365 Days
Gardens can provide so much: space to refresh ourselves, grow food and herbs, be a refuge against the busy world, and a way for us to support the natural world in which we live. 365 Days is a series of short posts to inspire contemplation of our gardens. While many of the date-stamps of posts will reflect Northern hemisphere seasons and some of the gardening typical in USDA zone 8, for Southern hemisphere gardeners, advancing the time-frame six months will provide greater synchronicity. But this is not a blog about how to garden, there are YouTube channels for that kind of thing. Rather it is about how stewardship of the soil can feed both ourselves and the space in which we live.
If it touches a chord in you, please let us know in the comments below each post. We enjoy hearing your thoughts.
365 days is not yet complete. It is, however, being steadily added to. Eventually, like planting a hedge, all 365 days will be represented.
Gardens, like lives, take years to reach maturity. Even if you are stupidly rich and can buy large trees, an instantly-landscaped garden cannot replicate a garden that's been developed year after year, season after season. But even with time, a garden that's been around a while won't amount to much unless the gardener has given it some forethought. In my front yard are five flats rooting cuttings that will this Fall become a hedge. In 15 years' time, those little cuttings will be a solid, beautiful line of shrubbery standing resolute along the edge of my property, branches poking through the fence, an impenetrable barrier to wandering dogs, deer, and nosy neighbours. Similarly, a life without forethought is likely to yield mixed results. Some planning is required, and then sustained effort to implement the plan is needed.
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Halloween - or Samhaim - as it was originally known, is a Pagan holiday that celebrates the harvest before the long nights of winter. It is said to be the time when the veil between the living and the dead is the thinnest.
For those of us who have lost a loved one, it can be a time of special poignance. As I write this, it is three and a half years since my wife died. Cynthia loved Halloween, so it is always a bittersweet period. The dying don't always get to see their dreams fulfilled, so this moment when the veil is at it's thinnest is a reminder to us, the living, to live our lives with as much tender beauty as we are able, while we are able. Life is, after all, ephermeral.
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The days are getting shorter and the switch to daylight saving time seems to have hastened how soon the darkness arrives in the yard. This summer, I struggled with similar shadows. I'd be in the garden, watering the cuttings that had rooted, and I'd feel great sorrow at the loss of my partner and that she wasn't with me to enjoy the new growth and the promise it held. It reached a point where it was physically painful. And then the next day, I'd find myself unable to be sufficiently interested in starting the day. I'd turn over and try to go back to sleep. Or I'd force myself up, eat breakfast, go to work and grind out the day. By lunchtime, I'd be exhausted. In the afternoon, as hard as I'd try, nothing seemed worth doing.
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The approach of winter provides the garden with fallen leaves. As our perennial plants die back, the trees shed their leaves. This is a gift. Pine needles form a carpet on the grass. Raking it into rows and then the rows into piles, soon we end up with a blanket to overwinter our perennials.
In sections of the garden where deciduous trees shed, it comes at a time where there is still some green in the lawn, topped with fallen leaves. Mowing before the lawn goes dormant provides a last top-up of the compost bays. The combination of fallen leaves and green grass will soon start to break down. With turning, by spring this last mow will have turned to black gold, ready to refresh the raised beds.
The change of season, the approaching darkness, can still provide bounty. Instead of looking to the sky, see the leaves that will safeguard your plants and feed the soil when spring returns.
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In his work after WWII, Nazi concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl observed that men without hope die. He wrote that among his fellow inmates, those who were able to connect with a purpose in life were more likely to be among the survivors.
Where do we find something to sustain us when all seems lost? When life becomes barren? When destruction seems imminent? When work is a grind?
Without trivialising these questions, gardening can help sustain the soul. It can remind us of the resilience of life. Seeds sprout in concrete cracks, and barren soil needs only compost and water - and a little loosening - to recover. On our knees, turning the soil can feed more than our bellies. The life it brings can feed our hearts, too.
The small acts of nurturing our garden, of choosing to foster the tiny signs of life emerging and then growing, holds space for hope in our lives.
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There are times of year that afford some breathing space. Thanksgiving in the United States is one of them, in the southern hemisphere, around Easter. Both are holidays for the people who get to take them, but if your year falls a little differently, take advantage of these spaces. In the United States, Thanksgiving Weekend includes Black Friday, which heralds the moment when shops can morph their Black Friday week into Christmas Shopping!!! Inboxes are filled with spam, each sales email more breathy than the next. Gardeners are not immune, and it can be a good time to pick up and end of season plant that would have cost triple the amount in the spring or summer. These breathing spaces are the times of year when the garden has gone largely quiet as frosts have taken their toll and vegetable patches mainly comprise winter hardy greens or garlic and onion snuggling down into their beds to overwinter.
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First freeze is seldom a surprise. It happens around similar times each year. Depending on your location, the first visit of the coming winter is only overnight, with weather allowing for the last stretch of summer growing. Gardeners everywhere have adapted to this time of year. Some harvest early and plant for fall growing, the cold-hardy plants enjoying the cooler weather. Others use covers to protect their plants until the season is truly over.
In the raised beds in my garden, I use old aluminum single-pane windows steepled over the beds, recovered from a home energy efficiency renovation. Foresight often seems like wisdom, but gardeners learn to look ahead at the cycle of time, and set aside resources. Recovered windows are winter-proofing; old coffee containers are saved from the bin and turned into pots for growing.
How are we translating the foresight of the garden into preparation in the other areas of our lives?
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There comes a time when Fall turns to winter, when temperatures kill the leaves of perennials, their dying a signal of their intent to hibernate for the coming extended cold. The leaves slump on the ground, looking mushy and going brown. The garden looks untidy, unfinished, even ugly.
But this dormancy gives us a chance to feed and protect our garden for the coming heat of summer and the possibility of drought. When the garden appears at its lowest, this is when to layer on the mulch. Unseen, soil organisms will feed on the mulch in darkness, adding goodness and tilth to the soil.
It is a lesson to consider: how do we feed our souls when things are bleak? What are we using to blanket ourselves against the winters we will face, giving us a space to feed our spirits until the spring? We know winter will come. Let us not look at it as a time of bleakness, but as a time to hold space to grow stronger for the spring.
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Gardening teaches us to choose, if we'll take the lessons of the garden and apply them to our lives. We choose the plants that will do well in our gardens. We choose flowers and species that will feed the bees and other pollinators. We choose grasses and undergrowth to provide a safe space for nature to take shelter. We choose where to locate plants. And each season, we compost annuals. Maintenance calls us to cut back the roses and other bushes and shrubs. We do so to keep them healthy and so that they will grow to be more beautiful.
The lesson of pruning is also needed in our lives.
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Our garden can teach us a lot about failure. But it also provides lessons on thriving.
All gardeners fail at growing at some point. We kill plants because of too much water, too little, too much shade, too much sun. The ground is too hard, or the hole too deep. Because we went away on holiday, or to hospital. Disease and insects. Bunnies and squirrels.
Gardens are also a lot like lives - they have boundaries and are located in climates that set limitations. We face limitations through birth, family money, education, disposition, health circumstances, life events, and a variety of structural and other impacts.
And yet there are gardens everywhere that are full of richness and that feed the souls of the people living there. Regardless of the space we have, it is possible to be intentional about what we grow and to thrive despite limitations. Gardens reward our stewardship. Spaces can be transformed into places of beauty with time and stewardship. In turn, this stewardship transforms us.
We can be beautiful, despite circumstances.
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