“A single plant is a marvel. A community of plants is life itself. It is the evolutionary past and future entangled into a riotous present in which we are ourselves also entangled. This stretches the mind. Plants give us the chance to see the system in which we live.” – Zoe Schlanger, The Light Eaters
Gardens reside and grow in a duality of time and space. When we are in our gardens we become fully present to all the delights of the season. At this time I am fully washed in the joy of the changing leaf colors, of the red hues and deepening oranges. I find myself immersed in wonder by the dew speckled spider webs that are delicately woven through garden paths. While I’m present to the ephemeral gifts of the season, this wonder is layered on the knowledge of what the garden has grown from. Knowing how the garden was shaped in the past informs my present. My appreciation of the garden is deepened by acknowledging its past, in knowing how it has changed in the three years I have worked with it.
The ever evolving nature of gardens act as a map for our journeys as their stewards. Who I was as a gardener three years ago has shifted from who I am today. That person of my past was more tightly constrained, diligently deadheading flowers and cutting back paths, attempting to reign in the sprawl of yarrow and goldenrod. When I look out at the garden now I smile to see the person I have grown into mirrored in the garden of today. In this space seed heads are left unsheared, providing hollow stems for insects and seeds for migrating and overwintering birds. The paths have softer edges, where self seeded plants grow out at the seams of the bark mulch, and branches are left resting on the soil in the shade garden. The garden has become a place where the imperfections are held up with joy and the knowledge that they make the space more habitable for all life.
This throughline of past and present is extended as I envision the future of the garden, one in which more native plants call our gardens home. I now look first for native plants to fill a space in the garden, oftentimes choosing the douglas spirea or the native rose, where in the past I might have reached for lavender and a hybrid tea rose. This does not change my love for the garden of the past, or the joy I find in cultivating lavender. That joy resides side by side with the current iteration of myself as a gardener, one who thinks about gardening for wildlife first, and the ornamental quality of the landscape second.
Gardening is messy, both in the physical sense and the metaphorical sense. They are spaces that make us deeply present while simultaneously taking us into our pasts, and reminding us to plan for the future. Trying to untangle the threads of all this is impossible, like a mycelium network the fabric of our gardens should be tangled. I feel inspired in knowing how far my garden has come in the past three years. I am nourished by staying present in each task, in the temporary quieting of my ever churning mind. I find hope in the garden of the future, in the knowledge of the space I want to cultivate and the work that it takes to get there.
This timeline of past, present and future all residing in one space is not surprising. We are starting to understand that when we remember our past, we re-experience it again. Our memory is fluid, it evolves and changes with time. When we are in the process of remembering, studies are showing that we in fact relive that moment. With each remembering, we change some small part of it, the more we remember something the more it changes. In this way there really is no past, we experience the past in the now. Similarly there is no future, as we plan for that future in the present. Despite knowing this, we also feel that both the past and the future reside within us, and so in some way they do exist. I love the duplicity of this, of the mystery that time is, and will always be. There is no making sense of it, there is only experiencing it, of taking in our gardens each day, surrendering to all the joys that they give us because we only get this one chance in time.
Farm to Table
This month, our tasting room menu features sunflower seeds, red peppers, cucumbers, apples, thyme, Jimmy Nardello peppers, cherry tomatoes, basil, and zucchini.