Lessons from a Lost Garden

I bought my first house many years ago. It was a modest bungalow, with three miniature bedrooms, no closets, and the steepest stairs I’ve ever seen in a house—built long before the city strengthened its building codes.

The yards also left much to be desired. Front and back, they were stretches of mud and weeds. But I was not unhappy with them. To me, that Earth was an empty book ready to be filled.

I went to work. For five long, hard summers, I dug, planted, and watered. I made trip after trip to local nurseries, returning with roses and chives, sedum and daylilies, phlox, coneflowers, catmint, hostas, local grasses and all types of shrubs. I ordered trumpet vines online and struggled home with heavy bags of wood chips and rocks from home-and-garden stores. My dad gave me a pond kit as a gift, and I dug the pond, brought home stones to surround it, and filled it with water plants.

I had never gardened before, and I had no idea what I was doing. I made one mistake after the other, and I was surprised how difficult it was to create an attractive landscape. I also battled a neighbor who was continually calling the city on me because, without a nice square of lawn (which I refused to plant), it was next to impossible to keep ahead of weeds until my garden was completely filled in.

Yet, after all those years, I ended up with a lavish landscape. It was wild and strange and rather unkempt, but I loved it and was proud of it.

After I got married, my husband and I bought a new house and rented out my old one. Our new home was much larger and nicer than my first. The yard was already landscaped—and far more attractive than the crazy-quilt garden I’d planted at my old house. Still, I always carried a torch for my old garden.

Just this week, I went to visit my old house for the first time in years—having left the business of the rental to a manager. To my shock, there was no sign—not even a vestige—of my garden. Gone were my mints and ferns, my prairie flowers and juniper, the lamb’s ears my friend Gayle gave me, and the beautiful, enormous Joe-Pye weed I had loved. My pond was filled in. My trumpet vines and periwinkle were nowhere to be seen. Even my raspberry bushes had been torn out. In the place of all of them was a straggly lawn.

Through the years of renting out my house, I imagined my garden growing and filling in. While I thought my tenants might pull up a section to make room for some vegetables or add some plants of their own, I had an image in my mind of my lavish garden as enduring.

But nothing endures. It is a maxim of zen and an axiom that many consider the key to a happy life. Most unhappiness comes from attaching ourselves to things we imagine will never end.

And so today, I’m stepping back from my disappointment to think not about what I lost when my garden was destroyed, but what I gained as a writer and a person from creating it. None of this will be new to my gardening friends, who have long understood these lessons. But they were new to me.

Planting my garden taught me about hard physical work. As a writer, I have spent most of my life with my nose in a book or a pen in my hand. My garden forced me to work outside, carry heavy loads, dig holes, get dirty, and sweat. Every writer in the world needs to do all of those things at some time in her life.

Planting my garden taught me to let go of control. Time and again, I put delicate plants into the soil, tended them with care, watched, and waited. Sometimes they grew so fast, I was astonished. Other times, they died quick, unfortunate deaths. Sometimes they seemed to die, only to appear the following year. I found planting a lot like sending my writing out into the world. I never knew what was going to happen, and, although I could help things along, the results were largely out of my hands.

Planting my garden taught me about the natural world. I learned more about soils, leaves, berries, shade, sunlight, rain, frost, worms, butterflies, and bees in the five summers I worked on my garden than in all the science classes I ever had.

Planting my garden taught me to expect the unexpected. I never knew what was going to come up in the spring—half the time I couldn’t remember what I had planted where. After I planted a Joe Pye weed in one corner of my yard, I discovered another the following year all the way on the other side, then three more the year after that—all in different places. You experienced gardeners out there are no doubt saying, “Really? You didn’t expect that?” No, I didn’t.

Planting my garden taught me new words, home remedies, and folklore. I learned wonderful herb names like nodding stickseed, self-heal, and mad-dog skullcap. I learned that some people apply burdock root to dry skin, that asters were once used to make wine, and that chickweed is full of ascorbic acid and calcium.

Planting my garden brought the cycle of growth and decay into stark relief for me, and losing my garden was just another reminder that nothing lasts. As I now plant bee balm, monkshood, and false salvia in the small, uncultivated areas of my current yard, I remind myself constantly, that this is just a temporary measure. That someday, the garden, the house, my writing, and I myself will be gone. Yet, more gardens will grow, more books will be written, and the Universe will continue.

 

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