Sometimes I wonder what’s driven me, for the last 25 years, to be such an obsessive and passionate gardener. I’ve alternately described the garden as a church, a temple, a cosmic universe, and various other spiritual places. It’s where I commune with what is infinitely greater than myself and feel as humble as a grain of sand. It’s also where I impose my wants and judgments without mercy. You become keenly conscious of your role as marauding assassin every time you put a hoe to the soil, not knowing what environments, what bugs or worms, you will dislocate, maim or kill. And then there are the pests you drive out and slaughter, smiling coldly like the Grim Reaper to see them fall.
But there’s more to it. There is the sense of living in the midst of the natural world’s own mad orgy. All around you, flowers are begging to be pollinated, waving their heads, wagging their stems, reaching skyward with lust. Have you ever examined a lily up close? It is a filthy exhibitionistic whore. It leaves no secrets hidden, thrusting its sex organs beyond its petals to get your attention. Not like the camellia, always dressed like a Victorian dowager aunt, shrouded by layers upon layers of frills.
Every plant and every flower has an arsenal of sex rituals. The honeybees know them. Butterflies and hummingbirds too. It’s their job to know which flower’s sex organs will give them that divine sip of sweetness that satisfies and fulfills their innate hunger. I wonder how nectar tastes to a butterfly or bee. Is it salty sweet, like human sex juice can be? Does it intoxicate them the way human sex juices can make people’s hormones fly? Hummers thrive on liquid sweetness and fight viciously to protect their sacred fountains. The sex juice of flowers is the source of their supernatural powers of flight! Without the flowery juice of life hummingbirds would die.
Flowers are the exhibitionists but animal mating is everywhere, in all the species that visit, from the quiet beetles screwing on leaves to birds mating in flight and rodents who cavort in tunnels under your feet. Have you ever seen a firefly frenzy? I wait every year for the fireflies to appear, and sit on the deck in the dark to watch them shimmer and jitter and zoom into mating dances, ecstatic to be alive. Wherever there is life, there is sex. And where there is sex…well, that’s where I want to be! It is my natural realm. I embrace its universality.
The other side of it for me, maybe even the driving force, is an expression of my need to control the things I can control. I can’t control the elections. I can control whether my daphne will bloom this year. I can’t fix my town’s infrastructure. I can improve our garden’s irrigation system. I can’t shape the world’s destiny, but I can shape my world’s destiny, not necessarily what happens to all the people in it but what happens to that sad patch of scrubby soil that would be an excellent location for a new bed. I can do that. And I will, even knowing that a sudden late frost or hurricane could undo my labor. Because I know I can rebuild and start again and succeed. I can improve my world, one little piece at a time. I can control its destiny. I can shape its performance. And year after year, it will show me how much it has transformed because of my labors.
The whole garden process rings a deep bell with my dominant side. It’s a level of control no one can guarantee year after year with humans or pets. They change and evolve and want new things and dynamics alter over time. They get old and when they die, a part of you dies too. But plants have a pleasing sameness. You can count on what they will do year after year. You get to know their needs and learn to fill them quickly and efficiently. More importantly, you can replace them. People and pets become unique fixtures in our lives, creatures whose precise depths and dimensions will never appear again in your life. But that rudbeckia that had to go will be replaced by a healthier one that will never wistfully wonder about its predecessor. I will not miss it a lick, either. I just needed to fill out that spot with its genetic twin to feel complete. My will be done!
It’s a small satisfaction. Maybe one of the smallest in a big world of big chaos and bigger disappointments. Yet, it is direct and real and meaningful to me. My garden lives because of me, and because it lives it feeds my soul daily.
