I've been thinking a lot about my garden lately. Partly because I've been spending so much time in it, and partly because I've been reading a book about a poet who spent his life gardening. The book is full of photographs, poems, and musings about what is the essence of a garden and what it has to teach you.

I love how much there is to learn about gardening. There are a several plants that I've tried to grow now for two or three years and failed dismally each year. Somehow that excites me--how much more awesome will it be when I finally figure out what they need to grow well! Someday I'll learn how to harvest seeds from all my plants, so I don't have to buy as many annuals and vegetable starts. I'll learn how to recognize diseases and pests and the best ways to deal with them. I'll know the perfect day to plant beans and how to get the jasmine to bloom.

I love how even though I'm still sort of flailing around in my little garden--like a child beginning piano lessons who just pounds away on the keys--even though I'm planting the wrong plants next to each other and over-watering or under-watering and not controlling the weeds well and putting stuff in too early or too late, my garden still manages to be beautiful. Imperfectly, unevenly beautiful, but still. It still produces delicious food for me to eat and flowers to go in my vases.

Gardeners often talk about the endless work of a garden, but I sort of love that there's always something to do. A garden is never finished. It's endless work because it's endlessly producing, endlessly living. And whatever you start in a garden has the potential to go on indefinitely. Unlike a cake which gets eaten or a blouse that gets worn or goes out of style, a garden can make lifelong changes on a landscape--like in my neighbor June's yard, where she has lived and worked since she was a child.



"I think of gardening as an extension of one's own being, something as deeply personal and intimate as writing a poem. The difference is that the garden is alive and it is created to endure just the way a human being comes into the world and lives, suffers, enjoys, and is mortal."
--Stanley Kunitz

Labels: garden, summer

1 comments

I love this post, Devon. (May I call you this now?) Beautifully written . . . makes me want to go outside and find some flowers and dirt. :) Hope things are going well for you! It's hard to believe it's already mid August, isn't it?

By  danae, at 2:45 PM  

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