Clear away, see what grows

Lessons from a garden

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I spent this weekend, for the first time in my life, tending to a garden (I’m a city person, ok?). Late last year, my husband and I bought a very old house in upstate New York very much in need of love and restoration, and since then we have been making slow progress of cleaning, repairing, and rehabbing it. This past weekend was the first nice one, and so we spent it out in our little yard. It’s clear that, at some point, the garden was well-loved. But it’s been years since anyone weeded, watered, or planted.

So we got to work. We cleared away sticks and leaves and dead vines. We pulled down dead branches. We disposed of a dead skunk. We aren’t even close to done — this is clearly a whole-summer project — but patch by cleaned-up patch, something growing and green and alive is starting to take shape.

Out in the garden, I was surprised by how much dead stuff there was, and how long it took to clear. I filled giant bag after giant bag. It came up in layers: The dead vines spiderwebbing on top, the tall sticks I ripped out of the dirt, the grey leaves, the brown pine needles.

Underneath the dead stuff, though, were so many alive things struggling to get a little sunlight. There were the daffodils and tulips planted years ago, two owners ago, that we could only see budding once they weren’t smothered by layers of grey and brown; uncovering them felt like CPR, the breathing of life after suffocation. And beneath them, tiny blue and purple wildflowers. In a perfectly manicured garden, those delicate little flowers would have been plucked out along with the weeds and everything else that distracted from neat rows of showier spring blossoms. In this one, a garden that went unmanaged for so long, they bloomed random and scattered.

I don’t want neat rows. I want a garden that is lush and wild. Which means that this will take time: I don’t know my garden yet, and as much as I want it done and beautiful, I need to sit with it over months and seasons to see what grows if I give it the chance.

Some of the dead stuff I plucked out of my garden had served a purpose; in decomposing, it fed new life. Too much, though, suffocates. Giving growth a chance requires ripping out the old and dead so what’s already budding can get the light and air it needs to move skyward. And it means leaving a little bit — just not too much.

There was so much dead stuff to tear out, I didn’t have time to work with precision. I pulled out huge handfuls of atrophying vines and disintegrating leaves, and sometimes, my inelegant gloved finger wrapped haphazardly around a tiny tulip bud or a pretty little flower, and I unintentionally yanked out something I was trying to preserve. I need to be more careful, I thought, and then the process started taking forever, and I sped up, and I did it again. I flinched every time I accidentally killed a flower. Going too slowly with limited time, though, would mean that more flowers would stay covered, wouldn’t have the chance to bloom.

Most of my job is a steady cycle of input and output: Read or report, metastasize, write. I only get paid when I produce something, and so the incentives are to produce more things, and to produce them quicker. My physical exercise is mostly yoga, during which I train my mind to stay still, to not think, to dissolve into breath and movement. I don’t have as much time as I would like to just be in my own head outside of the anxiety swirl, to read books, to chew on ideas without interruption, to really think things through. Doing physical, methodical work outside and with living and dying things opens up a different kind of mental and emotional space than I usually sit in.

Spring, in the northern hemisphere, is the season of rebirth, blooming, renewal. But it’s also the season of clearing away debris, of recognizing that what once fed you may now be smothering new beauty. Maybe it’s a season of small surprises — of seeing what springs up in a space of benign neglect. In my little garden, I thought about what I need to haul away before I can really see what could be — what I want to grow, what’s possible, what’s already taken root without me noticing.

More on that, maybe, next time. I still need time to think about it.

xx Jill

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