My Garden Love

I have come to realize that the call to garden and work the earth, a compulsion actually, is a fickle creature, part dedication, part fascination, and many parts sweat. It's collecting, gathering, discovering, editing. It's shape and color and texture. It is needing to understand where the plant in front of you comes from on this planet, to know about that place's weather and rain patterns, the composition and structure of the soil there, what eats it, how do its flowers get pollinated, its seeds dispersed. It's wanting to meet the other members of that plant's family, then reveling in the evolutionary steps that must have led to such diversity from a common ancestor. The steps of time and weather and place and genetic mutation. And then, it's finding a place in the ground or in a pot, where the latest addition to the collection will live and grow.

Cleaning the patio.

I've come to see the seasons as cycles of some invisible tide, playing out in years instead of days. With over a quarter century gardening and collecting on my little plot of earth, I am daily in awe of how the natural world works and responds.

The compost pile.