It’s common these days to hear the phrase, “She (or he) created a beautiful garden.” That simple comment is a testament to every gardener’s unique genius. As viable as a painter creating a picture or a writer creating a book, a gardener truly does create a garden. To create a garden, one needs to use the mind, the body, all of one’s senses and a healthy dose of spirit as well.
For most of us, gardening is not the daily work we do that puts money in our pockets. We work for a living and garden before or after. It’s interesting that during the time we spend working in the garden, the word “work” takes on a different meaning. In this sense, we lose any feeling of drudgery and put our heart into the effort.
Two transformations occur when a person becomes a gardener. First, the look of the land changes. A yard begins to take on a new shape. An order and an aesthetic that somehow mimics the personality of the gardener begin to emerge. While one friend’s garden exudes an aura of class, another is glitzy from the get go. Fellow gardeners relish a garden with personal flavor.
Then, there is the change of the gardener. In the process of planting a rose or choosing a garden ornament, moving rocks or sitting for a five minute coffee break, you, the gardener, come to know yourself. No one knows better what they like and dislike, what gives them pleasure than a person in the act of creating something. I never knew I was partial to a certain shade of yellow, until I chose the subtle ‘Moonbeam’ coreopsis for my garden.
Gardeners often spend hours alone, working on a chore such as weeding or watering new plants. Work that allows them to do little more than think. Ideas come to them and they have time to muse and ponder. They learn to grieve wholeheartedly and plan ahead for a loved one’s birthday party. They hear the melodic rustle of the breeze through Aspen leaves, and hum a once forgotten song an old aunt used to sing.
The magic of the garden is this: to reap all the benefits, you simply have to spend time in the garden. You don’t even have to get it right. Gardening is like real life. By thought and effort you can change what you think needs to be changed, now or next year. And you probably will because no other single work of art stays with us so long and lasts through our personal transformations like a garden.
Anyone who thinks differently probably spends most of their gardening time trimming, edging, weeding and spraying rather than puttering, planting and moving plants, dreaming and yes, just enjoying the garden. To experience the pleasure of gardening, you need to expect more than mere results. What you reap from the garden may come long after the harvest. It is the accumulation of moments; a sustained sense of joy, despite the results.
Sometimes our own gardens become so beautiful it takes our breath away. I never knew, until I began to garden, how good it felt to be proud, alone. But we don’t stay in that space for long. The moment your head grows too large to pass through the garden gate, a tornado will surely strike and wipe out everything you have worked for so far. Slugs will appear from nowhere.
It’s possible that your five year old patch of delphiniums, tall and stately, bluer than your memory of the sky in late spring, will die one winter after every effort to give them the best conditions. You will be sad for a while, and then go on. We don’t forget the ethereal beauty of what we once had in a garden. We may learn to find unexpected solace in the rougher, more reliable nature of the common daisy.
On a full, long day in the garden you might find yourself digging a hole with a shovel, putting a plant into the earth and shaping the soil around the base of the plant with your hands. You hear the birds sing song in a tree you planted yourself and smell the solid scent of new mown lawn.
So, you do a bit of labor and a plant grows well. In the process something from within you emerges to the surface. Using your unique talents, you fashion an idea in your mind. Using earth and water and the plants available to you, you bring them all together, as you see fit. Before you know it, you have created something very real, a garden.
