Why We Garden

Sure, we garden to cover the ground, to grow food and flowers, to enhance the value of our homes....but none of that explains why so many of us garden exhaustively, spend way more money and time than makes any sense, and most of all, why we love it so. It's not that the beauty, the fragrance, and the joy of nurturing living things aren't reason enough, but doesn't it feel like the obsession runs deeper than anything we can rationally explain?

 I asked my sister, farmer and impassioned flower-grower (you've never seen sweet peas as glorious as the ones she used to grow on her Clatskanie farm) what kept her gardening all these years... for her the draw is  simply being outdoors, hearing the birds, digging in the dirt, messing about with plants. All lovely, elemental reasons, which led me to this quote from D.H. Lawrence that perhaps explains the compulsion to garden, and its greatest satisfactions, at the deepest level.....

"A vast old religion, which once swayed the earth, lingers in our senses: a religion in which the whole life-effort was to get our lives into direct contact with the elemental life of the cosmos - mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life - to come into the immediate felt contact, and so derive energy, power, and joy."  D.H. Lawrence

Perhaps this ancient religion lingers in the senses of gardeners a little more strongly that that of other folk....I love his phrase "immediate felt contact" which is how I felt when the surprise of a peony I'd never planted peeked out through the Japanese forest grass in my little Buddha garden this weekend....

Comments

[Karen]

I could not agree more. I don't know why it hits some people and not others, though - that's just a mystery, I guess. It's nice to feel so connected with the earth, the seasons, wildlife, and all aspects of nature, even if we fight against them at times!