Every now and then I run across something that is really powerful in its simplicity and honesty, and that happened today. I followed a link to fellow garden designer Rebecca Sweet’s blog, Gossip in the Garden, where I found a video made by another garden designer, Susan Morrison. Susan had just finished a film class where she featured Rebecca in her final project, talking about what gardening means to her. This is a beautifully made little video that is quite moving, and I urge all who have that indescribable urge to get dirt under their fingernails to experience it.

photo by tinyfarmblog.com

Watching this video takes me back to the fall of 2001, when I was suffering from anxiety and panic attacks that kept me inside my house much of the time. While watching TV that morning from the couch, I witnessed, with the rest of the world, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. You’d think that watching the horrific scenes would throw me deeper into anxiety, yet the opposite happened.

I was drawn outside to my garden, which had been sadly neglected during my illness, and there I found a small seedling poking through soil and mulch. I hadn’t planted it, and it was the only thing that looked healthy with the promise of life in that entire garden space. What struck me then is what strikes many of us when we are working the earth and coaxing plants into mature beauty: I was in awe of the strength and resilience of the world around me. What a beautiful reminder on a day that held so much grief and destruction.

I started my garden design business the following year, confident in the life-giving value of gorgeous plants in a beautiful garden. And while I don’t recommend putting struggling plants in to a client’s garden, I secretly take great pleasure in the resiliency of plants which, in the face of every reason to shrivel up, instead find a way to thrive. And that is why I garden.

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