Garden Revelations.
There’s a long list of things I once thought I would never be drawn to. Hiking. Yoga. Being a socialist. But perhaps none of these surprised me as much as gardening. If you would have told me, a mere 5 years ago, that a substantial portion of my waking hours would be spent either planting flowers, looking at flowers, or thinking about flowers, I would have looked at you funny. Sure, I liked flowers. Who the fuck doesn’t like flowers? But I could count the number of flowers I could identify by sight on one hand, and all past attempts to keep even simple house plants, let alone flowers, had ended in death.
Then again, I had also never owned a house with a beautiful back yard. But when that happened, in Fall of 2020, I inherited a space that was already so gorgeous, I could have simply left it as it was. In the middle is a huge Crepe Myrdal – the largest, many people have told me, they’ve ever seen. Its branches extend out in the middle of the yard and hang so low I regularly walk into them accidentally. In mid-June, its magenta flowers start to appear; within two weeks, it is so densely covered that your eyes are immediately full of nothing but vibrant deep pink every time you walk outside. At night, the flowers seem even more saturated with color. On hot evenings, I’ve been struck by the sensation that I am in the presence of some other-worldly being, a sublime spirit or a god. I named the tree Yggdrasil.
We moved to our house just a few months after I had decided to give atheopagan practice a try (even though at that time, I didn’t yet know it was called that). Still, I had not planned on plants or gardens being a key part of that. I did have some recent success with growing one house plant in a glass of water and some succulents in our previous small patio, but that hadn’t sparked much ambition. Moreover, we inherited a relatively complete backyard garden as it was; in addition to Yggdrasil, there were four lavender bushes, a large lilac bush, and privets.
But such an excellent canvas cried out for me to contribute. There’s little I enjoy more than imprinting myself on a space through decoration and design, and when spring rolled around I found myself with plenty of ideas about how to transform the yard into not just a beautiful place, but a beautiful place I could feel like myself in. And so one afternoon my mother and I headed to the local nursery and bought a couple of simple plants for containers and a long-term vine we hoped to have grow up a trellis. I knew I also wanted to add a fountain and these items, along with a wooden dining set my parents helped us purchase, made for a nice little nook for hosting dinner parties and sitting outside to read.
I also thought I would try my hand at growing, well, something. So I bought seeds for a handful of herbs and tried following the instructions to grow them in containers. At the same time, I decided to throw a bunch of seeds in a peculiar spot on the concrete border around the lawn. For whatever reason, there was an heptagon carved out on one side, about 3 ½ feet big in its widest spot. I bought a variety of seeds for flowers I had never heard of, carelessly sowed them in, and waited to see what, if anything, sprouted. In the meantime I decided to use some rocks to lay out an Odal in the space; the heptagon already gave the space that geometric feel, so aesthetically it seemed perfect. Since then, I’ve referred to that little mini garden in the middle of the concrete as the Rune Spot.
I had some success in spring with the herbs, particularly some cilantro and a mint. But the majority of my herb experiments failed spectacularly, and by May most of the flowers that had sprouted in the Rune spot had since withered away in the Central Valley sun.
Except for the zinnias. They had started to grow rather quickly after Beltane, and by the time I left in early June for a week and a half trip back East, they were several inches tall and one had a big bud on the top looking ready to bloom. Still, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I asked a friend to water everything while I was away, and didn’t think about it much while I was gone.
And then I returned home. I’ll never forget the feeling of ecstatic shock that shot through me when I opened the door to the yard and ran over to the Rune Spot. Not only had that one zinnia bloomed, but 10 others as well. And to my total shock, all of them had nearly doubled in height. I did not know that was going to happen. I had selected the seeds I planted months before solely on the drawings on the seed packets, and hadn’t bothered to see how wide or tall any of them would get. Honestly, I was totally unaware of the variety of shapes and sizes flower plants came in – I thought they all stay low, like the quickly transplanted packets of pansies or marigolds you see outside businesses. But these were huge! These were three feet tall or more! The flowers themselves were inches across, in stunning bright shades in a glorious pattern of petals. I had not been prepared for such a possibility. Never in my life had I grown something so large and beautiful – I didn’t even know it was possible. As I stood there in blissed out surprise, I felt my eyes well up with tears.
The Rune Spot in Summer 2021.
At that moment, I was a goner. I had already been enjoying the flowers and plants I had tried to grow – I had also planted sunflowers and marveled at how quickly they sprouted and how much I enjoyed simply staring at them, as if I could spot it happening in real time. But I had never experienced gardening as an existential revelation until that afternoon. And I fell in love. With flowers.
I have since grown other things, as well. Tulsi basil for my Yule ritual. Cilantro somewhat by accident. But mostly I grow and care for flowers. Petunias. Tulips. Daffodils. Sunflowers. Finally this spring, after two years of trying, I found a way to make Nasturtiums thrive by providing them with a shady enough spot in the yard. I’m always finding new flowers in the local nurseries and seeing what works. Gazanias. Violas. Gladiolus. I’ve bought three planter beds since that first spring and the gods even know how many packets of seeds or young plants I brought home and placed in a pot or in the ground. Not all of them thrive, of course. Some fail spectacularly. But I’m never discouraged because I know they’re either simply not meant to be in my little slice of the earth, or that I just haven’t figured out how to accommodate them yet. They are constantly teaching and surprising me.
When I first decided to try to grow things, I had mostly planted herbs. Flowers, I thought, wouldn’t last very long anyway, and I figured I would prefer having plants that had a “use” more. I could cook with these, or make teas with these. And there is indeed a special reward to growing food. But since the afternoon that my zinnias filled my body with joy, I’ve come to look at flowers very differently. Flowers are so beautiful precisely because they are temporary. They require love and attention to their needs, and they reward you with beauty so sublime that there’s scarcely a culture on earth that doesn’t celebrate it. Our love of flowers stems from pure pleasure; the way they look, the way they smell. In this sense, they express how no one can live as a pure utilitarian; we all are made happier when we stop to smell the roses. But like everything in life, flowers won’t last forever – and you will have to invest your thought and energy for a year until the same of any flower returns to you, both familiar and unique in how each season expresses itself. What a perfect analogy for what life is like; what a good way to learn to cherish it.
Even before I fell in love with gardening, fake flowers seemed off-putting to me for a reason I couldn’t quite place. Now I know why. While they might look pretty, they fly in the face of what makes flowers truly beautiful – their transience, the humility required to work with them so they can grow, and even the courage needed to invest your heart in something you already know will pass away in a matter of days, weeks, or months. And so although I had already started practicing my paganism before I discovered flowers, I simply couldn’t imagine doing so now without them. Birth, life, beauty, decay, death. It’s all there, every season, in my zinnia-filled Rune Spot.
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