growth in the garden

beauty, weeds, and knowing yourself

It is the height of high summer in these very northern climes with the sun still rising around 5:00am and setting a little past 10:00pm which makes for incredible growth over a short period of time in the garden. The snapdragons are above my knee in height, the wild and wooly cosmos are not quite that tall, but between my poor seeding size when things were planted out and direct sowing things in May, I’ll take where most of my flowers are at.

The sweet satisfaction of being able to enjoy the morning cool air while checking sweet peas is my favourite pastime. Then to enjoy the perfect evening magic hour of warm sunlight dappling the garden while my husband putters around the vegetables is perfection. It’s the time of year that I need to savour to get through so many months when the outdoors is inhospitable to human life.

Right now we’ve reached the point when most plants have buds! That means serious progress and growth has been made. Yet even still I want flowers and I want them now. I don’t want simply a stem of each variety, I want buckets full. I want to be able to spend a good hour just cutting things every evening. Those days are coming but they’re not here yet.

But look at my impatience. Impatience for the gift of flowers, which if we think about it, we are completely undeserving. We shouldn’t get such perfection in colour, form, and beauty carelessly growing from the earth. We have done nothing to create that miracle. It’s just a lavish blessing and wonder God freely gives to anyone, anyone who cares to notice.

My impatience usually is much greater than my wonder. And that applies across the board. The way I see the world and life garners more impatience than wonder. I’ve been really slowly contemplating how God has created my personality and wants to speak to it. I guess because now that I’ve reached ripe middle age (I jest, I know I’m not that old, stop being dramatic) I’ve given up the ghost of trying to be what feels like most other women. Although I don’t think that is even true and it’s a weird falsehood I’m taken on as some expectation somewhere down the line. I just am not a highly emotive, let’s talk about our birth stories for hours, positivity/gratitude ooze out of me like an instagram encourager kind of woman. I’ve done real personality tests and I have a personality that is highly uncommon in women in particular.

This is all to try to say that although I’m impatient for beauty and see too many bugs consume my baby plants like so many all you can eat nachos which then causes me to want to burn the whole garden down, maybe it’s not all bad because the end goal is still beauty and facilitating growth. If I harness what aspects of my personality that even I find distasteful, let alone deeply unpopular on social media, for the powers of good is that better than trying to get rid of them completely?

This feels basic. But so much of actual gardening is basic. Which is at once surprising but dull. There are no fast pass ways to garden and make things grow. Bugs will eat your plants. Plants will die without water. Plants will die with too much water. You cannot will your plants to grow faster. Being closer to nature and the ways in which things actually grow shows you that all the modern, technological, and artificial ways that we live our lives aren’t the reality of how the world actually works.

The reality of nature, of the garden, is that growth takes time. There will always be weeds and flowers at the same time. While one plant thrives one season, another will flounder. There is no high point for all plants at the same moment in time. Over the course of a growing season each plant achieves its peak and flower at a different, unique time. These are all timeless, foundational, and life changing metaphors for human life. We cannot achieve perfection quickly. We cannot control our rate of growth. We cannot eradicate the weeds of sin, we can only keep rooting them out when we see them. We will never experience a magical state in life when every aspect of what makes up our lives is easy, breezy, beautiful. There will always be aspects of suffering, discontent, and pruning. But there will also always be beauty and the goodness of living things, of growth if you’re willing to look.

These sound like platitudes but once you start growing things they become painfully obvious. Painfully obvious and unavoidable. And yet not easy lessons to learn and internalize in a postmodern world that wants to detach us from reality at every turn. The problem with detaching from reality though, is that we are really detaching from ourselves, our humanity, our purpose. Planting a garden, with its beauty and frustrations, is one way to experience the reality of nature and in consequence the reality of yourself; your desires, shortfalls, and need for a Redeemer outside of yourself and this world. You know, no big deal.