Today, on my brief morning run, the May wind was biting and frigid. I tried to keep my ears covered with the hood of my sweater, but the wind was more clever (or at least more persistent) than I. It looks promising and warm outside now; the sky is relatively cloudless, probably thanks to today’s wind.
I am so ready for sun, and warmth. I have been living for planting time, pushing my feet hard against the floorboards because I can’t reach the accelerator, ever since we moved away from my farm nearly two years ago. Last spring I was managing a muddy construction project, and couldn’t afford to indulge in horticultural fantasies. This spring, settled in the house and eager to garden, I killed most of my penstemon seedlings and nearly all my lady’s mantle in their nursery flats with my impatience.
I have always started my new gardens with seeds. Seeds are amazing, amazing things. With between two to four dollars for a seed packet, you can plant an entire plug tray (or two). Which planting could result in hundreds of dollars worth of plants. Eventually. My very first garden was populated with salvia, lavender, rudbeckia, and pinks that had their beginnings in my bedroom window in late winter. Like a preschooler with a bean packed in a cup of dirt, I couldn’t contain my excitement and wonder as those first seeds germinated. Thirteen years later, I still can’t. Green sprouts emerging from inert, brown seeds–no, from buried, hidden, invisible inert brown seeds–ah! It is so miraculous. I feel so rich. I envision banks and swells and drifts of flowers. And that first summer in my first garden, I had them. Their blooming was arrhythmic, their proportions gawky (the lavender took two more years to catch up with everyone else), but I had lots and lots of flowers.
I learned with my second garden that even one or two surviving seedlings can spawn entire nations of flora (what works for weeds can work for lavender and almost always works for salvia). Of all the flats of seedlings I started the first winter on our lavender farm, only a small percentage survived the delayed planting, the hot and early summer, and the virgin alkali. But they were enough to bring significant floral wealth to me the next year. Their multiplication way outdid my Home Depot seed packet mathematics. Combined with the wealth from starts a friend shared, my garden in its third year was a blooming miracle.
I’m glad I remembered this today, when I saw that there werre only one or two feeble lady’s mantle survivors among the twenty four or so I’d started a couple of months ago. I killed them (I believe) with Miracle Grow. Frustrated that they weren’t growing faster (I’ve never had seedlings so stunted and puny before), I decided a few days ago to put a teaspoonful of water infused with fertilizer in each little plug. I’d spent the last couple of months chasing the sun from eastern to southern to western windows–every day– with my trays of failure-to-thrive babies, to no avail. Utah has been so cloudy this spring! I was feeling desperate, thinking that somehow fertilizer could compensate for lack of sun.
It never pays to get desperate.
Frank and I have been desperate too with backhoes and bobcats on our swampy half acre. Last week, we made another attempt at yard contouring with a backhoe. It got stuck time and time and time again, but Frank eventually got the mountain of sandy topsoil we’d bought last fall strategically distributed in piles all over our lot. Which is now rutted and grooved and clumpy and doesn’t really look any nearer to planting than it did a month ago. Less swampy though.
I have come to believe, not just with my mind, but with my heart and body, that gardening heals me. I believe it can heal anyone. Though I am far from understanding God, one of the things that I think I know about Him is that His love is wrapped around and threaded through seeds and leaves—branches, twigs, flowers, fruit. And that there is a powerful but latent connection to that love, waiting in our hands and fingertips. I have seen the constitution of dirt actually change from hard, unyielding, and sterile, to soft, rich, nourishing, and fertile, simply because things were planted in it. Watered and weeded and watched. As I garden, my mind and body are like dirt, promising change. And now, my heart a little barren, my soul a little tired and sterile, I want–no, need to garden.
