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Flora: Why We Garden

Posted on November 25, 2008November 25, 2008 by Staff

Photo by Ken Moore. Evelyn Sims holding a native oregano for her garden.Ken Moore

When asked, “Why do you garden?” Evelyn McNeill Sims was at first a bit startled as she leaned back in her seat, and after a few moments of thoughtful silence responded, “Well, that’s just what you do! I can’t imagine not doing it!”

That sentiment was expressed last spring, a few days before I presented the Botanical Garden’s 9th Annual Evelyn McNeill Sims Native Plant Lecture, an annual celebration of wildflowers endowed by Evelyn’s daughter and son-in-law, Nancy and Ed Preston, in 1990, on the occasion of Evelyn’s 90th birthday.

The topic for this year’s special gathering was “Why We Garden, A Conversation,” based on Jim Nollman’s book Why We Garden.

Timid at first to participate in a public conversation, folks at the gathering slowly warmed up to sharing their “Why We Garden” feelings. They described gardening for the beauty of flowers, fragrance of herbs, shade of trees, health of exercise, tastes of fresh fruit and vegetables on the table and attracting wildlife. Then they began sharing deeper feelings of gardening “to forget everything, to concentrate on nature, for sanity and peace, for bliss, for recovery from sorrow, to temper anger and to touch life and death in nature.” Wow, that was some mighty honest sharing about gardening.

Now returning to Nollman’s book, I find myself frequently rereading it, particularly the first chapter describing a “one-tree garden.” His description of selecting the perfect spot for a single tree in one’s garden explores the real meaning of gardening.

You may easily relate to walking around with a plant in hand considering where it feels just right to plant it. Nollman, in trying to site his little redwood tree, rescued from a neglected corner of his local nursery, thought back to what was growing on the site hundreds of years ago. In reflecting on what primitive humans may have dwelt there, he moved forward in imagining the same site when that little tree would be a giant, shading his great, great grandchildren.

For Nollman, “A garden is the place millions of people go to touch the earth, to smell the flowers, to use some of that fabled human brain power in the cause of participating with natural processes in the place they call home.… Gardening encourages a hands-on complicity with local nature.… It reflects an ecological longing by people everywhere to recognize themselves as an integral component of the ecosystem they happen to inhabit.”

Evelyn Sims vividly remembers her hands in the soil as a child growing up on the family homeplace.
She still has her hands in the soil, planting and tending roses, herbs and wildflowers in her garden just outside her sunny door at Carol Woods.

Much of my own gardening time is occupied by walks in the woods and cruising the yard for what nature has planted. Frequently, I kneel down to touch the soil and examine the leaf litter, much as Evelyn caringly tends the soil around her plants. We are both, without really knowing it, reaching far back in the evolution of human experience to a time when we shared a cooperative intimacy with the earth we call home.

At this time of thanksgiving, whether we garden on a window ledge or in the ground itself, let’s take time out to reflect on the deeper meanings of Evelyn Sims’ “Gardening is just what you do!” During this really busy period, take a child with you outside into garden or woods and remember to kneel down, feel the soil and give thanks for the earth we call home.

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