Why we garden

Gardening is the art of making order and beauty. — martinstone/Creative Commons

I had a note the other day from a friend who casually mentioned -- in a discussion about backyard birds, summer flowers and the virtues of porch-sitting -- that she was “looking at my lovely garden and thinking how worth it all the work involved was.”

I got it, I get it. Gardening is a lot of trouble, no lie. There’s a whole lot of toiling and sowing, planting and growing, thinking and doing that goes into it. It’s often dirty and sweaty. It’s sometimes disappointing.

What makes it so irresistible is that it is a close-at-hand example of nature and nurture in lively dialogue, unfolding right before your eyes. You watch that balance in action every day of every season. You have to notice things and pay attention. You’re a part of it, a player.

As a gardener, you have to concede for starters that Mother Nature always bats last, dishing out the climate and weather, responsible for the earth beneath your feet and the lay of the land in your little corner of the world. Nature is the given, the baseline. Nature giveth when the tomatoes bear fruit and taketh away when the Japanese beetles savage the roses. Nature cuts no slack. Nature just is, ignore that at your peril.

Nurture is the human element – the imagination, the hope, the labor and the love, essential ingredients if a garden is to be wrested from the untamed natural world. Nurture is the weeding and watering, the fretting over bug onslaughts and baffling plant ailments. It’s applied caring. It’s personal. Your garden may be a tiny little patch of ground, but it’s your tiny little patch of ground.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether at your level of involvement it’s a hobby, passion or addiction – or just a passing fancy. Gardening keeps you interested with the sheer unpredictability of larger events and the rich rewards of small triumphs.

It has nothing to do with virtual reality or pixels on a screen. It’s as real as it gets when your hands are deep in the dirt and your eyes are on the sky, keeping watch on the weather. Will the rains come and be kind or will it storm and flood? Droughty summer, frigid winter? Weather happens, but you’ve got a chit in the game. You’ve got something riding on it.

No ground? There’s always pots. — HerelsTom/Creative Commons

Gardening helps you keep track of time. It plants you firmly on the calendar, puts your boots on the ground as the seasons cycle by. If it’s April, there are daffodils, smelling of warm rain. If it’s May, the powder-puff peonies are breaking your heart with their loveliness. If it’s June, smell the roses. If it’s nearly September, the asters and goldenrods are dead ahead, the mums and Montauk daisies still to come.

Gardening is memory and anticipation. It forces you to look back and plan ahead.

It’s remembering the crisp bite of the first plucked radish, the sweet, heavy scent of summer lilies, the sun-kissed flavor of a vine–ripened tomato, the year the morning glories covered the fence in sky blue, the nights the moon flowers flung themselves open to the stars.

It’s thinking ahead to spring, down on your knees in the autumn chill planting tulips and snowdrops. It’s spending a wretched winter afternoon dreaming over the latest seed catalogs. It’s plotting your vegetable patch, picking new varieties to try.

Gardening is all about the making of order and beauty, a fine pursuit in my opinion. In this chaotic world, it’s far from nothing. Good for anyone who can take credit for an environment perfected, a place of deliberate pleasure. If there are flowers blooming and birds singing in it, butterflies and bees busy in it, people happily enjoying it, congratulations are in order. Your garden is a success.

When the summer draws to a close and the cadence of the crickets slows with the cooling temperatures, I may get pensive – so forgive me. But as I reflect on another season in the garden, I think of how good it is to have this complicity with the very real things in this life of ours, on this earth of ours.

Gardening keeps us in touch with all that. It feeds the soul and fills the heart with a wild kind of joy when we get what we hope for out of it. That’s the reward, hitting that sweet spot. It makes it all worthwhile. It’s why we bother.