“Look deep into nature and you will understand everything better,” said Albert Einstein.
Gardening has always eluded me. Not the gardens themselves, but the work to make them. I have gone out of my way to see them — Brooklyn, the Bronx, London, Giverny, and more, but no gardener am I.
I am lucky, though, to know people who create gardens and allow me to visit. I know that there are lessons in the gardens. Taking time to listen and look deep for those lessons is what I can do these days. That has to be enough.
#1 Patience
“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace,” said May Sarton.
Dean Riddle, a Hudson Valley garden designer, has been creating and caring for beautiful gardens over many years, primarily in settings not his own. He carefully considers the surroundings, the architecture and the landscape. He brings a well-educated and acutely tuned knowledge to each project. I have seen a great deal of his work over the last decade, each one more beautiful than the last.
This year I was introduced to a Phoenicia garden that he was a part of in its initial stages more than 20 years ago, and then turned over by him to its owners for care and cultivation thereafter.
He still knows this garden intimately and speaks of its beginnings and its evolution since. The arborvitae columns towering above the roofline just outside the door to Roger Griffith and Tomoya Minowa’s 1930s bungalow were once not more than five feet tall. When he planted them two decades ago. Dean envisioned their current stature. Having to wait, Roger and Tomoya focused on other areas, experimenting elsewhere in the garden.
A few years ago, Roger scattered bulbs randomly around the yard, and planted them where they landed. This year they had become a delightfully free-spirited array throughout the lawn.
Some trees were planted, and others were removed. Rock paths and natural branches create boundaries. Time happens, and so does life. Patience is a perspective.
#2 Trust
“Watching something grow is good for morale. It helps us believe in life,” wrote Myron Kaufman.
Those arborvitae, along with every corner of the gardens that flowered this year, are a testimony to the idea that things mostly work out well. Roger and Tomoya were enjoying not only the benefits of their hard work — which it was and continues to be — but of their faith in the outcome.
Plant seeds and bulbs. Imagine the possibilities. Wait. Watch what happens. Be willing to trust in the good.
#3 Disappointment/humility
“There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder,” said Alfred Austin
Kali Rosenblum has two very distinct Bearsville gardens. The garden in her back yard is highly curated: “domesticated.”
She began it with lots of enthusiasm and a very creative imagination when she and her husband bought their house many years ago. She experimented with interesting plants and beautiful flowers, which often thrived and sometimes didn’t. It was disappointing to her to work and wait, to be attentive and caring, and to wait some more, only to see them wither.
She armed herself with questions. Answers were revealed. Sometimes the problem was location or soil. Sometimes it seemed to be fate. Kali learned to live with the disappointment. In a garden, it is better to embrace disappointment and move on to more successful endeavors.
These days, Kali’s labor has been mostly rewarded. From her cherry and crabapple trees to the potted tulips that spend winters wrapped up in the dark to burst forth in spring, to the exquisite ground cover that adorns the rock shelf that is an immovable part of her lawn, Kali has let those times of disappointment lead her to other lessons important to a dedicated gardener.
#4 Acceptance
Wisely said Doug Larsen, “A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.”
Kali’s other garden, her woodland garden, was an experiment from the very start. Her interest in native plants derived from the disappointments she’d weathered in her back-yard arboretum. Research provided options that seemed ideal for the ecosystem already thriving behind her house and yard. Letting go is the biggest part of acceptance.
She planted Virginia bluebells and heuchera, among other things — amidst ferns and anemones — in the soil on the hill sloping away from her home. Now they are everywhere, growing out of rocks and in areas not adjacent at all to the stone steps they were supposed to frame. What hand was their guide? Wind? Water? Birds? God? It’s a lovely and courageous chaos awaiting edits that you find in a garden like this, no matter how or why it happened.
#5 Gratitude
“Isn’t it enough that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it?” asked Douglas Adams.
There are life lessons in the garden, if one seeks them. It’s a rewarding exercise for a thoughtful viewer. But do I always have to add something to appreciate its worth? Sometimes I know to be grateful that I can look — just look — and it’s enough.
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