Risk, Hope and Grace in Gardening

“Sing a song of harvest home”, the traditional Thanksgiving hymn urges us. Safely squirreled away in the freezer, the fruits of a summer of vegetable gardening reward us with memories of work productively done. Now is the time for family and friendships and a well-deserved fallow time as our garden rests for the season.
Precious memories for dark and difficult days, as well as the coming winter. In my novel, TIME IN A GARDEN, the heroine and gardener, Eve, writes a great deal about gardening and growing older, about life beautifully lived. “Words like ‘risk’ and ‘hope’ and ‘grace’ do not pop up a lot in horticultural magazines,” she says, “ That is odd, because you cannot survive long in the gardening business without them.”
I don’t think anyone would argue that hope is commodity we all badly need these days. “As a culture,” Eve writes in her diary, “we tend to want immediate gratification. Gardens do not operate that way. Gardening works. . .only when we learn to plant by a calendar in which months and years and even generations become the measure of what has been accomplished.”
Shortcuts and greed-is-good ethics don’t work particularly well in the garden. If we get lazy and plant the bulbs too shallow, they freeze or rot. If we skimp on fertilizer or don’t keep an eye on the nitrogen content of the soil, the harvest is skimpy or we wind up with great foliage and no veggies. In the end, all the alpha-dog hubris in the world cannot substitute for honest and careful stewardship. We reap what we sow.
Yet, for all our short-sightedness, our gardens also remind us that it is never too late to begin again.“Gardening opens the possibility of second chances,” Eve writes. “Our failures are only final if we give up or if we refuse to learn from our experiences. The saga of a gardener is the story of hope.”
“Gardening is both life-affirming and humbling. It teaches us to have faith in new life to come and to hold on through the darker days. It grounds us—literally and figuratively—in what really matters as the seasons play out around us.”
Perhaps the greatest gifts we can share with our families this holiday season are not bought with mega-bucks, but with a loving investment of common sense, the kind of life-lessons that only gardening can give. Seeds packets are not as cheap as they were when many of us were growing up. Still, the dividends they pay may be absolutely priceless.