There is magic in a garden. When the moon shines upon the interior of a golden poppy, transforming the downy petals into a lampshade, when sprays of jasmine dance in the dusk breeze diffusing their dulcet aroma, when a summer’s sultry stillness is broken by the whisper of leaves, I am most ready to believe in fairy tales. In the garden I allow myself to daydream, unfocusing my critical gaze. I let the morning glory vines promise me a regal foyer while the folds of a creamy camellia pull me towards the universe’s center.
From a distance insects and field appear the same. Smudges of color dotting the landscape are all I can see of stem, pistil, corolla. Clouds pick out clumps of green to shade. As a visitor, I’m often drawn to gardens of all types, taking inspiration from their color combinations, their romance, and their poetry. I admire the end-product so to speak: flowers blossoming in season, bushes pruned to visual neatness, trees heavy with fruit. In these spaces I’m always separate from the place I’m observing. The plants are there — in designated zones, carved out by grassy borders and boxwood hedges — and I am here on my carefully curated pebbled path.
Gardening is an altogether different proposition than wandering a garden. Instantly, I’m acutely aware of being in relationship with everything around me: branch, wing, dirt. I notice I’m catching air… <inhale> … pausing. I remember to breathe. I see my exhalation flutter the spine of an euphorbia inches from my face, despite their sturdy character. Something fuzzy and leggy struggles to waddle onto the back of my hand to cross to the next meal. What is my foreign body part to this caterpillar? Squishy obstacle? Monster bridge? Anywhere else I’d fling it off. Here, I wait patiently, flatten my palm so the bug has an easier time. With that small gesture the soil under me unravels mysteries. No longer a homogenous substance, I can distinguish the soft crumbling humus, the sharp edges of quartz crystals, the tiny spheres of fungi. And, I remember again, the worm isn’t part of my world. I am part of theirs.
I am fascinated by the liminal space between what is wild and what is cultivated in the garden. As a gardener, the boundary between my aspirations and nature’s process is continually shifting. I surrendered having a plan after awhile. The studied European landscape architects would not be proud of my handiwork. I let things get messy. A pattern of irregularity I picked up from my ancestral cultivators who accepted that sun, wind, and rain should dictate the composition of their farms. I embrace the strange, the entanglement of shade trees and creepers, the confusion of limbs and roots. This garden is me. Bits and pieces coexisting, needing one another.
Sometimes I get lost in the weeds of reason, desiring to know why this and not that, wanting structure from the chaos, imagining method from the medley. Uncertainty is so painful for my body. Then, I sink into the garden again, ‘my’ garden I call it in my head — as if any portion of sod could be possessed exclusively by me. But, perhaps this is because I am in my sacred cosmos, a paradise where life flows directly from me to the microcosm of carbon, nitrogen, and bacteria and back again. And in this gooey kaleidoscope I find the words once more to create my story.
There is a tending I come to in the garden, that I often eschew in my daily routine. To care is to bear the burden of risk. To open oneself to the grief of loss, the hurt of betrayal, the labor of intimacy. Amid this flourishing habitat I agonize over the browning leaf, I mourn the cracked egg fallen from the unrigged nest. I water and I trowel and I sow, knowing full well none of it will endure. I learn how to use my fingers and twists of wrist to provide safety for another. There’s no clean living here, there’s no not being terrified of approaching storms. Still, my heart melts a little more each time I’m gardening. I begin to belong. I begin to not want anything of the moment. I begin to be enough.
Bespoke Traveler Note:
Poet scholar Camille Dungy diversifies her garden and contemplates the relationship between herself and the land she lives on in “Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden.” Available at your local bookstore or through the bookshop.org link below:
Thank you for listening. “Enchanted Garden” was written and narrated by Atreyee Gupta. For more travel tales, head to our website at www.bespoketraveler.com.
