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.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Jenny, what a lovely post. I can’t tell you how wonderful it makes me feel that Rebecca’s story inspired you to think about the poignant role gardening has played in your own life. I know we gardening geeks tend to gush about plants a lot on our blogs, or blather on in a preachy way about sustainability (I’m guilty of that one), but both your story and Rebecca’s show how deeply personal and meaningful a garden can be.
Susan, a week later and I just re-watched your video of Rebecca (I was showing my son) and it made me cry again!
Jenny – I just now read this post and am so touched by it! I so appreciate that you took the time to tell your own story, and what a powerful one it is. It’s amazing, isn’t it, that a person can think of a specific moment in time when the lure of one single plant (in my case a pansy, and in your case that seedling) brought us out of ourselves into the bigger world. What a lovely story – thank you.
jenny – as usual, you are an inspiration. you are in good company with susan and rebecca.
Thank you, Rebecca and Elayne! I’m convinced that gardening and plants aren’t just aesthetics (although that’s good, too!), but live-giving things that connect us to the world around us.
“…and the ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around.” –from ‘Where the Wild Things Are’
It’s funny – I , like so many others, was very moved by the film – and I think we all may have that similar experience of gardening being the thing that pulled us out of a bleak time in our lives. I found a world in gardening that I had no idea existed before, and the path I took to move away from a painful time in my life was the garden path.
Susan and Rebecca’s film brought this forward in a powerful way – I also well up every time I watch it!
Thanks for this post, Jenny – you speak the truth, and I’m so happy that the power of gardening brought you back to being the funny, cool, vibrant woman I only know online, but feel I know well anyway. You rock.
XOIvette
Wow, thank you, Ivette! There is definitely a reason why we are all so passionate about gardening and plants, isn’t there? I suspect many of us have a similar story to tell, so I am very thankful that Susan and Rebecca shared with us.
I’m looking forward to meeting many of my online friends in San Francisco next week at the Flower and Garden Show–I hope you’re there, too!
Everyone is making me cry with these gardening stories!