Peace in the Garden

My yard is ablaze with color. The blue leadwort tumbles under the changing reds of the Crimson Queen maple and pushes up against the golds of the rudbeckias and those irrepressible calendulas. The grey lavendar soothes the scene even as it encourages its blue blossoms to keep those of the hyssop and the annual salvia company in the waning days of the summer season. Sunflowers of all sizes turn their cheery faces to greet the sun and bring smiles to the walkers who pass by. A few double white petunias cling to prosperity while the alyssum emerges anew, ever hopeful that it will have enough time to grace its place before it withers under the pressure of the winter storms to come. And the mallow just keeps on blooming, oblivious to the certain fact that it too will soon be sentenced to bed rest until next spring. There are so many candidates for plant of the month this time of year…and yet I’ve put the stories of each of these individual plants aside, just for this one column. Today I want to remember that our gardens are more than just an assortment of plants. They are places of peace and—most of all—hope. What other term can describe what we feel when we lean on our hoes after an hour spent poking tiny brown seeds into shallow little holes and patting them gently into place? We have faith that they will follow their natural course, giving us blossoms to sustain our spirit and fruit to nourish our bodies.

The very predictability of my garden’s cycles makes it easy for me to take them for granted. I slip into the assumption that all other aspects of life—including the affairs of humankind—will continue to unfold the way they always have. I forget that everything can change in an instant and so when it does, I am surprised and shocked. It’s then that I turn to my garden for comfort. It reminds me that there are some rhythms in life that do remain constant, that seasons of new beginnings always follow those of endings, that the beauty of spring ultimately triumphs over the dying and death of autumn and winter, that the blossoms and fruits of summer will always reappear. Faith and hope may be withered by the blasts of anguish and despair, but they will inevitably return to grace their place in our hearts and our souls.

Plants are agents of health, and sustenance. It is no accident that they are most often called upon to symbolize peace, love, humility, remembrance, purity—the best we can offer each other in our short journeys together on this earth. When we are shown that there are those who for reasons we can’t understand offer only the worst, plants remind us that it need not always be so. For many of us, our gardens are where we try to make sense of it all. And yet we can’t stay in them forever. We have to take our necessary places in the scheme of life and experience all the demands and pressures and sorrows and joys that are sure to result from our interactions with others of our particular species. We are individual parts of another sort of garden, one that’s often messy and overgrown and in need of much work before its beauty is restored. Sometimes it’s hard to find the essence of that beauty, but it is there. Life and its cycles go on. Beauty and its companions—hope and faith—will move from our hearts, through our gardens, onto the streets of our neighborhoods, out into our larger communities. From there, they can establish themselves throughout our world. We need only remember to tend to ourselves and to each other as we tend to our plants, with care and concern and understanding.

So the featured plant for October 2001 is every plant you’ve ever loved. It’s the one that gives you happy memories or a smile when you see it or catch even a hint of its fragrance. It’s the one that you’ve nurtured or the one that has grown tall even though you’ve neglected it. It’s the one that stayed where you put it or the one that’s wandered aimlessly into every corner, causing you to cluck at it when you find it where it doesn’t belong. This column is a tribute to every plant that ever grew, and it’s dedicated to every gardener who ever dug in the dirt and wondered if the rains would ever come or the sun would ever shine again.

May goodness and mercy follow you all, in and out of your gardens.