“The garden is not the real world…”*
“Zinnias in Glass” by Maryann Lucas
The zinnias are taller than me now. In February, they were seeds the size of fingernail clippings, now they are the size of a human and prolific. I spend a couple early mornings a week dragging hoses, adjusting sprinkler angles, re-coiling hoses. This morning, I threw a vase of spent dahlias, which have hung their graceful heads over our meals this past week, into the compost with some weeds pulled while the dog attended to her own morning rituals. In a couple hours as the sun spills into the garden, it will be dizzy with bees, dragonflies, butterflies, ladybugs, hummingbirds, and damselflies. The lizards emboldened by warmth will skitter between bushes and up fences. For now, it is me, the dog, and a pair of mourning doves on the power lines.
Here, in the garden, I do not have to market my services. I do not have to hide my pain to be palatable. I am not a brand or a billboard. My tired eyes go unnoticed. Time simply passes for us both—the garden and I.
The sweeps of sunflowers bend toward the brilliant magenta bougainvillea. Cucumbers creep up the rusted trellis shading the basil from crisping in the late-July sun. Loose drifts of lavender scent my ankles as I wind the hose into a tight coil. The basket I brought is heavy with zucchini that will become my neighbors’ dinners because it has been ours for too many in a row and the children will riot if I bring more inside.
We live in a machine we have inherited but insist on repairing well past its usefulness. We give this machine everything and in return, it asks for more.
The garden exists outside this machine.
The garden accepts what I can give today, even if it is not enough. And it gives in riotous abundance. It’s not an even trade. My time and energy, for more food and beauty than I can handle, that make me seem generous in my gifting. Rich soil to pass on to the generations that come next, who will also need to eat and make beauty for themselves. A place to sit in the shade on intolerably hot days that come earlier and earlier each year. A home for the birds and insects that teeter on the precipice of existence.
In gardening, there is no final product, it is all journey. As Yiyun Li writes in Things in Nature Merely Grow, in the garden “One learns to be patient, one learns to make concessions, one learns to redefine one’s visions and ambitions, and one learns to stop being a perfectionist.” And we humans are so very slow to learn. This year, bindweed has found its way into my garden, snaking itself through the salvia and up the passionfruit vines. The machine tells me there is a chemical that can deal with this. My mind tells me it is a failing on my part. But the garden is teaching me, slowly, to see it as a gift. It is a gift to spend my time bowing my body toward the ground and carefully prying the roots out. A gift to throw the verdant vines onto the compost pile, where tomorrow I will pour old coffee grounds while the water boils and watch the dog nose soil that is ours by some miracle and for such a short time.
*Borrowed from “Daisies” by Louise Glück in the collection The Wild Iris, which I recommend reading in its entirety.
