During the worst months of the covid-19 pandemic, when I’d suffered several losses and felt raw and isolated, I spent a great deal of time in our garden. At our bungalow, where the light in the front is best, this meant spending hours in our postage-stamp-size yard. I renewed beds, fertilized fruit trees, and reclaimed the sunny, unused concrete driveway for planters of favas, pole beans, and tomatillos. The labor steadied me, and had an additional benefit: As I worked, I often fell into conversation with passersby. I was grateful to be growing both kale and community—in a difficult time, I tended the garden and the garden also tended back.
It isn’t the first time a garden has renewed me. As a teenager who struggled with disordered eating, seasons spent planting, sowing, and harvesting helped me understand how both the earth and I deserve and need wise and gentle care. After that, I found a way to garden pretty much everywhere I went: I led a teen garden program at a youth center in Berkeley, built a community garden in a formerly vacant lot in Brooklyn, and worked on a small farm in the Berkshires. Each season rewarded me with birdsong, soilcraft, and friendship. I saw how gardens help us nourish both the soil and one another.
Gardeners, are, by their nature, people who believe in regeneration. They understand that the broken world we inherit can also be amended, with compost, worms, and steady tending. They have seen that the tended earth, in turn, offers up radical abundance—not only of food, but of insects, birds, rhizomes, and soil.
The garden surprises us in unexpected ways. Oregano winters over. Wild miner’s lettuce springs back. A volunteer pumpkin luxuriates near the compost bin. Suddenly met with abundance, we beg people to come help harvest our plums. We befriend a plot of earth, and it befriends us in return. By some powerful force, this friendship brings us into a fuller, more just communion with the human and nonhuman at once.
Of course, any garden plot is small compared to the brokenness of a wider world that can seem beyond mending. We live in a divided society. We live inside climate change, ecosystem loss, mass extinction, and racial violence, in a global community gripped by famine, hunger, and war. The heaviest days are excruciating.
Yet sometimes, in the face of huge pain, the things of the earth—hummingbird and mockingbird, snail and earthworm—can help reroute any of us toward awe and fascination. They can reconnect us—if just for a moment—with the life-energy we need to go on. Gardens also remind us that repair need not be so far off: in daily ways, we can each build our lives toward greater diversity and abundance. Nobody needs to be hungry. When we work the right way, we can all be fed.
We befriend a plot of earth, and it befriends us in return.
My life outside being a gardener is being a poet. When I was asked to craft an anthology of new gardening poems, my heart leapt in delight. Poems and gardens share congruence: Gardens distill nature, helping us see how to live inside what we must wisely steward. Poems distill language, creating sculptural spaces that illuminate the world around us, allowing us to savor the language through which any one thing can be known. Poems and gardens
sculpt what the poet John Keats called “slow time”—building up sites from which we may apprehend and savor our wider life. Poems and gardens also remind us, in the words of poet Gwendolyn Brooks, that
we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.
In gardens and poems we find figures for grief and surprise, for loss and regeneration. Gardens and poems each help us dwell and abide.
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