How I became a gardener
Summer Sundays are introspective. I spent the last one sitting in our garden, eyes half closed, half open, watching the halo of pollinators crowning the towering, flowering Joe Pye weed.
I’m attempting to master the difficult art of sitting still. I’ve already vacated my lawn chair to get a little table, then iced tea, a large book on charcoal barbecuing, and a second, smaller one on the tiny lives of mosses. Eventually persuaded by lethargy, I observe the want of anything else pass by like the sparse clouds dawdling across the blue sky.
Beyond Joe Pye’s blooms is a deciduous tree canopy. Both are cloud shaped; one light purple, the other dark green, synchronously swaying in the breeze. I’ve been looking for a way to introduce this gardening blog, a space meant for answers to the many gardening questions I field as a professional gardener. And here, in the synchronicity of clouds, the large green one, the small fuzzy purple one, and the cloudy thoughts floating across my mind, I’m finding a hint of a beginning.
I didn’t intend on becoming a gardener. If you asked my younger self what she wanted to do when grown up, she might have said to write film music. Or perhaps to bake. The future was far and filled with endless options. Time passed. I wrote music, I baked for a coffeehouse, but the wind blew, the clouds flew across the everblue sky, and after seven years of study and work in Waterloo, I moved to Niagara.
There is something about Niagara; the air, the glacially deposited soil, the inescapable microclimates of the Escarpment… it makes magic happen in gardens. Just take a stroll down quaint Niagara-on-the-Lake on a summer evening, a walk along the plentiful orchards on fall apple days, or even in the middle of winter, clinging to dislodged escarpment boulders along the Bruce Trail, see evergreen ferns enjoying a sunny winter noon. Niagara’s gardens are impossible to ignore. I fell in love.
I found my way to a college at the base of the Escarpment, an introduction to caring for plants. Planting, growing, hedging, splitting, transplanting, designing gardens. I grew my own business, Mélanie’s Gardens; a name and frame for the gardens I care for.
The sun hides behind a cloud, the clouds of pollinators crowning Joe Pye dissolve into shade. The bees are still there, I just can’t see them. I know where I was, where I am, but how did I get here? What was the southerly wind which carried me here, why did I stay? And, in the spirit of lethargic introspection, what is love, anyway?
Like the purple Joe Pye clouds juxtaposed with the giant green cloudy canopy, gardening made sense to me. I transplanted the time-based art of writing music into time-based planting designs, adapted the craft of kneading dough to working soil. But it was all transferable, what did I unearth in gardens I hadn’t found before?
Gardening breathes to the rhythm of seasonality. There is only so much time for spring cleanups. Seedlings waiting for last frost. Deadheading to be done before seeds ripen. Once winter comes, so comes rest, a balance known by nature since the dawn of plants. My thoughts follow suit, ideas followed by reflection, clouds by sky.
Perhaps that’s what made me a gardener, the space between doing, when between garden work I watch the world unfold around me. Seeing it all buzzing, floating like clouds across the still blue sky. I still don’t know what it is, but I’m in it… in love.
So, you ask, how did I become a gardener? In the passage of clouds, I seem to have found some clarity. Wanting to create, I grew a garden. Needing rest, I set down a lawn chair on a sunny summer Sunday and stayed still until the sun set and the evening mosquitos ushered me back inside.