(Today's post is in celebration of National Gardening Exercise Day. Cheers! J)
I grew up in a small Michigan town surrounded by farm country. Big crops were wheat, beans, corn, and sugar beets. We didn’t have a garden. I think my mother, who grew up on a farm, was over it.
In middle school, we moved to a larger town. My new step-dad was an outdoorsman, and in his free time he loved to garden. We had a large plot in our yard with radishes and corn, tomatoes and herbs. My mother got back into the act then—in the kitchen. I remember her seasoning everything with our home-grown dill. Everything.
Later, when I became a newlywed and moved to Colorado, my husband decided that we should grow tomatoes. You know what we grew instead? Tomato horn worms, as thick as my thumb, and two to three times as long. I promise you, those suckers really do have horns. I was traumatized for years. (I’ll spare you a picture of the Colorado critters and instead share one of our Georgia garden, below, the first year we tried a mini patch of tomatoes out back.)
It actually wasn’t until moving to Georgia that I settled into a truce with gardening. My sister Lynne brought us two dogwood trees for a housewarming. When I didn’t kill those, she started bringing us transplants from her yard…perennials that grew back year after year. Some were not a hit—like dead man’s nettle, which spread like wildfire and smelled like the most heinous body odor ever. Most were beautiful, like the opulent green hostas that continue to grow richer and thicker each year (see below).
Lynne also brought me iris and day lily bulbs, and she taught me to reproduce azaleas, rhododendrons, and hydrangeas by stretching a branch over the ground and placing soil and rock over it. Over time, when the branch has rooted, it can be separated and planted as a new bush (like the hydrangea below, which was planted in such a fashion and has grown more purple with each year).
In my early stages of gardening, I fell in love with two things: (1) gardening can be cheap (and I confess, I do love cheap), (2) and gardening can be forgiving. (Irises not doing well here? Move them there.) Later, in the early 2000s, I fell in love with something else about gardening: It can be restorative; it can heal the heart.
I learned this when our oldest child, Alex, was sixteen. She was struggling with some typical adolescent angst along with some extra challenges of her own. She was rebelling, and the major target of that rebellion was me. She and I could barely be in the same room together—unless we brought in a mediator. Or we vowed not to talk to each other. Our relationship started to shift, though, when she got a job at Pike Nursery. She’d come home from work with half-dead plants, fuming about Pike’s “no-questions-asked refund-for-a-year policy”. And then her anger would subside, and she’d talk to me: “What should we do to bring this one back?” It was slow going and not without its glitches. But gardening—even this accidental gardening—helped us heal and move on.
These days I still love to garden. I like the surprises it holds. For instance, last year I tried planting from seed for the first time. My zinnias and radishes tanked, but I was able to produce some lovely green beans, coleus, marigolds, and basil. (Check out my seed-grown coleus, below.)
And now on this National Gardening Exercise Day, I can relish that gardening is good my body as well as my spirit!
What I love most about gardening, though, is the memories it invokes. When my hydrangea blooms—or the wind chimes twinkle, I’m reconnected in my heart with those who shared those gifts with me. When the cascading Japanese maple still changes its form with the seasons, I’m reminded of how planting that tree so many years ago also changed the relationship between a mom and her once-trouble teen daughter.
(Check out Alex’s garden design above, complete with a Japanese maple she brought home from Pike, a dogwood my sister Lynne bought us, and Christmas roses transplanted from my friend Yumi’s yard.)
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go tend to my garden. Seems I’ve been remiss, and the bird bath needs water. Cheers! J
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