How a yard turns into a garden

I asked my mom recently if she ever saw my gardening hobby coming from how I was as a child, and she said absolutely not. I want to write about why I love gardening. Why doing what we love matters. And how we can all be more connected to the people around us. It may sound like three topics, but I think it’s really just one.

I like to pick flowers pretty much every day from March to October. I always leave enough for bees and birds, but I grow in abundance so I can share with my friends, neighbors and myself. I tell the recipient, “This is what bloomed into the world, just for you, today.”

My husband, Ryan, and I got into gardening together. We started with a blank backyard. Then a woman I worked with, a friend’s mom, gave me a brown bag of zinnia seed heads from her previous year’s garden. She told me to rough up the dirt, sprinkle the seeds, rough up the dirt again, and keep this watered for a bit. Voila! I had flowers. I hope I always feel the sheer magnificence of this opportunity to collaborate with our earth. I put a tiny seed in dirt, add water, and sunlight AND IT TURNS INTO A BEAUTIFUL FLOWER. Miracle.

Soon after this, Ryan and I built two wooden raised beds. Our friend Adam helped us. I remember that was the same day he introduced me to Instagram. So a long time ago. The beds were side-by-side in the back of our yard in full sunshine. We grew various veggies–onions, squash... I grew zinnias.

We planted a rosemary bush someone gave us from a grocery store in our raised bed. We didn’t know it was perennial and that it would get huge. We learned that squash-bugs are a rough hand to be dealt. That you cannot expect to get everything you planted because weather and bugs are factors beyond control. I think this helped me come to my first ounce of peace over life being unpredictable but still beautiful.

A few years later Ryan read a book called “Garden Awakening” which spoke in capacious phrases about the connection of earth with heart and community. It also suggested circles were a grounding shape for gardens. So we added what we jokingly called “our contemplation path.” Truth be told, over the decade we’ve had it, I have walked so many healing rings around our maple tree, calming my emotions, considering situations, chatting on the phone with a friend, following my precious daughter as she steps through our days together. A grounding force indeed.

Ryan wanted to add more flower beds. I was fine with that. Ha. I grew peonies. And sunflowers. And more zinnias. We added an arch between the raised beds and grew snap peas and morning glories.

When the 2020 pandemic hit, my daughter, 4.5 at the time, and I spent long days in our backyard. One day, I had invited my friend Mary over to spend time outside on our porch, and it rained. We didn’t get together. The isolation of the pandemic made this a crushing disappointment to me, and we promptly built the covered pergola that we’d talked about building for twelve years. It changed everything. We now spend hours and hours outside.

A friend told me she thinks one of the paths to help people spend more time outside is to make the outdoors more comfortable. A covered porch is a room. We added comfortable seating. A chiminea we light often.

Ryan dug out a new bed. We tossed wildflower seeds in it. We had weeds and flowers and it was beautiful. We added some perennials. We weeded a lot. We paid some younger people to weed a lot.

Since this time, two more raised beds and a very long cut flower experimental bed were built, the original wooden raised beds converted into crescent-shaped rock-sided raised beds, a large flower bed in our front yard was dug out, and a long border bed on one side of our yard have all been added. Just typing all of this reminds me of how much we have done. I would say it was a slow, steady start and then the pandemic put us into high speed.

And that’s the basic story of how our yard became a garden. One step at a time. No overarching plan. Just choice after choice–each decision made the next move clear. How did your garden start? Are you thinking of starting one? What’s the hold up?