MÉLANIe'S GARDENS

On Becoming a Gardener

About body, time, and learning to listen

1. Becoming over time

I did not set out to be a gardener.

Becoming one happened slowly. By staying with the work long enough for it to change me. Not through talent or calling, but through time. Time spent paying attention. Time spent learning what worked, what didn’t, and what failed quietly before it failed loudly.

I came to gardening the way many people do, by taking a path that answered a real need. I stayed because the work held up under repetition. It asked something of my body, my judgment, and my patience, and returned that effort in small, reliable ways.

A gardener is not made all at once. The work shapes the person doing it, season by season. What matters is not how you arrive, but whether you remain present long enough to change.

2. The body refuses

My degree is in classical music composition. One of its requirements is to play an instrument. I played piano. At the end of my first year, I developed tendinitis in both forearms. It made playing difficult, and it reached beyond music into daily life. Cooking, holding books, and other ordinary actions became painful.

At first, I tried to work around it. I adjusted schedules, modified technique, and focused on the places that hurt most. None of that addressed what was actually happening. The pain was local, but the causes were not.

What forced my attention was not the discomfort itself, but its persistence. Ignoring it made things worse. Pushing through narrowed my range of motion and increased strain elsewhere. The body did not adapt. It accumulated damage.

That refusal set limits on how I could move and work. It made clear that force had consequences, and that effort without attention could not continue indefinitely.

3. Learning systems through the body

Once the tendinitis developed and was diagnosed, I began visiting a massage therapy clinic that worked specifically with musicians. Their recommendation was immediate and clear: I had to stop playing.

Returning to a regular practice took years. I did not simply rest and resume. I had to relearn how to use my arms to play without repeating the same strain. That meant addressing body alignment, reducing unnecessary tension, and understanding where movement actually begins. I learned that effective movement comes from the body’s core, and from where the body rests on the surfaces beneath it. Not from the extremities.

The fingertips do not initiate motion. They receive it.

This reframed how I understood the body. It was not a collection of parts to be fixed in isolation, but a system. Pain showed up in my forearms, but its causes were distributed elsewhere, especially in my shoulders, back, and overall posture. Treating the symptom brought short relief. Changing the conditions that produced it required broader attention.

Small inputs accumulated into real effects. How I stood, how I breathed, how I sat, how I carried weight through my body all mattered. When I noticed early signals and adjusted before pain intensified, damage slowed. When I ignored them, problems spread. The body responded not to force, but to timing, alignment, and awareness.

This way of learning carried forward into gardening. Working with land requires the same systemic thinking. What appears at the surface rarely begins there. Addressing symptoms can be necessary in the moment, but lasting change depends on understanding the structure underneath and how forces move through it over time.

4. Listening as a skill

Listening is not something I started with. It was something I learned, slowly, and against my instincts.

When I was a musician struggling with tendinitis, the hardest lesson was not how to move, but how to stop. Acting less did not come easily. Stillness before an action, and returning to stillness after it, felt counterintuitive and inefficient. Yet without that pause, small strains compounded into real damage. Movement without listening cost me.

That stillness was not passive. It took effort to interrupt momentum, to notice tension building before it became pain, to resist correcting too quickly. Over time, I learned that restraint was part of the skill. Acting lightly, with attention, preserved my body in ways force never could.

Gardening asks for the same discipline. My hands, posture, breath, and timing all matter. Tools either amplify feedback or dull it. The work rewards pauses. It punishes rushing. Listening lives in the body, not in ideas about it.

Listening does not solve problems. It clears the noise. It makes it possible to see what kind of action might help, and what kind will only repeat the damage.

5. Time deepens listening

What proved harder in gardening was not restraint, but trust.

Gardens speak quietly. Their signals are subtle, and they only make sense in comparison. To know whether something is wrong, you need to know what is normal. To know what is early or late, stressed or thriving, you need memory. Pattern recognition takes time, and there is no shortcut for it.

Unlike stillness, which can be chosen, trust must be earned. It grows through return. Through watching the same plants across seasons. Through noticing small shifts before large failures. Through being wrong, and correcting course the following year.

Nature does not explain itself, but it does hold knowledge. That knowledge becomes visible through observation and awareness, practiced over time. Gardening taught me to value that kind of knowing. Not certainty, but familiarity. Not control, but recognition.

Listening, in this sense, is cumulative. Each season adds context. Each mistake sharpens perception. Over time, action becomes quieter, and better timed.

6. What a gardener is

A gardener is someone who works through their body, over time, in close contact with a specific piece of land.

Gardening is a physical practice. It asks for strength, balance, endurance, and restraint. The body doing the work matters. How it moves, how it rests, and how it repeats actions all shape what is possible and what will eventually fail.

A gardener pays attention to causes, not only outcomes. Symptoms are real, and sometimes they need to be addressed directly. Plants die. Soil erodes. Things break. But treating symptoms alone does not change the conditions that produced them. When time and circumstances allow, a gardener works toward those deeper causes, knowing that surface fixes tend to return.

This work is shaped by duration. Gardens change slowly, and so do the people who tend them. Judgment improves through repetition, correction, and return. What looks like intuition is usually familiarity earned over seasons.

To garden is not to control, but to participate. It is a practice of acting, waiting, adjusting, and acting again, guided by attention rather than certainty.

7. Closing: setting the series in motion

The rest of this series will move into tools, plants, and ways of working. Those details matter, and they will come. But they make sense only after understanding the person doing the work.

Gardens are not made by plans alone. They are made by bodies returning to the same place, noticing change, and adjusting over time. The gardener brings their own history, limits, habits, and attention into the space. That shapes the garden as much as soil or sun.

Each reader will arrive here differently. With different obstacles, different experience, different goals. What we share is the work itself, and the desire to make a garden that can hold up over time.

This series begins there.

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.

About the human body, hand tools, and finding what works for you.

Dear Reader,

Like a parachute, Grimsby’s trees suddenly deployed their canopies and we landed mid-spring. It seems just yesterday the Niagara Escarpment was bare and brown, now it’s a sea of green so dense you can no longer see the ridge from below. Even blooms and buzzing bees have awakened. The air is fragrant with lilacs, crabapples and korean spice viburnums. The long weekend, an early one this year, has come and gone. It rained before, and it’s raining again. Gardeners, roll up your sleeves, spring cleanups are on their way out; it’s weeding time!

To some, weeding conjures memories of kneeling in dirt and sweating under a hot, unforgiving sun. To others, it is a sisyphean nightmare of removing plants that magically return the next day. I’m often met with confusion when I say I enjoy it.

I’m not claiming immunity to the dust, sweat and endlessness. There have been many long days since the start of my professional gardener journey. By enjoyment, I mean there are a few things that have made the daily activity sustainable for many years. I may not convince you to love the task, but may offer ways of acclimating to it. Perhaps you’ll even enjoy it from time to time.

In the interest of time, let’s consider two of the most common complaints about weeding: it hurts, and it’s some version of boring. Since even these sub topics are expansive, I’ll deal with the first issue here, and the second in a follow-up post.

The first issue, pain, extends beyond weeding to all of gardening. Aches and pain can make gardening not only difficult, but also impossible. It is no surprise if weeding causes you pain, whether it’s the pinching cramping your hands, kneeling causing pain in your legs, or bending causing strain on your back and neck, you may tend to avoid it.

Because every movement in a garden relies on the body working well, physical pain management has over the years become a priority. I’m no expert in fitness or physio, and every body has different needs, but a few basic ideas have worked well for me, and may help you out on your gardening journey as well.

WARMING UP

Let’s first acknowledge here that gardening, like any sport, is a physical activity. In some ways it’s no different than kicking a ball or throwing a frisbee. Cold muscles don’t respond well to sudden strain and repetitive action, and your body will promptly tell you when you overdid it. That’s why, before every day of gardening, I warm up.

My go-to is yoga in the morning. It combines repetitive stretching with active balancing. A half-hour of it translates to very gentle cardio and strength; just enough to give my muscles a heads up I’ll be using them again shortly. I sometimes follow yoga with cardio, usually rowing or running. This daily practice allows for day-long gardening.

We likely have different gardening requirements. Your garden may only need an hour a week. You may prefer free stretching, pilates or a walk. Scale your warm-up accordingly and find what works for you. The key here is not a specific routine, but that even a little bit of warming up goes a long way. Your body will be less sore after your gardening tasks are done, which also means you will dread it less next time.

THE TOOLS RIGHT FOR YOU

While gardening, consider the tools you’re using. Here in the Niagara we often rely on the usual trowels and dandelion pickers, but there are endless hand tools available. Some allow for standing, such as hoes used for scuffling, or dandelion claws. I’ve explored many options, and have settled on two essentials: a Japanese hori-hori knife, and a ho mi Korean hand hoe. The hori-hori takes care of tap roots, the ho mi pulls up spreading roots. They both have many other uses. Digging, slicing, levering, scuffling… every year I find new ones. That, to me, is the sign of a good tool: Simple design, endless uses. They both have a home in my weeding bucket, and while I work, they rarely leave my side.

I do most of my weeding while kneeling, so a comfortable kneeling pad is a must. I recently found one that is waterproof and wedge-shaped. It can be used one way (thick side forward) on flat ground, and in reverse (thin side forward) on a slope. The filler material is some sort of thick foam, which after a year of use shows no sign of flattening. Its only quirk is noise: when I stand up, it regains its shape with a whoooshhh. I don’t mind. My knees have been very happy lately.

It goes without saying I love my tools. They make weeding easier, and their design brings me joy. It compels me to take care of them. I worry when I lose them (often) by dumping them with a pile of weeds from my weeding bucket into a yard waste bag, from which I fish them out again and again. I am delighted and relieved every time I find them. Lately, I’ve been getting better at keeping them out of the yard waste bags altogether. It’s all a work in progress.

As with all things gardening, tools are personal. You will work magic with some, while others will seem useless. I hope here not to tell you what to do, but to encourage you to bring an open mind and find what works for you.

MAKE STILLNESS A HABIT

So your garden bed is weeded, and because of your warm up, your body is tired but not in pain. What now?

Rest has been on my mind this year. What does it mean? Why do it? If I’m already (mostly) pain free, won’t a wash and a scrub take care of the dirt, and I’ll be on my merry way to other tasks? A proper rest is a hard sell when the sun is still up, especially in May, when gardening tasks pile on quicker than weeds grow after a good rain.

Perhaps a better word for what happens after hours of weeding is Recovery. Something that brings you to a neutral state, so you’re ready for the next task. A Reset. For me, it’s taken many forms, but always involves sitting still for a moment. A cup of tea, jotting down a few notes in my journal, a short meditation or body scan, a light snack. Gardening involves many asymmetrical tasks, and sitting still or gently stretching allows me to release uneven tension before it becomes chronic. It’s not a long rest, just long enough for my body to feel settled in the stillness and return to a balanced state. And then, on with the rest.

I hope this short peek at weeding and its before, during and after, will be of use in making your own garden care easier. I’ve found small changes repeated often make the biggest difference. Experiment, and find what works for you. It’s a dream for gardening to be like the gardens themselves; as enjoyable to do as to be in.

Happy Mid-May!

Yours,

Mélanie