March 3, 1999

My daughter Rebecca was home from college this past weekend. After dinner she sat down at the piano while I read the paper and wandered through some magazines. As she played I paused to watch her. She was playing "Claire de Lune." This time, however, she was playing it very slowly, savoring every note. Some passages she would repeat, as if taking a second helping. Unaware of anything else around her and forgetting about classes and term papers, she allowed the melody and harmonies to wrap around her, reviving her spirit and giving her energy, like hugs from Grandma.

The garden has the same effect on my wife Donna. As she moves through the perennial border, routing weeds and dressing up geraniums and canterbury bells, she becomes completely immersed in the task at hand, unaware of time passing and phones ringing. While she’s pruning a coneflower or shaping up a young spirea, it is as if the other plants gather round her like a litter of puppies, each clamoring for her attention. When I must interrupt her for something, I often have to call to her several times to break the trance and bring her back to the real world.

For me, being close to the soil is to be close to the past and the future. Life comes from the soil and eventually returns there. The soil itself is the pasts of men, as well as pasts of plants and animals and microbes who have completed the short journey we’re now taking. Past life energizing life present. The message of Ash Wednesday.

Have you ever stopped to consider why you garden? Why do you struggle with a spade to turn the soil? Why do you fight the battles with bugs and bunnies and weeds? Why do you haul the water in times of drought? Working in the garden is not a task you must do. Or is it? For a true gardener, the answer to that question is "yes." But the reasons one gardens are personal and probably have to do with a mixture of ecology, psychology, and theology.

I have observed a few common attributes of true gardeners. For example, all true gardeners I know believe in God and go to church. Gardening itself is an act of faith, really. Without faith and hope, what's the point of planting a tulip bulb?

True gardeners are optimistic sorts. They know next year the weather will be better and the bugs won’t be as bad. Life in general is good and is getting better in the opinion of the true gardener. True gardeners I know expect to live forever. I have seen a good number of gardeners in their late eighties and nineties buying young trees and shrubs to plant at home. And they do the work themselves.

I recall an elderly woman who visited my place once. Her daughter patiently helped her out of the car and unfolded her walker. A canister provided her with extra oxygen. As she slowly came into the nursery, I said, "Hello, how are you today?" With a twinkle in her eye she said, "I’ve never been better, young man. Now where are your pale blue pansies?" I have asked that same question of younger, healthier people and gotten a much longer answer which included a list of aches and pains and doctor’s visits.

Finally, most true gardeners have a keen sense of humor. One time I was showing an elderly man a young spruce tree for his yard. "Too small," he said. "Do you have a bigger one?" I told him this one would be about ten feet tall in six years or so. He said, "Son, at my age I don’t even buy green bananas." I found him a bigger tree.