MÉLANIe'S GARDENS

Tools

So here you stand, in a space you would like to call a garden. Land is beneath your feet. You are settled in your body, accepting consequence. With land and body in place, you reach for a way of making a garden: tools.

Tools won’t make a garden, but a gardener without them will have a hard time. There is no pizza without a paddle. Tools extend our abilities, our reach, the force we can exert, our stamina. But tools do not choose their own timing, direction, or intent. The gardener does.

Even a great tool in hazy hands won’t do much good. It may even do harm. Tools enhance our bodily habits, aligned or not. The fit and comfort of a tool is not an optional preference. It is a limitation that guides our choice. When a tool does not fit your body, your body will compensate for its inadequacy. Uneven tension and fatigue arise, changing how we shape the garden by making room for error. You are the one using the tool.

Use will tell whether a tool is a good fit for you. Over time, its qualities become obvious: durability, versatility, portability, and, most importantly, your bodily tolerance for it. Brands may carry reputation. Specialization may promise narrow perfection. Novelty promises unexplored horizons. But these are structurally irrelevant. The question is simpler: does the tool hold up to your use over time?

Carrying, storing, and caring for tools sets a useful limit on your collection. Tools earn their place through time. This is not about avoiding new tools. It is about separating the ones that stay from the ones that do not. Some tools are ubiquitous and earn their keep through repetition. Others are for a single task, but indispensable. What you can carry, store, and care for will bring to light what truly earns its keep.

Tools will inevitably break, dull, and put strain on our bodies. When they do, they are talking to us. What broke? What dulled? What hurts? Our tools tell us about our relationship with them. When they are misused, they fail. And when they fail, they reveal.

Gardening tools take their meaning from use. Use takes its meaning from time. Time will decide what holds.

On Becoming a Gardener

About body, time, and learning to listen

I didn’t set out to become a gardener. I was on a different path, and became one along the way. What follows is not a change of careers so much as a change in attention.

When I was younger, I wanted to write soundtracks. I set out to be a composer. I studied classical music at a university. It was there that I first encountered a problem that would later shape how I understand work of any kind. My arms were in pain. I tried to play through it, but the pain increased. I was at a loss. I could still think of music, but I couldn’t make it.

My arms hurt, but they weren’t what my therapist treated first. Most of the work was on my shoulders, neck, and especially my back. At the time, it felt like a misunderstanding. But this was the moment the pattern became visible. Pain is not stationary. Symptoms are often caused elsewhere. If the back, shoulders, and neck never release tension, the strain of hours of playing pools in the finer muscles of the forearms. Eventually, the body can’t take any more and gives way at its weakest point.

My attention shifted.

Where is the body holding strain?
What is it compensating for, and for how long?
How do its parts relate to one another over time?

What I was told was this: stop everything. Don’t play. And because playing caused pain, I had little choice but to listen.

It takes a lot of piano playing to injure yourself. My pain came from habitual misalignment between my body parts, and from avoiding a return to neutral, repeated over time. Repetition was the amplifier. It had turned habit into chronic pain.

As I searched for a different way of being, I kept asking: when will I be healed? When will I recover? When will I be back to normal?

Then something shifted. The answer was this: when the alternative becomes the norm. When, through repetition, alignment is what gets amplified.

I now work in gardens with my body, for a living, a lot. I tend to it as deliberately as I tend the land, before work and after, preventatively and reactively. It doesn’t always look the same. I add new practices and set old ones aside. And if I’m going the wrong way, I have a reliable barometer. My body tells me quickly when something isn’t working, and I adjust.

Gardens are made with tools and techniques, but the maker, the gardener, is the one doing the work. And that gardener is someone with a body.

You.

What Is a Garden

Before Making a Garden

Most people think of a garden as something finished: a look, a layout, a set of plants that finally make sense together. But a garden begins earlier than that. It starts before tools come out, before anything is planted or moved. It begins the moment a piece of land is set apart in the mind, noticed, returned to, held as its own place. Long before gardens were designed, they were enclosed. And that first act, more than any later choice, still shapes what a garden can become.

The word garden is an old one. Long before it named flowers or beauty, it named an act: enclosing a piece of land. Its roots reach back to Proto-Indo-European, a shared ancestor of many modern languages, spoken thousands of years ago. This was before Old English, before Latin and Greek even existed as spoken languages. The reconstructed root, gher, means to grasp or enclose, and it sits behind familiar words like yard, orchard, and horticulture, all tied to land held within bounds. The word garden comes from use, not theory, from the need to set land apart for daily life, to shape what happened inside its edges. That same need still lives on in the fenced yards and hedged lots we call gardens today.

Gardens do not exist on their own. They sit inside larger enclosures shaped by land itself. In Niagara, those edges are hard to miss. The face of the Niagara Escarpment lifts and breaks the land, changing wind, sun, and the way water moves. The broad presence of Lake Ontario softens temperatures and pulls moisture inland. These features have shaped roads, property lines, crops, and livelihoods for generations, and they still shape the small enclosures we call gardens. A home garden here is never just a fenced lot. It sits inside slopes, soils, air, and water patterns much older and larger than itself.

Because gardens sit inside larger enclosures, problems often begin when that context is missed. We bring in plans and plants before noticing what the land is already doing. Sun is treated as fixed. Water is expected to behave. Soil is assumed to be static. When a garden struggles, it’s easy to blame the plants, rather than the mismatch between intention and the enclosure it sits within.

A garden takes shape when attention stays with a place long enough to see it clearly. Noticing comes before change. Time reveals where water gathers, where soil shifts, where sun and wind linger or pass through. Within an enclosure, these conditions move together, and they do not show themselves all at once. Gardening begins by staying put, watching, and letting the place speak before answering it.

Seen this way, a garden is already present before anything is done to it. The fence, the hedge, the slope of the ground, the way water moves after rain, all of it marks an enclosure shaped by conditions. When those edges come into view, the garden stops being an idea to impose and becomes a place to work within, not a closed box but an open canvas. Only by knowing that canvas can anything surprising, even beautiful, take root and grow.