Of pride and humility

Not exactly Manolo Blahniks, am I right? — paix120/Creative Commons

Gardening can keep you humble — doesn’t it regularly bring you to your knees? From that low-down position, you plant and weed, clip back errant shoots and sift the soil for its secrets. If you say a little prayer while you’re down there, you wouldn’t be the first. I personally have spent more time on my knees in the garden than in church.

You’re not standing tall in the garden, for the most part, unless it’s to shake your fist at the (fill in the blank) deer, woodchucks, squirrels or rabbits that are trying to get to your harvest before you do. Otherwise, you’re stooped over the hoe, bent to the rake, or heaving a heavy shovelful of the good earth, working on a backache.

To be a real gardener is to relinquish all hope of looking like a fashion plate. You wear your ratty jeans or shorts, knowing they will be caked with mud or splashed with water as you make your rounds. Sweat? We’ve got sweat, burning our eyes, soaking our T-shirts and trickling down our dirt-streaked arms.

For others are the nail wraps, the five little nails in a row painted with American flags and glitter. Long, manicured fingernails in every culture that aspires to them are the badge of women of leisure — and that would not be us. We would be the ones with broken nails and the dirt under the cuticles that defies soap and nailbrush. We’re the ones with the thorn-scratched hands, the scraped and weary knees.

It’s not just the women who won’t make the pages of Vogue. Male gardeners are rarely sartorial wonders, hair moussed in place and shoes shined. Rather, they appear in clothing that, frankly, has seen better days — the shorts with the pockets blown out by carrying pruners around, the jeans with the holes in the knees that their womenfolk won’t let them wear off the plantation.

Gardening is, essentially, a dirty business. It’s not that we gardeners don’t clean up nicely when we hang up our trowels and stash our watering cans. It’s just that in the press of normal business, we look more like a crew of homeless people than the upstanding, tax-paying, property-owning worker bees we really are.

Humble isn’t just a state of dress; it’s a state of mind. Confronted by an attack of unknown leaf-eaters, a fungal mange, a case of the wilts or an infestation of who knows what, we ponder and fret, but sometimes can find neither cause nor solution. At every hand, there’s opportunity to remember that no matter how much we know, we don’t know enough.

Sweat-streaked visions of glory - they count, too. — NathalieSt/CC

This kind of humility leads to bafflement and hesitation. Do you a) spray, b) cut back, c) fertilize or d) yank that damn plant out by its roots? Experience — or a more knowledgeable gardener — may give you a clue, but most of the time, you’re on your own. The decisions you make in the garden are often backed by groundless optimism and are just as often wrong. You never outgrow your capacity for making mistakes, in itself a humbling thought.

Just the other day, wading into the jungle that is the garden in August, I rued the fact that I had failed to stake the dahlias before the rains knocked them over, that I’d let the pinks go to seed and that my job of deadheading the roses could only be described as lackadaisical.

I stood over my big, white phlox — “David,’ a very fine, mildew-free cultivar — and couldn’t quite figure if the flower heads with their veil of soggy brown spent flowers were really kaput, and should be trimmed off, or were actually developing new blossoms, and should be left alone. I find it equally hard to puzzle out the torenia, whose new buds and spent blossoms look very, very much alike.

Stretching my aching back, wiping the sweat from my eyes, I surveyed the plot that is my own. The black-eyed Susans were in full, golden bloom, the rosy spider flowers and the pink anemones waved their blossoms over the purple coneflowers, the lipstick pink dahlias and the deep, dark maroon ones bent their heads together as if in conversation and the annual salvias were standing tall, exclamatory spikes of navy blue.

Yellow daylilies and coreopsis, big, blue balloon flowers and delicate, white roses met and mingled. The bold spears of acidanthera, the Ethiopian gladiolus, stood guard to the rear with their sweet-scented, starry flowers dangling, white with a maroon heart. Billows of sweet alyssum and powderpuffs of ageratum in their distinctive, acid blue lined the paths.

In the air, dragonflies darted and soared, bees bustled, hummingbirds fed at the scarlet runner bean and butterflies — swallowtails, skippers, red-spotted purples — fluttered their way from bud to blossom.

The riot of color, the exuberance of foliage and blossom, the sheer fecundity of plant world in the heat and damp of high summer took several long, wordless (and workless) moments to witness and absorb. I looked, and saw it was good.

Gardening can make you proud, too.