Will We Still Garden When Grief Comes?

In the past couple weeks I have watched two close friends experience the grief of unexpectedly losing a parent.  Another friend is closing in on a year without his father and the grief is still an ever-present weight in his life.

Nothing focuses our attention on what matters quite as acutely as grief does.  In those moments we cling to whatever gives us hope, whatever gives us peace, or whatever just feels safe.  All of the other things in our lives just recede into the background, into what life used to be like.  Before.

I keep this photo at my desk at work as a reminder that what matters most to me can fit in a single picture.

As an outsider in this time of grief, I have watched my friends turn different directions.  One turned to a faith in God that had been dormant for years.  He wanted to experience something he hadn’t felt in a long time.  Another turned away from God saying he couldn’t believe in an all-powerful and all-loving being that wouldn’t give his father peace before he died.   This friend sought peace in other things I won't name here.  

Life is filled with things for us to do.  We stay busy with friends, hobbies, passions, and pursuits.  But when grief visits, we suddenly find it not only easy to walk away from these things, but necessary.  These things might have felt like a critical component of ourselves just days before.

Watching my friends struggle and watching what they choose to do in their time of need has prodded me to consider what my response would be.  What would I turn to?  What would no longer feel important?  If it would not be important to me in a time of pain, should it really be important now? 

I was pondering these very questions while working in the yard on Sunday and I quickly realized that gardening is one of those things that could melt away if tragedy struck.  The weeds would grow and I wouldn’t care.

Grass and weeds creep in on the orange tree's territory.  It is littered with last year's fruit and this year's blooms.

Tomatoes would rot on the vine but it wouldn’t matter because I wouldn’t have an appetite.  The sprinklers would fall into disrepair and I would neglect them.  I would absolutely stop turning the compost.  But I believe that I would eventually return to gardening.  I would return to it because it is a quiet way to spend a day.  I would return to it because my laboring would help my body and my heart feel in tune.  I would return to gardening because it allows the mind to wander.  I would return to it because of the perspective that gardening provides on seasons, life and death, renewal, beauty, hope, hard work, and sustenance. 

Someone else could worry about feeding the birds.

I am thankful for my garden.  I am thankful for a quiet place within which I can mull over the questions I have.  I am thankful for the peace I have and I hope that I can use that peace to share a little comfort with my friends who need it.  

Captain Ahab's Focus

I suppose I should admit it to the world something that my wife has known for years: I’m not the best multi-tasker.  I don’t necessarily think of this as a negative though.  In the “glass half full” spirit of things, I see my propensity for avoiding multi-tasking as a direct cause of my single-minded determination.  I have an Ahab-like ability to obsess on one thing at time. 

Once my obsession has taken root, I find it difficult to move onto other things.  For the last two months, my obsession has centered on the construction of a new room off the back of our garage that we’re temporarily referring to as a “man cave”. 

A place for tables without chairs, cabinets filled with paint cans, and rusty file cabinets. 

Before it was the man cave, this room was a thrown-together catch all.  My guess is that former occupants of this house used it as a shop and a place for their kids to shoot their air soft guns.  The structure, such as it was, stood on top of a slightly raised concrete pad that takes up the majority of what was once a good sized patio.  Initially, I thought we could just tear down some of the old construction and put up new dry wall and replace some lights and we’d call it good.  But when we discovered that the entire frame was nothing more than one of those iron patio awnings we knew it was best to tear it all down and start from scratch. 

After we moved in I started filling this space with weed whackers, HD buckets, and gardening shoes.

Although this means the entire project would be much more expensive, it turned out to be a real blessing for me.  I was able to design the new room and add in all the perks that would make it truly usable as an extra space for our family.  Because this room juts out onto the patio, and the back yard as a result, I had to consider the exterior of this room as a backdrop for the garden at large.  To that end, when we designed the room I made sure that there was enough space between the windows that I could put my large planter box/trellis between the windows without blocking any of the light.  

This now fits perfectly between the room's two windows.

I also made sure we installed several exterior outlets making it easier to do things like power Christmas lights, corded power tools, low voltage lighting, irrigation timers, and anything else that comes with an electrical cord.  I also asked for an outlet to be installed just under the eaves because I thought that would be a perfect way for me to realize my Pinterest-inspired day dreams of being able to string café lights up into the mulberry tree that presides over our patio. 

Something like this is what I'm aiming for. 

After two months of construction, the keys have finally been turned over to me and the decorating will begin in earnest this weekend.  Once I have gotten the interior situated to my liking, I am going to turn my obsession to getting the patio set up the way I like it.  

A fresh start always comes with a renewed feeling of hope.

The door on the left now hides the utility meter and provides a little closet storage.

If I knew how to Photoshop, I'd erase those chairs from the picture.  Obviously I don't know how to Photoshop.

At my last residence, I was very much a container gardener.  I probably had 20 different containers on my back patio alone.  I enjoy container gardening immensely.  I used to think that I was a container gardener because I lacked the space to do more traditional gardening.  But now I understand that I enjoyed the restriction of it, the "movability" of plants in pots, the ability to easily change the scenery as my mood dictates, and the experimentation involved.

Nearly time to pull my pots and misc. containers out of storage!

I am definitely looking forward to letting myself obsess about filling up my patio with plants, pots, and power cords.  

There's No Terroir There

At some point in my garden blog reading, I began to encounter a fancy French word, terroir.  I quickly realized that “terroir” is what the smart gardeners call what the rest of us explain as “what’s it like where I live”.  Less sardonically, terroir means a sense of place. 

Being a connoisseur of fancy words, I quickly filed this one away.  It went under: Words I Like but Will Never Use in Casual Conversation. 

This is no casual conversation though.  I know that if you’re reading my blog it’s because you are esoteric in your own way, right?  So allow me, if you will, to write about what it’s like where I live.  Allow me to explore the terroir. 

I don’t want to tell you too much about the weather (historically dry until the last week) although that plays a significant role.  And I don’t want to write too much about my neighborhood (old with lots of character). 

My neighborhood is filled with turkeys.

I want to write more about my sense of the place.  I have lived in my house for less than a year.  In fact, it’s been just about a year since I first saw the listing for our house online.  I have probably written several times before, or at least I’ve thought about writing several times, that one of the main draws to this house was the lot itself.  All I saw was potential.  I was so excited to get started with a new garden, a garden that had room to grow, where I could plant more than one tree and not worry that it was the only thing I’d have room for in the entire yard. 

But then I got here, moved my family’s stuff and my personal junk into the house, worked on some projects, and did the unthinkable and hired people to mow my own lawn.  And after some nine or ten months I feel like I don’t have any real understanding of the terroir of my lot. 

My yard is still largely a blank slate.  I have certainly done things since I’ve been here.  I planted most of the Japanese maples that had lived in pots at my old place.  I have created one new garden bed, cut down lots of poorly planted and placed trees, and added some boxwood hedges, patches of ferns, and tackled my vegetable garden.  But it still just feels like small pieces of a larger puzzle - only this puzzle is lacking the box with the big picture on it. 

These pieces (the chair, the potted Japanese maple, the wood lantern) all had a place at my old house.
Now they are grouped together on the island of misfit elements.

The other morning as I drove through the neighborhood and looked at other people’s yards, it struck me how differently people landscape their yards.  I don’t know most of my new neighbors yet, but I can’t help but derive a sense of who they are based on what I sense of their place. 

That got me to thinking about how other people might perceive my landscape and what that says about me.  Can they tell just from looking that I’m still feeling directionless?  Can they sense the influence of too many different voices the way I do?  Do they experience the terroir of my yard the same way I do?   

In the realm of all things that are much less important than life-and-death, one of the worst things to feel is discouragement caused by your lack of progress in an endeavor like art, writing, or gardening.  But I am not as discouraged as I could be.  Although I sense that the terroir of my garden is as muddled as a slow-moving stream with too many kids playing in it, I also know that Spring is just a few warm days away here (the ornamental pear trees in the neighborhood have already bloomed!).  And when the Spring rains come through, this muddy water will be revived and I will have my chance to do a little bit more to fill this place with my voice.

This pincushion flower is already blooming in my front yard.

I am curious to hear from you on this topic if you have a moment.  I would love to hear how long it took you before you started to feel like your garden or yard or home started to feel like something you wanted it to feel like.  Did you have a good sense for the garden right away or did you have to live with it and listen to it for some time before it became clear to you?

Inclined to Garden

The custodian at my office is an interesting guy.  He is a true custodian in the sense that he likes to take care of the building and the people in it.    

The other night he stopped by my desk to empty my garbage can and we spoke for a few minutes about the busy-ness of work and life.  I guess the conversation struck a cord with him because he stopped and thought for a moment before asking me, "Do you like quotes?"  I said I did.  He pulled out a little wallet and started looking through dozens of tiny scraps of paper.

Each little scrap had a typed quote on it.  I’ve seen these around the office and always thought it was cool that our custodian sought to inspire us by offering words of wisdom.

The quote he gave me said:

He told me to think about it for a while, let it sink in.  So I have. 

It has always been apparent to me that my ability to “act as I would incline” has been limited by circumstances.  For example, I know I can’t garden every day because I need to go to work.  And I know that some weekends are filled with other things – laundry, grocery shopping, weddings, tune-ups, or attacks of laziness – and that gardening can’t always take place then either.

But I suppose there was a part of me that believed these circumstances were just temporary.  And maybe the exact circumstances are temporary.  But capital letter “C” Circumstances will always be a part of life.  That is something I didn’t take to heart before.  In my daydreams, I imagine the luxurious life of retirement and how I’ll get to spend hours every day puttering around my yard.  It seems like nothing would restrict me then.  After all, not working 40 hours a week would free up a lot of time.  But who knows what life will be like when I reach retirement age?  It's entirely possible that I will have to deal with a bad back, limited funds, or a need to downsize into a smaller house.  Maybe pollution will be so bad that I won't want to go outside anymore?  Maybe there will be severe droughts and gardening will be criminalized? 

Although these thoughts were initially discouraging to me, I have come to see the positive side to realizing that there will always be limits in our lives.  It's a positive that this is true for all people so when it gets me down I know I can turn to other gardeners for sympathy or advice.  It's a positive that we can't get everything we want exactly when we want it.  I'm a firm believer that wanting something is often a better experience than actually getting (although I'm always open to testing this theory by getting the things I want just to be sure it still holds true).  And finally, I think our limits and circumstances force us to be creative and force us to make choices and those choices help clarify what matters most in our lives.  If nothing else got in the way, I might always choose gardening.  But things come up in life and those circumstances give me an opportunity to choose family, relationships, celebrations, and experiences that make life worth living. 

S'mores are one of the best things in life.

iGarden

Sometimes I think we gardeners typecast ourselves as eccentric, solitude-loving, back-to-nature tree huggers.  And you know what?  There’s probably a good reason for that (it’s the truth?). 

But I know that gardeners are as diverse in their other interests as their plots are diverse in plants.  I love the solitude of gardening and hugging trees is a metaphorical passion of mine.  I love how primal it feels to sink a shovel into the ground.  I love the sound it makes when you push down on the shovel and small roots give way under the pressure. 

It is an entirely different sensation than swiping to unlock my iPhone.  And yet, I love that sensation too.  I love the ease of the movement.  I love the swoosh sound.  The experience is anything but primal.

Slide to Unlock doormats - A black version can be purchased for $49.90 here.

I have tried to marry these opposite experiences by downloading gardening apps and using iTunes to play music while I worked (I have a playlist of songs chosen just for me to enjoy while gardening) but, like I imagine all arranged marriages to be, the result was clumsy and disheartening.

Yesterday was a beautiful California spring day.  It was sunny and warm and quiet.  So after I finished eating lunch I went outside to soak it up.  I was dressed for work and happened to be sporting a bright white shirt.  Not wanting to put forth the energy it would take to select a new outfit should the current one get dirty was sufficient motivation not to pull weeds, prune off rusty rose leaves, or turn the compost while I was out there. 

Instead, I sat down and looked around.  Although gardeners may be diverse in their interests and tendencies, I have a hunch that just sitting down and doing nothing much in the garden is not something most gardeners actually do on a regular basis.   It felt odd at first.  It felt lazy and that made me feel guilty.  It felt like I was missing an opportunity to get ahead of things out there.  It felt like I should be doing something, but what could I do without getting dirty and having to change clothes before going back to work? 

And then it hit me.  Actually, it gently vibrated my leg.  I pulled out my phone to see what was invading my privacy and after seeing that it was just a "Words with Friends" notice that it was my turn, I thought to check my DavesGarden.com journal so I could look up the cultivar name of the gardenia I had been admiring a minute previously.  From there I decided that I would use my phone's notes feature to update some of the things that I had noticed about the yard that I could take care of some other time when I wasn't wearing white.  I started thinking about things like taking the antenna off the roof, replacing some of the stones and wooly thyme in the pathway, and whether it was time to take out the lavender I planted so many years ago and no longer fits the look . . .

My current list could use some work
but it's a starting point for this weekend.

It wasn’t exactly a quiet meditation in the garden.  But it wasn’t exactly tuning out the natural world with an iOS device either.  When it was time to head back to work I felt like I had both rested and accomplished something.   And that is a great feeling for any gardener. 

Monomaniacal

Last month I mentioned that I was reading “Moby Dick” and I tried to draw a comparison between Captain Ahab’s desire to seek out and kill the white whale that had maliciously devoured his leg and my personal issues with the grey squirrels that maliciously devour my seeds.    

Common flowers? Yes.  But colorful? Aye!

Well, I have now finished Moby Dick (finally) and in so doing, my head has been filled with a couple things: a nearly-encyclopedic and worthless knowledge of the anatomy of a sperm whale and a new lexicon of nautical and American romantic terms like “avast”,“hast”, and “doubloon.”  But the word that really got stuck in the riggings of my mind is “monomaniacal”.  It was the one adjective that Melville used to describe Ahab.      

My new Acer palmatum 'Murasaki Kiyohime' under
planted with dwarf mondo grass and a fern. 
The fern might have to be removed if it gets much bigger.

Now, monomaniacal is not a word you hear every day but it’s pretty easy to figure out what it means.  We don’t hear it every day because it is “no longer in technical use” as a way to describe a “psychosis characterized by thoughts confined to one idea or group of ideas.”

Close up of the Murasaki Kiyohime's spring leaves.  It's a dainty dwarf that does not take afternoon sun at all.

These days we probably just hear the word “obsessed.”  Obsessed is fine, but monomaniacal is more fun to say out loud.  Go ahead and say it. 

I’ll wait.  See?

Mexican Feather Grass, or Stipa tenuissima if you speak botanical.

Anyhow, given that it has been raining here in Sacramento all week and the gutters are filling up like it was the fourth day of Noah’s flood, a little fun is what I needed since I have not been able to do anything related to my monomaniacal desire to putter around the garden.    

The peach blossoms are getting ready to paddle off into memory.

I don't have a lot of pinks or reds in the yard.  These blossoms always make me second guess that decision.

Until today.  There was a brief reprieve in the typhoon this afternoon, okay, it's really just a light rain, so I went out and took these pictures in my back yard.  It might just have been enough to tide me over (nautical pun intended) until the next time the sun breaks through.  And when it does, I might have to fight back the urge to hail the sun with a hearty “Thar she glows!”  

I'm leaving the bird feeder empty for now.  It attracts too many of those damn squirrels.

Same picture but with a different focal point.

If you hate bad puns, I’m very very sorry for this post.  Please don’t make me walk the plank.    



I purchased these columbines this weekend.  I've never grown them before.