i am a gardener. my grandmother was a gardener.

her mother was a gardener.

to touch the earth. to converse with the soil. i ask it often, what can i get you—some water, perhaps? is so, will you accept this offering and let it grow?

i spent hours in my grandmother’s urban garden. watching her place dried banana peels at the feet of her roses. egg shells in the lilac hedge. turn her compost heap and portion out its spongy black goodness on her favorite vegis and flowers. popping sun-warmed tomatoes from vine and fresh broccoli florets from the stalk. climbing the old apple tree grafted from seven heirloom varieties. she grew her world around her and called it her farm.

my father is a hiker, a photographer, physicist, and naturalist. he says the woods are his church. we lost days on hikes in the new england woods, our black lab ever 500 yards beckoning ahead. and, too, we swam. hours in our tea-colored lake a mile from the house. we stacked cairns as tall as my dad. watched pumpkin fish swim endless circles cleaning their nests to the white sand below the leaf muck till they glowed green. and fresh water mussels suddenly close as our shadows passed overhead. my dad and i didn’t seek to change his environment, just be in it. we just spent time under the sky as it was. watching learning. admiring.

weeding the garden cleanses my mind. in truth, i don’t believe in weeds, as i don’t believe in bad thoughts. only in volunteers and hangers-on that serve or don’t serve the current composition of the moment. there are, of course, the more fruitful thought-patterns just as there are the more habitat-building plants. i’m not equanimous in that way, i’m biased towards the happiness-building thoughts and key stone species. perhaps this is the designer in me. the ever-tweaker. the part of me both accepting of what is and a drive to optimize.

i am both grandmother’s grandchild and father’s daughter. the naturalist and the gardener. the observer and the change-maker.

the garden was a love language of sorts. fresh parsley in the eggs. a fresh cut bloom on the dining table. tomatoes ripening on the kitchen sill. no one could enter her house without sitting down to some fresh baked good nor leaving without a flower cut from the garden. my grandmother seemed to have an endless supply of those translucent green floral water tubes to ensure each flower travel safely and arrived in its new home to bloom for many days thereafter, a token of their visit to roberta’s.

when my mom moved into her house, the family heirlooms came with her — including half the garden. the peonies, lilacs, favorite roses and hostas. peonies resent being moved and it took three seasons for them to bloom in their new home, my mother convinced she had killed them. but bloom they did, and have every year since, first their swollen buds are visited by ants to lick them open.

my grandmother past away this year, and this spring those peonies will bloom and we will pick them and put them in a vase for her. or perhaps leave them to sway their massive pink heavy heads amongst the green. either way, she will be there to gawk at their outrageous beauty.

my grandmother moved in with my mom ten years after her lilacs did, and thus she arrived to a lush garden brimming with her old friends. she lived out the last of her days stealing as much sunshine as my mom’s skin cancer fears would allow. she would walk the acre and half daily for years, slowly her rounds getting smaller and smaller, till she rarely left the porch. but oh! the porch! from there all the scandalous happenings of the neighborhood could be kept on close watch — people walking their dogs, mail carriers coming late or early, new cars, old cars, too-fast trucks, the prowling cat stalking her beloved birds (those rascals!), and the hummingbirds living out full operatic violent dramas over the sugar water and butterfly bush.

my grandmother made a place of belonging for everyone who walked in her gate. and that belonging surrounded her in her final years

a garden is a memory chamber, a place of dreaming and. a place for sentiment and tragedy, life and death. remembrance and forgetting. long-durée growth and fresh starts.

a garden is a curated stage for living. a metaphor for the right balance of acceptance of what is and the effort to make the best of what we’ve got, who we are, and our relation to the world.