As I drafted this column, I thought of my friend Rachel Postma, who also writes for this paper, and whose gardens cause me to swoon with appreciation every time I’m in them.
For years, I have marveled at gardeners as if they spoke a foreign language. I’ve watched them look through seed catalogs as if they were shopping for Neiman Marcus’ finest wares. And they may as well be, right? For “Solomon in all his glory couldn’t match the splendor of the lilies of the field” (Matthew 6:29).
Before, I marveled as an outsider, a spectator. But now, I have a little garden. It’s not much. Some flowers, both wild and from seed as well as perennials from Walmart. And the mint! The mint just won’t quit. I can’t stop tinkering with my garden. Lately, I praise it and have coffee in it and love to place whimsical trinkets under the shade of some of the flowers. (After visiting a local shop in Cable, WI, that I like, inspired by the owner’s “Fairie Garden,” I also installed a wishing well — AKA, a repurposed dog bowl, plunked into the ground and surrounded by beach glass. It is now a receptacle for water, wishes and, well, all those out-of-circulation pennies.)
Years ago, when we lived in Salt Lake City, I had a couple of mentors that later became friends whom I lovingly referred to as my “aunties.” Both were without children, but gardens seemed to fill their maternal buckets. I used to love to stroll through the flowers and vegetables that towered over us all. “Here you go,” Auntie Catherine said once. “Take a bag. Fill it with lettuce.” I remember saying in my 20s, “I could never have a garden like this,” but the aunties gave me another angle. “Consider how you feel about writing,” they said. “That’s how we are with our gardens.”
And maybe a garden is a bit like a poem and every leaf of grass I pluck, an edit. As I push the lemon balm back through the trellis where it belongs, I’m reminded of the structure I’m after, however loose and wild it seems.
Garrison Keillor, of the “Prairie Home Companion” fame, says the people in his hometown are very particular about gardens. In fact, they’d no sooner eat a store-bought tomato than go scrape roadkill off the highway and serve it up for supper. Gardens, Keillor says, are an emblem of imagination.
“Understand” might be strong, Rachel, but I am definitely beginning to appreciate gardens. I mean, isn’t this what God intended, free-form flourishing; flora and fauna and the happy creation abuzz with joy at the Holy Spirit’s handiwork? It is, after all, where life began.
Maybe a garden is a good place to sit with such reflections, even the not-so-pleasant recollection of how we blew it in the first one. It’s devastating to sit with a mistake, but a garden is a reminder of mercy, too. I’ve heard gardeners refer to certain plants being “forgiving” or only needing the slightest care, the tiniest drink of water and then there they go, rising to great heights as if shouting: ALLELUIA!
What is a garden? Well, allow me to wax poetic. A garden is a place of possibility. It is a sonnet you can live in. A garden is a way to busy yourself when your depraved human nature is suggesting you flip someone the bird or take up chain smoking. A garden is a gift; a reflection of God’s grace, a blessing of the work of our hands.
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