When my friend Elizabeth’s children and our own were in their single-digits and playing together weekly, Elizabeth and I were often the target of my youngest daughter’s wit. As longtime gardeners, the playdate wind-down was inevitably slowed by our lingering over her garden beds or my own. I always had questions, Elizabeth had expertise, and my daughter cracked up the other kids by imitating us with a gleam in her eye: “And this flower, and this flower, and THIS flower …”. She was not wrong. We had a lot to say about flowers. And still do.
Every garden is a story. Or, really, a novel without end, but lots of Deus ex machinas. No matter how small, how scraggly, the decision to make a garden can feel biblical in its profundity. “Now, let there be a garden!” But of course that’s just the beginning of a lifetime of attempts and second-guesses, discovery, disappointment, and delight.
My mom was an Anglophile with an artistic sensibility and floral acumen. Over the second half of her life, she improved our suburban tract home in Lakewood, Colorado with English cottage gardens, planting flowers she’d seen on her trips with my father to the Cornish countryside. When I finally visited Cornwall, myself, I recognized from my mother’s garden the pink plumes of Jupiter’s Beard flourishing in gardens there— indeed, growing out of stone walls — and immediately planted them in our own front beds. Like you, I suspect, I could tell a story about each plant in my garden — this torch lily, a tribute to my father; this bloodroot, a gift from a friend’s woodsy backyard “biomass”; these native plants, with their busy, buzzing clouds of pollinators, designed by Ben at The Botany Shop. “And this flower, and this flower, and this flower …”
Such talk cross-pollinates. When my spouse and I were the only visitors to the 13th century Scottish castle, Hunterston — smaller than many McMansions in moneyed American suburbs — I peered longingly through the padlocked iron gates of the walled garden, studying from a distance the late spring coral poppies companion-planted with bluebells and foxgloves. The gardener suddenly rounded the corner, his mind mid-task, but he stopped, recognizing an aficionado. “Fancy a look?” he invited, and to my surprise he not only unlocked the gate, but lingered to chat, once I all but cracked my knuckles and trash-talked with him the runaway rhododendrons (an invasive disaster throughout the Scottish Highlands), and then praised the color and structure of his beds, with rosy lupins coupled with sky blue bachelor buttons, and the next wave of color at the ready as yellow rosebuds and violet irises swelled. Once he saw I understood his work, he nodded, and left us to wander, calling back, “Just lock up when you leave!”
Further North, along the drunk-doodled coastline of Western Scotland, we stopped for coffee and cake in the village of Gairloch. Their rocky fishing harbor had a modest stretch of exploding flowers planted in raised wooden beds and a repurposed dinghy, mere feet from high tide. Maintained by the community, the space is called the “Gairloch Sitooterie,” and features cafe tables and benches where people can “sit oot” and enjoy the flowers and conversation. The Gairloch Sitooterie has its own Facebook page (my favorite follow after Heather Cox Richardson) with its unspooling epic, as volunteer gardeners nurture spring fritillaria and then succession plant fireworks of delphiniums and spiky sea holly through salt-spray and season shifts until winter winds blow them out.
It’s not surprising that gardeners are so often change-makers in communities, including ours. Gardeners balance hope with humility. Nature is our best teacher, as birds drop gifts in our beds — this year, for me, a sunny-cupped wild mallow and the scarlet plumes of Woodland Pinkroot — reminding us of our modest place in the web of cultivators. We learn to companion-plant for vegetable health and to delight the eye, tucking nasturtiums, marigolds, and strong-scented herbs around vulnerable varietals — a skill that transfers to bringing together the talents and personalities that fuel grassroots activism. And making the effort to learn and celebrate the names of every living thing is kind of the whole shebang, isn’t it?
With my trowel, and my keyboard, I follow poet Mary Oliver’s “Instructions for living a life”:
“Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
And, flower by flower, I am.
