Passion for Gardening Inspiration for a Lifetime

Recreation for a Lifetime I met a young horticulturist at a botanical garden recently, and we spent several minutes chatting about the plants she helped to tend. We were meeting on common ground-as two garden lovers-and we both chattered on excitedly, sharing ideas about culture and information about little-known species that we'd both learned to love. But when she mentioned that she grew one of these species on the windowsill of her parents' house, where she lives, and that she hoped someday to have a garden of her own, I suddenly felt every one of my fifty-plus years. I wondered how she viewed me, dreading the idea that she saw me as a contemporary of her father (which I was). I wanted to seem cool, but then I had an awful thought: Good God, I've got houseplants older than this girl! I mentioned this encounter to my friend Jill Hagler, who is halfway in age between me and the young gardener. "It's just a state of mind," she assured me. "All gardeners are young at heart." And it's true: all the gardeners I know always seem to have one foot in the future, wondering what gifts they' ll get from the garden tomorrow, next week, and next year. Gardening truly is a lifetime recreation, one that can keep us fresh and on our toes (or on our knees) until the end of our days. Among my older-than-the-young-gardener houseplants are twin specimens of the cycad Zamia furfuracea, which were probably five or ten years old when I bought them in 1975. They traveled with me from my first college apartment in Providence, Rhode Island, to Manhattan and then to Brooklyn. Now the twins live in New Jersey, and their longevity helps put our history of gardening together into perspective. Ancestors of these conifers populated the earth for millions of years before flowering plants evolved. The fact that this genus has been around for so long points out how very short thirty, forty, or fifty years is, and how my time on earth spent in the garden is really only an instant in the scheme of things. I may call thirty years an instant, but in this age-which might be called the "Age of Impatience"-that span of time may as well be forever to most people. We get impatient if the car in front of us pauses imperceptibly at a red light. We watch the interminable seconds tick away on the microwave, and get irritated if the computer takes a few extra nanoseconds to accomplish a task that, even five years ago, would have seemed incomprehensible. Technology has compressed time so greatly that we have come to expect miracles to be over and done with almost before we even notice they have begun. Gardening is an antidote to this manic pace. Gardens aren't created overnight; a good garden takes time to develop, and then can be made and remade, over the course of a lifetime and even into succeeding generations. Plants don't mature in nanoseconds. They follow the pace of the natural world, which for most of time has been the only measure of time: the passage of days and seasons, the annual cycle of death and rebirth. The late May Sarton, whose intimate journals are full of wisdom about life in the garden, wrote: "Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow cycles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace." Tending a garden can be a continual lesson in letting go, of accepting what is offered and appreciating the moment-because a moment later, what you see could disappear. How many times has some wonderful thing become a casualty of a thunderstorm or been decapitated in an unfortunate dog-walking incident? The list of possible accidents is endless, and even the plants themselves have a built-in brevity: Hemerocallis aren't called daylilies for nothing. Unfortunately, many promoters of garden products hope to cash in on our cultural impatience, offering "new" ideas for instant color, instant effect, instant solutions. FDruse, Ken is the author of 'Passion for Gardening Inspiration for a Lifetime', published 2003 under ISBN 9780517707883 and ISBN 0517707888.