Garden: A Love Story – Introduction

A Surgery Planted the Seed

Thank goodness for my mother’s back surgery.  No, not really.  I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.  Nevertheless, it was her operation that first opened the door to me, at age 15, to the world of the garden.  Though mom’s surgery was successful she had to take it easy for awhile.  During her six month recuperation I took on some of her tasks.  I was glad to.  I didn’t mind.  I learned how to cook supper for a family.  I learned how to make biscuits.  And I was introduced to something that became a life love: the garden.

I remember those heady first days and weeks.  What started out being a small plot with a few tomato plants and some carrots, ended up being what felt to me like a vast garden kingdom, my own horticultural wonderland that included cantaloupes (grown on a trellis and supported by old nylons tied like slings), castor beans, and even peanuts as well as the usual things like peppers, beans, onions, lettuce, flowers, and much more.  It was the beginning of my habit of spading under lawn (who needs all that grass?) to make more room for garden space.  I spent hours poring over garden books, soaking in garden knowledge and lore and, of course, in the garden itself.

Gardening helped me get through my teen years, a time of self-questioning and introspection which, at age 51, I’m pleased to say I’m finally through.

Bad Career Choices

Okay, I don’t quite mean it that way.  My career choices weren’t bad as a career goes, but they weren’t conducive to gardening.  Newly graduated from college I was a youth worker for two years, then a seminary student for four.  Afterwards, I served at two churches, each for about two and a half years.  In those eleven years we always lived for one to three years at a time in apartments or houses that weren’t our own.  Then we moved to Western Maryland for five years, three in our own cabin in the woods (lots of trees, lots of shade, little garden space).  As if the gardenability of where we lived could get any worse, we then lived for two years each in Bombay, Lisbon, Seoul and three in Jerusalem.  In Bombay and Jersualem we lived in apartments with no garden space and in Lisbon in a house with virtually no garden area (except for some pretty perennials and a lemon tree, all there when I arrived.)  I gardened as I could those long, nomadic years.  For example, while living in a church-owned parsonage, I planted a small garden, complete with strawberries, in the backyard.  I also asked members to share flower cuttings which I turned into a large, attractive perennial garden.  I enjoyed it until we moved after less than three years there.

It’s tough to garden when you move every few years.  You can tend plants for a season or two, fun as far as it goes, but part of the point and joy of a garden is building soil, planting perennials, and developing a year-after-year garden, something to enjoy and be proud of for years.

Gardening in the Fan

My two years in Seoul were a little different, garden-wise.  We lived in a house with a yard (we had to keep it mowed, a joy for me!….the smell of freshly mowed grass…Ahhh!).  Around the house were many empty flower beds waiting for me to start planting.  Ever since that very memorable, fun and satisfying gardening experience in Seoul, I’ve wanted to write a garden journal.  The book I imagined would not simply be about the mechanics of seeds and plants, watering and composting, and the many details of tending growing things, though it would include some of that to be sure.  What I was (and still am) really interested in is gardening’s context, the bigger world that surrounds the vegetable plot, the feelings and responses of the gardener, her family and neighbors.  I got that idea in Seoul, gardening within range of North Korean artillery (as all of Seoul is).  I was going to call the book, Gardening in the Fan, referring to the artillery fan (range) in which I gardened.  I was going to juxtapose relevant current events that were happening at that time with what I was doing in the garden.

In that unique context I planted more than just one-season plants like tomatoes, basil, and lettuce.  I also planted bulbs, azaleas, perennials, and even a rock garden, something I hoped would last for many years.  Setting the garden, both short and long term plants, within the context of that regional conflict was a powerful image.  Who could be planting plants at a time like this in such a setting?  But that’s just the point and joy of it!  Gardening is a powerful act of faith in life’s ultimate, inexorable victory, and in defiance of an uncertain, often hostile-seeming world.  The book’s punchline, at least one of them, would be that every gardener gardens between these two extremes, a participant in the mystery of new life and in a context filled with unique threats, worries, and uncertainties.

The Ruler of the Many Gardens I Survey

Through a series of fortunate accidents I promise I didn’t engineer, I now garden three different plots, two (one I named Smith and the other, Jones) in local community gardens and one, the Lorelei, outside the door of our ground-floor apartment.  We will most likely not settle here but move to a new and likely far-away place next year (hopefully not until spring crops here are finished).  I guess that’s part of the uncertain context that makes my gardening so precious and satisfying.  My garden experiences in Smith, Jones, and The Lorelei form the basis of Garden: A Love Story, that journal I first imagined after gardening in Seoul.  Planted between these entries are reminiscences, snapshots and vignettes from the gardens of my life, from those first experiments (all gardening is an experiment) when I was fifteen to the many garden loves of my life.