I've never been much of a gardener (lack of opportunity, mainly, and confidence, partly) so everything is a bit of a question. A visit with my friend Barbara for tea included a tour of the garden during which I gleaned as much input as I could and during which she helped me wrestle several root-bound trees and shrubs out of pots and into the ground. She also identified for me as "columbine" what I thought was a curly clover, after which I stopped pulling it up.
Later in the week, I enjoyed a visit from another friend, the former gardener-in-residence at Pleasant Pines. We visited as we dug and grubbed, releasing one of the flower beds from its shackles of overgrowth and last year's glory and unearthing a scattering of beauty to travel down to Georgia with her to connect her new home to the old. As we toured the yard and I gleaned more information about the plantings throughout, I pointed to one bed saying, "There's some columbine." I was feeling pretty good about my newly acquired knowledge and the casual way in which I displayed it until Sharon replied, "That's clover." A closer inspection did, in fact, reveal the very commonplace clover I have recognized all of my life until I discovered columbine.
Ah, well. So, in gardening, as in most other endeavors of my life, I am an amateur. But, as another friend and I were discussing just the other week, just because we've never done something before (or our mothers never did it!) doesn't mean we can't learn to do it now.
And there are advantages to being a beginner. There is the heightened awareness that comes with the new. Our senses, which jog along through the routine and mundane, come alive in the undertaking, bringing with them the poignancy that touches on childhood. A garden in spring is a wonderful place to be fully alive!
I made discoveries other than columbine this past week (one does a lot of thinking when the blood is rushing to the brain, bent over in a death match with crabgrass!). I share them here as a list with no particular order, making no claims as to their importance or originality:
1) Dirt smells good! (a rediscovery)
2) Worms that are cut in half do not grow into two worms.
3) Gardening opens conversation. We talked about many things - my daughters and I, my friends and I.
4) Someone needs to make a mud-proof dictionary. I imprecisely defined "tenacious" for my two oldest several times. Here is my shortest definition: tenacious = crabgrass.
5) Gardeners wear gloves for a reason. While historically resistant to wearing gloves, three days of stinging, lacerated hands attempting to do dishes and give baths convinced me of their necessity.
6) In our eagerness to get rid of the ugliness of old growth, weeds, or dead leaves, it is easy to damage the tender new growth it encases. Carefulness, gentleness are needed in beginnings. This is true of plants and souls.
7) Some bulb plants will not bloom if their bulbs are not exposed. What seems to suggest greatest vulnerability is a condition indispensable to its beauty. This, too, is true of plants and souls.
8) In the garden (and in life), I do not create beauty. I am simply privileged to experience it, to wonder at it. And, yes, to have a small hand in pointing others to it.
Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Luke 12:27
not a lily... but still glorious.
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