Leaving it Behind
Garden: A Love Story
I’m looking forward to our upcoming time away in the United Kingdom (Scotland, Cornwall, Oxford, London, Essex) but find it ironic that we plan to see several Cornish gardens as well as attend the Chelsea Flower Show during the busiest gardening time of the year. I’m abandoning my own garden for three weeks to tend itself, sort of the horticultural equivalent of Home Alone in which the kid left behind is a newly planted garden. Newly planted potatoes (no sprouts yet), several hundred newly planted baby plants I’ve meticulously raised from seed over the last couple of months, newly planted bean, cucumber, okra, zinnia, Mexican sunflower, cosmos seeds, newly planted native plants for the shade garden out back.
Once things get established a garden is more leaveable. At the beginning of its planty existence, however, it needs a little more tending. It needs my watchful eye, my vigilance to know when action is needed to help these youthful plants get to their productive adulthood. It needs me!
Or does it? Well, maybe not as much as I imagine. Plants, especially the many native ones I grow like goldenrod, aster, monarda, black-eyed Susans, Helenium, alum root, bleeding heart, and so forth, are by nature good on their own. The many annuals, flowers and vegetables I started from seed are mostly mature enough, ready for the transition. I’ve done what I can. There’s no reason to expect I’ll come home to a barren wasteland full of dead and dying plants and many reasons to expect to see my young garden entering its vigorous adolescence.
Sometimes I don’t think highly enough of myself, my abilities, my talents, my recognitions of what’s good and bad, what’s beautiful and not. But often, way too often, I think I put too much weight, too much dependence on my powers to save, to protect, to accomplish, to Conquer the Foes Arrayed Before Me day in and out. I’m thinking this is lesson 147 taught by Professor Garden: Do what you can within your abilities and limitations and do it well, and then, well, let it go. Trust your work, yes, but even more trust the process, that amazing almost magic-seeming system, that system of systems, we sometimes call nature but that we could also, maybe should more often, call the Hand of God.
It’s too easy to focus on my hands and their work but maybe that’s not such a bad thing, at least as long as I remember that God, in His ultimate unknowableness, His unfathomable wisdom which is to say His foolishness that is “wiser than men,” chooses to use those hands, my hands, to do His work…
…including in the garden which I’m thinking is going to be just fine until I get back.
(Of course, an hour or so after posting this I walked by the potato bed and saw these.)
