Gardening: Take One
Finding Peace.
I am not much of a gardener.
In fact, born to city life, I always felt unaccustomed to dirt and soil. Outside my window in my growing-up years, there were some manicured hedgerows, all green, that obscured the windows on the basement floor of the three-story home I was raised in in Brooklyn, New York. There were also two oak trees, separated by concrete, on the sidewalk with the letters JK which had been ever so neatly written in as it cured. Flowers grew on the patch of grass that was our yard with decreasing frequency after my Mother’s death; family members were too concerned, I suppose, with the other business of life and less devoted to annuals that needed frequent care.
Time with others was valued in those days and in the conversations and the stories; Hands in earth were not. And, those were mutually exclusive domains.
I spent many of my own days raising a family in almost rural Connecticut. My now ex-husband loved to be outdoors, so much so that I often joked that I was widow to his gardening, and his better occupational choice would have been a landscape architect. Year after year, he planned flower after flower, some perennial and some annual. He’d order from catalogs, and attend local sales, including one every Mother’s Day whereupon he would rise early to have the best selection of unique and locally cared for plants. I often thought, though he did not say, that his viewpoint toward those gardens was that more was better – I would look about in our yard and barely be able to see ground beneath the blooms.
Pandemic Times mean new pastimes. And, in that raising a family in a home which is now mostly mine alone, that means I watch that garden with a new and more discrete eye. I see small goldfinch outside my window when I work from home, ones never visible here resting on the abundant yellow daylilies. Other plants are vivid blue and purple this year, and lilacs in one corner of the yard were early spring fragrant and large in number despite that fact that the tree my ex and I had planted for our eldest son’s first Christmas has now grown to over 50 feet and sheltered them with its branches.
I truly cared for a garden for the first time. Pandemic positives.
I learned that the rain does really make the flowers grow. The morning after a storm, or even a humid evening, the blooms are wide open; the cucumber plants advance a foot between 9pm and the early rise of the next morning.
I had simply never paid attention to this simple and natural caretaking. And, just how much growth is possible over one single night.
I learned that gardens need to be tended; some distance between plants actually makes for brighter and more noticeable color blooms.
My ex would work feverishly in our yard between the first break of winter, and late June, then taper off in his hobby with the heat of July. The flowers would look lovely at the begining, then overgrow to seed; his investment only lasted so long because the reward of one sight of one pretty garden in one week of one year was, for him, enough. Job done, he turned to tender a garden of files in his office.
The first year after our divorce the plants bloomed, and then this year, not quite well, that is until I tore out about half of them, and to my surprise, the remainder smiled in color - types of blooms I had not seen in years reappeared.
Those perennials needed spaces between their togetherness.
And, my actions had consequence in my garden; destruction brings room for new life.
