I am not sure when I began gardening.

There is a photo of me as a young child sitting in a rhubarb patch, looking content. I like telling people I was born on a farm in Vermont. This, of course, is true. Born to parents who went “back to the land” a couple decades after the peace-&-love generation & decades before the trendy, neo-hippy movement of today. Displaced, so to speak; the idealized, flower-power mentality after its heyday had come and gone, and way too soon to sell “Vermont-made” handicrafts on Etsy. Sitting in a rhubarb patch as a child, I was in a little garden paradise, blissfully unaware of the lack of cultural stimulation, full-time employment, and the reality of being 16 miles from the nearest supermarket.

Gardening is a form of regression back to this innocent state, not entirely of course, as I am no longer a child in a rhubarb patch, but enough so that allows for certain worries and concerns to be gently washed away.

In the summer months between semesters, I would landscape. It wasn’t lucrative or as lucrative as I would have liked considering my upcoming needs as a full-time student, but I found myself repeatedly drawn to it. The long hours of labor, the sun and sweat, and the feeling of contentment after a day or a long week were completed. I needed this connection to labor and the earth in those summer months. It was a reprieve from the bullshit of academia, a world I was beginning to loathe. I worked with men who, as children, labored alongside their brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, in the potato fields in Maine. I had worked with them for several summers. Each summer, I’d return, and they were there, seemingly untouched; country music playing in the shop, lunchtime at noon on the dot, and crass jokes when the situation presented itself. Whereas they saw the job as a means to an end, I saw it as a desperate need to return to the land, like my parents, and get my hands in the dirt regardless of how the future might unfold. 

During the initial treatment I completed in July 2016, I was too ill to venture outside to do any gardening. The following summer I was at Mass General undergoing stem cell transplants which, after being discharged, left me with essentially no immunity as well as energy levels that constantly hung well below normal. 2018 allowed for light yard work. I would venture out and, as usual, due to my stubborn nature, would push myself too hard and end up exhausted to the point of tears. Nonetheless, it felt good! I have started early garden cleaning this season. Raking the leaves, spreading a little mulch, trimming back anything that was too lanky last season. These seemingly little pleasures make me happy. Yes, I have to wear the N95, the same type I needed to wear whenever I roamed the halls at Mass General. The sterile smell conjures up numerous memories and nauseates even to this day.

I have been contemplating the reasoning behind my love of gardens and the earth itself. This post (or update) has remained unfinished for some time as I wasn’t sure how to end it — rather, how to articulate the power gardening has over me. What I came to realize is that I can’t fully articulate it, I can’t express it in words as there are none. After my weeks of trying to find the great “why” we perpetually ask ourselves as humans, I do know that there is honesty in gardening, in the earth. A single garden bed has no masks to hide behind; it is more direct and honest than most humans ever will be. A return to the earth, to the garden(s), is the kindling of a relationship that, for me, surpasses the relationships I have/had with my own species. I feel safe within gardens and the earth itself. I can be joyful and happy or sad and mad; the garden, the earth, accepts this and is joyful with me or soothes my sadness.

I didn’t understand this connection for the longest time. In fact, as stated, it took serious contemplation to even recognize the reasoning behind my feelings for both gardens and the earth. Looking back, I can trace this feeling of comfort and safety throughout the years and through the many gardens I have worked in and spent time in. I wonder about that photo of me as a young boy sitting in a rhubarb patch. I don’t want to taint that memory with the ideas and philosophies I have now as an adult, but I can’t help wondering.