For most of us, gardening is not the daily work we do that puts money in our pockets. When someone asks us what we do, they are usually looking for a job title to attach to our persona. Most of us “work for a living” but we “become gardeners” before or after work or on the weekends. It’s interesting that during the time we spend working in the garden, the word work takes on a different meaning. In this case, we lose any feeling of drudgery and put our whole heart into the effort.
Two transformations occur when a person becomes a gardener. First, the look of the land changes. A piece of property, perhaps a suburban yard, begins to take on a new shape. An order and an aesthetic that somehow mimics the personality of the gardener emerge. While one friend’s garden exudes an aura of class, another is glitzy from the get-go. It does us all good to see ourselves reflected in our garden. Fellow gardeners relish a garden with personal flair.
Then, there is the change that takes place within the gardener. In the process of planting a rose or choosing a garden ornament, moving rocks or sitting for a five-minute coffee break, you, the gardener, get the occasional glimpse of your own hand at work. You come to know yourself. No one knows better what they like and dislike, what gives them pleasure, than a person in the act of creating something. I never knew I was partial to a certain shade of yellow until I planted the subtle buttery moonbeam coreopsis in my garden.
The magic of the garden is that it is so much like real life. A garden is a part of nature and nature is a great metaphor for this life. You work with Mother Nature; you don’t take over her job. Ideas come to us and we take time to ponder. By thought and effort, we change what we think needs to be changed, now or next year. Once you become a gardener, you accept the fact that creating a garden takes time. No other single work of art stays with us for as long and lasts through our personal transformations like a garden.
