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Gardening is for lovers because lovers are in tune with the deeper threads of life that sustain us. Stanley Kunitz uses a metaphor from nature’s garden when he exhorts us to “Live in the layers, not on the litter”.
In his book “The Wild Braid”, gardener and poet Kunitz calls the garden “the cosmos in miniature” that is symbolic of life, complete with its surprises, and unexpected outcomes.
Rachel Naomi Remen tells a story of one such unexpected outcome in her collection of stories, “Kitchen Table Wisdom”. She made a decision many gardeners would not: she allowed a stag who was eating her rose bushes free access to her garden, and explains: “I thought I was planting rosebushes in order to have roses. It now seems I was actually planting rosebushes in order to have half an hour of silence with this magical animal every morning and every evening.”
In “The Sanctuary Garden”, author Chris McDowell tells the story of the backyard birch tree he sat under as a boy. The tree gave him a place of solace, rest, poetic imagination, and a place to watch and enjoy nature.
By such simple acts as providing water, food for birds, and nesting places, we invite nature into our lives, so that we can interact with life that goes beyond ourselves and our immediate personal concerns. It can pull us out of our own isolated worlds and impart feelings of connectedness.
Author Thomas Moore writes: “We may have to learn again the mystery of the garden: how its external characteristics model the heart itself, and how the soul is a garden enclosed, our own perpetual paradise where we can be refreshed and restored”.
In the words of Phyllis McGinley: “Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense.”
In the snow-covered frozen land that is winter in the Midwest, the gardener in each of us remembers the green of the landscape from summer. Yet many of us are still able to embrace the beauty of winter in the naked skeletons of trees, some still clasping their brown leaves from autumn. Too, we appreciate the boughs of the evergreens that remain majestic as winds howl through them. Even the dried stems of tall grasses half-buried in snow emanate a sense of silent determination in the face of adversity.
We know the tulips, daffodils, and crocuses will come, as surely as they always do. We know, without ever being told, that gardening is not only an act of hope, but is hope incarnate in a living, breathing form. Hope and love, I should say. A wise man once said that if you want to learn how to love, begin by keeping a houseplant. In that way you will learn how to care for another, to meet its needs, to help it thrive. By doing so, you may learn the rewards for such caring are great, indeed.
