I walked the garden this morning, as I always do this time of year. I thought about all the gardens I’ve had and the many small things that have amazed and delighted me about each one.
There were the garden beds at my childhood home. I remember my mom’s bearded irises and how they smelled like candy. To this day I can’t experience that fragrance without it taking me back to that little stucco house in L.A. One year when I was nine or ten I decided to plant radishes. I put a whole pack of seeds in a 24 inch line. It was a surprise to see the crowd of sprouts that arose and the power in them astonished me.
In my twenties I moved into a duplex down in San Diego. There was a yard out back in which I planted beets and lettuce, and harvested the already growing purple statice flowers, to decorate my table. Completely unrelated to gardening, I remember climbing on top of the shed to watch the fireworks from Sea World on warm summer nights.
I got married and we moved into a small cottage in Long Beach. I created a vegetable bed right along the side of the house, next to the fence. It flourished. And then I became pregnant and had such awful morning sickness I couldn’t even harvest the glut of tomatoes. The neighbor next door was kind enough to do so for me and I promptly put the bags into the freezer because the smell of those ripe red veggies just made me more nauseous.
We moved to Phoenix with our first baby and got a house on a quarter acre lot with ten citrus trees. Those were the sweetest oranges I’d ever tasted. I remember the raised beds I put in the yard and how the basil and eggplant loved the desert heat. But it’s the star jasmine that really comes to mind. It was a humble climber I planted next to the front porch post. On cool summer mornings or evenings, when I could open the house, the scent of jasmine flowed in and I still think of that home when I smell that flower.
Several years later found our family back in California, in the bay area. I loved my El Cerrito garden. The big yellow cabbage roses I planted, that I check on every time I visit my ex. The persimmon tree that has thrived as well as the fig. I planted a white sage in the easement that’s still going strong...I clip a some whenever I’m there to bring back a little bit of that California garden to my home in Richmond Virginia.
And now I’m living this solitary life, except for my dog and the abundance of plant beings that keep me company in my current garden. I walk among them every morning and so many small things make up the whole that never ceases to awe me...poppies are currently blooming, bumble bees are rolling around in rosa rugosa blooms, mugwort offering me its healing leaves, greens and veggies there to nourish this physical frame. There is nothing out there that doesn’t bring me amazement and joy, healing and wholing my spirit day after day.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.