It’s a beautiful, sunny morning, and I have just come in from my garden, flushed with victory, and yet somehow, bleak and despondent with loss. My garden is a metaphor for life. In it are the usual suspects you would find on any given day in a patch of soil existing on a cliff overlooking a body of water in the Pacific West Coast.
Resilient plants that never fail
There are plants that exist to love and support you and wish only to be there for you, to rise up out of the devastation of winter to give you joy—there’s rosemary, there’s ceanothus, and lemon balm. Not to mention mugwort, lady’s mantle, and elecampane, faithful beings all, waiting for the right day in May to spring up and welcome you, their perennial hearts full of promise and vegetative bliss.
Plants that mysteriously disappear
Then there are the plants that want to bring you down, pierce your soul with the agony of loss, disappoint you with a disappearing act equal only to Houdini. These are the delphinium, the lupines, and the cabbage rose, they will turn to you with a beaming smile, welcome you with a display of love and purity you can only imagine, and the next day, abandon you with no more than a bye the bye, just like a bad seed, they might as well just run away and join a rock band.
One day, they are your true friends, sharing the sunshine and fresh air with you, and the next, they are gone, and you are left with a knife in your back, saying, “Eh tu, Brutus?”
Plants that give in to weakness and disease
Some of them, of course, just like in life, seem to have a genuine desire to please. They turn on their charm when they hear you coming, their flower faces beaming at you, their blossoms unfurling the minute they hear your footsteps on the path.
And then you look closer, and you see that they have given in to decadence and disease. Typically, these are the peonies, the viburnum, the well established rose. Years of nurturing mean nothing to them. After so much pleasure in the past, they have now, just like errant children, turned on you and gone bad.
Nothing good ever comes of them now. Lacking discipline and self-control, they pick up caterpillars and aphids and other bad habits. They fail to fill out, leaving space for brambles, trumpet vine, and noxious weeds.
Plants that attract predators
And then there are the treacherous ones, hydrangeas, and the fragrant rose, plants that make you wary—they will be nice to your face, and stab you the minute your back is turned. They welcome bad influences into their space, shameless displays of disloyalty and lack of appreciation. They have a weakness for dubious friends and evil accomplices, creatures they welcome during the early hours of dawn. the light-footed deer, the rabbits, the sneaking cats that dig. They all cooperate to torture you and make you weep.
Plants that are a metaphor for life
Ah, yes, a morning in my garden is all I need to complete my life. I have no need for cups of tea at the Empress with friends, walks on the beach with my loved one, long telephone calls with my sisters in another city. All I need to experience the fullness of life, and the complete range of human emotion is a morning in my garden, consorting with my devoted followers, and doing battle with my most grevious foes.
I know that after a season of working in my garden, and being in the centre of the maelstrom of life as it were, I will be exhausted and fulfilled at the same time, overcome with wonder and derision and disgust, emotions that pour simutaneously into my heart. Just as in life, everything exists in unison, the entire universe outside my patio door.
I just have to wait for the perfect day in May, when the sky is cloudless, the sun is shining and the air is still.
I just have to spend a morning in my garden to experience life.
I love this piece; love how you describe your connections to earth and plant and sky with sensuous abandon. This is a glorious time of year, watching the blooms rise and fall, pulling out the weeds, basking in the beauty under blues skies and bright sun. You struck a nerve, and I so relate. Thank you for a delightful read . . . Sign me your fellow garden lover, friend and fan!
Hey, Stephanie—”sensuous abandon”, love to steal those words someday! Thanks for this, I’m grateful!
Good writers always borrow and share with other good writers! Again, I adored this piece. It was a glimpse into your soul.
Thanks, again, Stephanie! I love this online community, and its generosity!
Odd that you write about your garden today as, today the tilers finished work on retiling our garden. I shall shortly be blogging about it showing pre and post redesigning the garden.
Our garden is small but whatever you have said about what you find in yours resonates with me as ours show me the same. Great post and very incisive.
I hoped you would like it, Rummuser! It’s a bit of a spoof, which is always a risk, since not everyone ‘gets’ it. But I can always count on you!
A lovely entry! Is the photo of you? The West Coast is such a different climate for growing an ornamental garden, than Ontario. Winter kill is so common here, many plants that are perrenials elsewhere, are annuals here.
My favourite things in the yard are wild: strawberries, dandelions, violets, plantain, red and white clover, hawkweed… even the dreaded bindweed has its moments of beauty. The lungwort, the columbine, and the day lilies have escaped their beds and run wild over the yard. I enjoy the tended flowers very much, but my joy is found in the wild things.
I lean hard on my perennials, they are the backbone of my garden, and I love them all, even the ones that give me a bad time!I’m all for including “wild” or “volunteer” plants in my garden. They seem to thrive the best! And no, sadly, the picture is not of me. I subscribe to a company that supplies me with photos (at a price), and couldn’t find a suitable one of an older person gardening—this lady is somewhat younger than I am!
I love your metaphor! We grow a lot of succulents: tough, hardy, always there for you, unique, and every once in a while, many of them will present you with a flower of astonishing beauty.
Thanks, Janis. I think you are in a warm climate, hence your use of succulents. It gets dry here as well, but spring is usually wet and cool, the perfect environment for perennials!
Love this, Diane. There’s so much wisdom to be found in the garden.
Hi Linda. Trust you to see the ‘wisdom’ in the piece! Thanks, I hoped the departure from my ‘serious’ topics will be tolerated, and hopefully appreciated!
I am not much of a gardener but can appreciate all the emotion that goes into carefully co-creating living beauty. My husband is like you in this. I gave him a garden stone one year that reads, “As the garden grows so does the gardener”. I think that is a very appropriate quote for the exceptional post.
Bernadette, I will cherish that quote! And, as always, praise from you is valued, and so very much appreciated!
Hi Diane! I love your idea that a garden is a perfect metaphor for life. I’ve learned so much from my garden and all experiences with working in the dirt. We live in the desert southwest so I am right now enjoying the bounty of tomatoes from my garden but I know that within a couple of weeks it will be gone. Certain plants can survive the desert heat but not many from a garden. Still, the plants that are able to survive, and sometimes even thrive are uniquely wonderful as well. Thanks for the thoughts. ~Kathy
I don’t think my favored perennials would thrive in your climate—they require more of an English atmosphere. I envy your ability to grow tomatoes, though!
As you know, I use gardening as a metaphor for the art of being happy. Pulling the weeds, nurturing the flowers. Patience and persistence, commitment and practice. And enjoy the process, that’s what it’s all about! Resilience!
It appears that some people, like plants, are more resilient than others! Thanks, CM.
If my garden is a metaphor for life that is a worry.
Have a look at Bernadette’s quote below, Rachel. TeeHee.
It’s easy to visualize you in your garden, Virginia! Hope you are getting good weather and the best of conditions!
So true. Thank you for another way to think about my garden.
I have always enjoyed gardens, from my dad’s WW2 small back yard where he grew vegetables and a rose bush or two, up to today’s rather untamed assortment of shrubs, trees and unidentified plants, most of which are probably weeds. I still potter about, but in my eightieth year I’m afraid that I am forced to hire someone else to do any hard work. Well that’s my excuse anyhow. .. 😉
Well, that’s okay BJ! As long as you maintain an interest in it. That’s what keeps us ‘gardeners’ going!
I feel so honored when in a garden. It’s as though all the beauty and scent exists to bring me happiness. Your metaphores are lovely and universally true. I have but one problem. I cannot garden. It’s relentlessness is a dread. I so want to be a person who loves it and for whom the pride of garden is well deserved. It is a true dissappointment in my life that I have no pleasure in gardening.
Gardening is a must for me, but if I didn’t have a garden, I would look for public garden to visit, just to experience the beauty and indulge my senses. You don’t need to actually do the work (and the digging!) to get the benefits! But I’m sure you have other outlets to satisfy your appreciation of life—such as reading, or art, or doing anything you enjoy. One of the things I would love to do (but can’t do it well) is bake. There must be so much pleasure in doing that!
You are very kind. And I love to cook and bake. Now I will take more pride in it. We do have lovely gardens to visit. I was at Longwood Gardens recently with old high school friends. What a treat.
Thanks, Alexandra. Have a wonderful summer!
Comments are closed.