letting a garden go
the garden in 2018... so young! so different!
June in the garden has been different this year.
This has been a transition year for me: it’s my last year with the garden I’ve tended for five years.
The garden will become a meadow after I leave, and I’ve been caring for it accordingly: last fall, I planted even more Monarda (aka Bee balm). This spring, rather than doing a full cleanup, I just weeded around the plants I intend to harvest from: Nettles, Lady’s Mantle, Clary Sage, Echinacea, Yarrow, Lavender, and so forth. I didn’t plant any annuals (ok, some Tulsi). But I did sow seeds of native meadow plants in all the empty spaces. The Hopi Sunflowers are already sprouting.
I’ve tended plants in many forms: as veggie farms, herb farms, veggie gardens, ornamental home gardens, and this herb garden. Usually, the goal is to tend the space for continued production, to keep it going & healthy after I left. Once, someone mowed all my plants. That was rough.
This is different. This is a transition to something else altogether.
It’s a transition without a guidebook, one I’m feeling my way through.
Letting a garden turn into a meadow means allowing all the Goldenrod to live. It means keeping a few pathways mown while choosing some to let grow. It means selecting which areas will be wild, and which I will tend for one more season.
It means sowing seeds with a hope of what they might become, knowing I will not see them.
I can speak gently about this, but it’s also hard. I’ve been here for five years. I’m leaving yet another garden, yet another beloved group of plants and memories. Some days, I feel peaceful in the garden, enamored with the smell of the Clary Sage and Roses. Other days, I cry.
As I guide the garden towards its liminal space, I’m entering my own liminal space: I’ve had increasing reservations about the property I was planning on moving to, so it seems likely that I will be transitioning to limbo, with no clear path in sight. For someone whose past decade has been pointed in the direction of owning a farm, the idea of pausing is not comfortable.
It is so uncomfortable that, for the past few weeks, I’d been caught up in the sensation that a part of me was dying. For the past ten years (aka my entire adult life since college) there has been a piece of land that I’ve tended, where it mattered if I showed up or not. There has been a piece of land to which I’ve given my body, my labor, my creativity. And in return I’ve been given the joys of flavor, fragrance, fulfillment.
I cannot imagine not having a space like this. The very idea of it feels like being locked away, cut off from the world, unable to give in the way I was meant to…
I was mired in my sadness about this, unable to think about anything else, until a memory came back that changed everything…
more on this in the next post,
Amanda