May is my favourite month. It is the month when, after several false starts, spring finally arrives with no turning back and the natural world explodes in 100 shades of green. First the beeches and maples come into full leaf, followed by the oaks and walnuts. As the petals of the extravagant magnolia flowers fall to the ground, the redbuds—in my eyes, the most beautiful spring flowering tree—begin to put on their unabashed display. One warm rain can change the landscape in a matter of hours, as trees and plants respond energetically to the stimuli of moisture and warmth. When the risk of overnight frost passes, gardeners begin setting out tomato plants and filling flower beds with tender plants like impatiens.
For many years while I was still working full-time as a nonprofit executive, I would schedule a week’s vacation for the middle of May to give me time to get our yard and gardens in order at the beginning of the growing season. Gardening was pretext but the objective was the restoration of my soul. Or, in management terminology, the well-tended garden was an output but the desired outcome was a healthy leader. As I laboured at my job through the long days of the winter and early spring, I could feel the vitality draining out of my spirit, but I would tell myself that I would be OK if I could only hang on until my break in May. And then, a week spent with my hands in dirt would restore me like a gentle, steady rain in the desert. That’s why, when I visited Uganda with International Justice Mission five years ago this month, I relished the opportunity to get on my hands and knees and plant cabbage, sweet potatoes, and eggplant in the terracotta-red soil of Juliana’s garden plot.
This year, during the season of pandemic, gardening took on new meaning for me and many others. Like toilet paper, hand sanitizer and all-purpose flour, supplies of vegetable seeds were affected by panic-buying. A friend of mine told me yesterday that she and her family—parents and teenage children isolated together now for ten weeks—have finally found the impetus they needed to design and plant the flower beds in front of the home they purchased six years ago. This year, it was the need to be released from the confines of our home that drove me into our back yard to begin gardening two weeks ago—more than the need for emotional and spiritual renewal. And for many during this pandemic, gardening is a source of comfort. Joel Flagler, professor of horticultural therapy at Rutgers University in New Jersey, explains the allure of gardening in this way: “There are certain, very stabilizing forces in gardening that can ground us when we are feeling shaky, uncertain, terrified really. It’s these predictable outcomes, predictable rhythms of the garden that are very comforting right now.”
There are certain very stabilizing forces in gardening that can ground us when we are feeling shaky, uncertain, terrified…
Joel Flagler
Last week, as I worked compost into the ground around our hostas, planted the hanging baskets with mandevilla, and prepared the new flower bed along the west side of the yard to receive plants native to this region of Ontario, I could not help but reflect on some of metaphors gardening provides for life during a season of transition and loss like this one we are living through.
- Gardeners work within constraints. Every gardener performs his craft within the limitations of his environment—the amount of sunshine and rainfall, the length of the growing season, the fertility of the soil, the prevalence of destructive forces. Through his skill and attentiveness, he coaches beauty and productivity out of the elements at hand. But there is no Garden of Eden anywhere on earth. Adversity, mutability and loss are always with the gardener in the form of drought, the changing of seasons, invasions of pests and the devastating effects of unpredicted destructive storms. Yet beauty emerges, even—or especially—in the harshest of environments, like the desert. The pandemic has been a time of extreme loss, but the great sorrow that comes with those losses is not unknown to the human race. In My Bright Abyss, the American poet and essayist Christian Wiman writes: “Sorrow is so woven through us, so much a part of our souls… that every experience is dyed with its color. This is why, even in moments of joy, part of that joy is the seams of ore that are our sorrow. They burn darkly and beautifully in the midst of joy, and they make joy the complete experience that it is.” Joy shines brighter because of sorrow, just as the garden appears more beautiful because we know that in months it will be frozen and dead.
- Gardeners take risks. I admire business owners who have had the courage to adapt their business model and launch new ventures during the emergency orders put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus—as with restaurant owners who have offered basic online grocery menus and meal kits, enabling them to keep a fraction of their staff employed and at the same time attract new customers. The financial and collateral risks are much lower for gardeners, but the reward is finding a species that will thrive within the particular constraints of his setting. Our back yard is heavily shaded, which immediately rules out sun-loving plants like roses and irises. In addition, much of the yard is under the canopy of black walnut trees, which produce a chemical called juglone that is toxic to certain plants like chrysanthemum and peonies. Over the years, I’ve experimented with delphiniums, lupines, astilbe, and Jacob’s ladder, to name a few. Most have not survived.
- Gardeners (and farmers) know that not everything turns out well—but we will try again next year. In my last blog (“Disappointment“), I cautioned against looking for a silver lining to every cloud. Many businesses will never recover from the economic impact of the lockdown. Hundreds of thousands of families worldwide are in mourning for loved ones lost to COVID-19. The full social and mental health impacts of months of isolation may never be known. I remember as a young man (spending the summer on the family farm) surveying a barley field after it had been attacked by a plague of armyworms (moth larvae). Almost nothing remained except the shattered stalks, the leaves and green heads having been devoured, seemingly overnight, by the larvae. There was no prospect of saving the crop; we cut it and fed it to our dairy cows as green feed. But, as farmers say, “There’s always next year.” Gardeners and farmers look beyond every disappointment to the possibility of a different future. Humans have an almost limitless capacity to imagine a better day and strive toward it. Looking beyond the sorrow and difficulty with which we are all too familiar, Wiman describes a “joy in reality’s abundance and prodigality, in its atomic detail and essential indestructability, and in the deep, implicit peace whose surest promise of reality is the miraculous capacity we have… to imagine it.”
“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.”
Audrey Hepburn
Gardeners never lose hope. Audrey Hepburn said, “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” When the world seems unpredictable and out-of-control, a garden is not only a physical refuge and a spiritual reservoir, but a sign and a symbol that we will emerge one day into a new future that we can still help create.
Banner photo by F Delventhal. Some rights reserved. Unless otherwise identified, all photos and text © 2020 Edwin Wilson.
