Garden Variety Good Fortune – A Little Late with the G Post

By fate and good fortune, when my time came with the Creator to pick what life I chose to experience, I picked the one with gardens. My seedling self must have wanted to know what it was like to watch things grow, bloom, die, and regenerate season after season—maybe even nurture lives as they take root. Also, my little pre-birth zygote must have asked that this garden love advance slowly. Maybe, had it come fast, it would have burned out. I saw the hard truth before I saw the beauty and that made me love it all the more in time.

Gardens have nuance and personality. Each plant is different; each season is unique. There’s no end to the number of unexpected disasters waiting to happen. And yet, even when you do it wrong, there is always something that brings you back, and something beautiful that comes from the effort. Always. I’m so taken by the garden, that I’ve even had one permanently inked on my body.

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My first garden memory was when I would spend time at my Aunt Mary and Uncle Bart’s house. Bart was a Fire Chief and mischievous, playing tricks with his hearing aid. Mary was all things. She had the biggest smile that could light up a room. She always looked impeccably dressed, even while doing the dishes. When you’d show up at her house, which smelled of fresh air and green things, she’d say, “let me get you a Coke.” Then, she’d go on the covered back porch to the second fridge and pull out a bottle of Coke—one of the thick glass kinds. Just thinking of the weight of it in your hand and the dewiness running down your fingers makes you nostalgic for slower time and summers. But, the thing that Aunt Mary did the best was garden—bright tomatoes, buckets of green beans, dirt-smudged potatoes…. I wish I could will the spirit of her home into my own.

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I was an adolescent, only-child when my hippie parents realized their dream and bought 10 acres in Southwest Missouri where they worked to build an organic farm. They did well. My dad became an early lobbyist for organics and President of the Southwest Chapter of the Missouri Organic Association. This farm was my delight and my torment. Our home was a two-story “fixer upper,” meaning a glorified chicken coup that had seen better days—many, many better days. Children had been birthed in the back room. The only shower was in the basement. The heater was a wood-fired furnace, shiny and new. The basement looked like it belonged in a movie about serial killers. I stayed away from the nether regions. I also honed a love for remodeling and design at this house.

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We raised sheep, chickens, cows, ducks, goats, dogs, cats and each other over the next several decades. I learned to drive while bailing hay. I experienced my first muscle fatigue by picking green beans and mowing acres of lawn with a push mower. I relished the sweetness of a warm strawberry and sweet peas eaten right as they were picked. I garnered respect for spiders, snakes, and bees, our misunderstood companions, and came to despise grasshoppers and aphids. I mourned the goat that died in my arms, the cow that I enticed to slaughter, and the moments I saw my parents defeated from efforts that failed to produce. And we ate! Man did we eat! To this day, I hope my last meal on earth is a tomato that has ripened in the window, fresh sweet corn on the cob, broccoli rice casserole, and a slice of peach küchen. We built something special in that place.

When I left home, I didn’t’ see myself gardening again. I wanted to be a city girl. But, as the years progressed, I could feel it calling to me in open patches of space in my yard.

“Wouldn’t a flower bed be nice there?” it said.

“Imagine a lovely pepper plant in that spot of bright sun. “

“Tomatoes are supposed to be red and bright! Not pink and spotty. C’mon girl.”

And so, I began to build what I ran from. My husband and I planted peppers of all varieties. We were spicy. Our love affair was passionate and idealistic. We started strong and burned up in the drought of adulthood.

When we divorced, and I became a single parent, I could not find the time or the energy to grow anything except my children. Everything became processed—food, career, school, even love. Then, before I even knew it had happened the little ones became full-grown. They had their own opinions that didn’t always coincide with mine. There’s an apt metaphor here about reaping what you sow, but in reality the truth about crops and kids is that they aren’t always predictable. You can sow things to the best of your abilities, and yet, what you reap has as much to do with the environment, appropriate space, beneficial relationships, and magic, as much as the work you actually put in.

My boyfriend and I now live in a condo. We traded indoor space at other complexes for small living quarters and a huge balcony. In the summer, it serves as an outdoor living room that overlooks the train yard, a park, and a lively bridge. I have over fifty thriving plants, and collect orchids, and succulents. I also have a plot at a community garden in town. In the winter, I bring all the plants inside where we hibernate.

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My gardening skills are one of the first things people comment on when they come to visit. What they don’t know is that I killed that Japanese Maple in the picture above and the fir tree that came after it, have rotted the roots of a few succulents, have a fern that looks like it has alopecia, and in the spring I cannot wait for my plants to be banished back to the balcony because they are crowding me. That first year at the community garden, the rats had a smorgasbord of all of our ripe veggies leaving not even one of the beautiful purple cabbages for me. I planted the plot again and still the rats came to pilfer. No matter what we tried the rats were one step ahead. Bait traps over holes resulted in alternate portals the rats dug to avoid the traps. You see? Growing a garden is unpredictable, a wild ride…a rat chase. But the truth is, the rats aren’t that unlike myself.  They are in the garden dodging dangers, or down below gorged on squash and sweet corn, reveling in the feasts of their labor, and eager to see what the next season brings. Good or bad it’s sure to be different. And the death, the unruliness, the love/hate relationship? I think Frank Sinatra said it best….