Plotting
the Garden
“As
the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical
yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome
occasion—the small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in
the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring,
oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly
well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under
those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the
resurrection.”
E.B.
White
White
writes about his wife's last year of life, and her preparations for
the garden she would likely never see. Whether she would live to
enjoy it mattered not; only her faith in another spring and her
inborn “homing” signal told her that you plant bulbs in October
if you want blooms in the April. She had probably planted bulbs in
October for as long as she could remember, and this would be no
different. Gardens require preparation and planning, or “plotting,”
as White puts it.
Growing
a garden is a great teacher of life. Like life, gardens are both
nourishing and unpredictable; they are susceptible to treachery and
drama; they are labor intensive and may or may not pay off. When they
do well, your cup 'runneth' over in the most literal sense, and when they do poorly, you feel the
impoverishment. You can learn a lot about yourself and your capacity
for hard work and perseverance by growing a garden, even a small one.
And they do in fact require forethought and planning.
Last
year, I impulsively bought three Heirloom tomato plants at Walmart. I
thought I would beat the high prices at the market and grow my own.
What a dismal failure! They weren't acclimatized to this area, and I
hadn't done a good enough job of preparing the soil for them to
produce. They grew huge plants and made almost no tomatoes. My
friend, Andy, on the other hand, planted sweet 100's in his garden
and they produced enough to feed his office staff and his children
and grandchildren until frost. He starts planning his garden early
and uses lots of homemade compost and mulch to enrich the soil. But
no amount of planning protected him from the bunnies, who ate all his
squash plants.
Springtime
is a resurrection with or without the plotting, isn't it? Even when
it comes in fits and starts, we wait with bated breath. I pruned
crepe myrtles and rosemary in the seventy degree sun yesterday, and
today we are back to freezing rain. But I know that spring is coming
as surely as the sun has risen while I've been writing. And when it
does, we will feel its resurrection in our own bones.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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