as well:
The current flowing to him through the earth
flows past him, and he sees one descended from him,
a young man who has reached into the ground,
his hand held in the dark as by a hand.
Photo Credit: Carol Donsky Newell
