From Your Minister
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As another gardening season begins to come to a close, I offer gratitude for all of the lessons that I learn from my garden. From time spent with these little green friends I learn a great deal of what I know about beauty, joy, abundance, resilience and persistence.
When I think about persistence in the garden, the first image that arises is earthworms. Everywhere I dig, in every area where there is soil, there are also dozens of squirmy, dirt-covered worms. I greet their presence the way I might receive a rainbow, as a positive sign that all is well! Worms tell me that the soil is alive, and nourishing all that grows in it.
Earthworms crawl around and dig thousands of tiny tunnels the diameter of their body, allowing air and water to move through the soil. They eat organic matter, bring it all the way through themselves, and release it in castings that enrich the soil. The worms are my tiny co-creators, though I only see them when I dig or when it rains and they need to come up for breath. Still, for me they are a profound symbol of persistence. Day after day, season after season, they are doing their part to create lush, beautiful soil.
Another part of the garden that has taught me about persistence—if not in such a good way—is horseradish. In my garden, horseradish is the trickster figure I contend with year after year. When I first started gardening, a botanist up the street handed off a small plant to me. Did he warn me that if I planted horseradish, I could never change my mind about it? No, he did not. He cheerfully passed it off as if it were a normal plant.
Ever since then I have attempted to remove it from where I chose to plant the thing—an unfortunate place in the middle of my bed of strawberries and rhubarb. Friends have come over to help. We have dug and dug and we used to feel victorious after we pulled up every shred of it we could see.
After our sessions, the yard would look like we had buried a body. Now, I am no longer delusional about my ability to remove this plant. I know that those long white roots will spread underground anywhere they have to go in order to keep growing. I will find horseradish in my lily bed, in my peony bed, anywhere that I have not dug up and searched.
It’s worth remembering that what persists in life is not always up to us.
Still another lesson from the garden is that there are some pests that will persist unless I stop them, and others that can be ignored because their season will end. This helps me to decide which battles are worth fighting. Those shiny little beetles known as Japanese beetles, for instance—they will eventually go away if I ignore them, admittedly turning a significant number of leaves on my flowers to lace before they do. They have a season. This doesn’t stop me from walking around with a bucket of soapy water scooping them off of my favorite flowers, but it does calm me down about worrying they will destroy everything if I am not vigilant.
On the other hand, aphids aren’t going to stop spreading until I spray them with something to halt them. It’s good to know which problems must be addressed and which can simply be lived through, and to make choices accordingly.
And then there are weeds. I must say something about weeds. No amount of mulch, landscape fabric, or anything else I’ve tried can match the persistence of the thousands of weeds which spring up year after year. Here’s where my own persistence becomes a factor in the garden. If I don’t keep going out on a frequent basis and wrestling down the growth of weeds, all of my planning and cultivating will soon be lost in a tangled briar of unwanted plants.
This is one reason I gave up maintaining a community garden plot to which I had to commute. I need to be out in the garden daily, keeping up with things, persistently installing my own point of view about who lives and who dies among the plants. If I drop it for a week, there will be a high price to pay. This is a fact—the plants grow persistently and I have to show my own persistence if I want to have a say in which ones grow, and how. If I want to shape the world there is simply going to have to be some effort involved.
Others may think this daily attention sounds like drudgery, and content themselves with a potted tomato plant or two. For me, the most persistent and enduring fact about the garden is that I am deeply joyful, and spiritually grounded, when dirt and worms and even horseradish and weeds are my companions, when my own will to shape how life shows up is just one of the forces at work in co-creating a lush little piece of earth.
As the harvest comes to completion, and I contemplate once again facing the northern season of frozen soil and dormancy, my love for the ecosystem I know best persists. And, to my mind, there is no finer form of persistence than the persistence of love.
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