For the Love of a Garden
When I was nine or ten, one of the summer chores my sister and I had was to weed my family’s sizable garden. We got up really early at my dad’s suggestion, so we could be finished before it got hot, and we grumpily dragged hoes across the yard to the garden. Neither of us wanted to do this job; neither of us wanted to be up early. We agreed to start at opposite ends of the same row and work toward each other a row at a time, and we got started.
It didn’t take long for disagreements to come and tempers to flare. One of us (probably Kristi) would complain that the other (almost certainly me) was not working as hard. I was almost always the first one to start throwing dirt clods, trying to break them across her back while she was actually pulling weeds, but she always returned them, because my sister does not take my nonsense. When I did actually devote myself to the task at hand, I savagely attacked whatever weeds I found, frustrated at having to be outside where it was rapidly getting hot, and at standing in the dirt, which I hated. I grumbled and shouted and wore myself out by swinging too hard.
The first time I accidentally chopped down a stalk of young corn, I was horrified. I looked wildly around for the wrath of my dad to descend until I remembered that he couldn’t see me because he was inside asleep like a normal person. I hurled the corn plant into a nearby field and covered over the hole, and the next time I felt especially irritated while weeding, I chopped another one down on purpose.
How a delicious garden managed to grow with this kind of bratty caretaking is a wonder, but it’s probably because of my dad. My dad has a green thumb and loves growing things. He carefully tilled the soil and tended the row of gorgeous flowers, as well as the flower beds he built throughout the yard and the flowers hanging from beautiful pots on the carport. He knew all the names and how to treat them, and he scolded me when I carelessly ran over them with the lawn mower.
When I read Andrew Peterson’s book God of the Garden, I thought about all these memories of gardening and my father. The book is part memoir and part love story for trees, for the way nature joins people, and for the idea that since God cares for nature, we should do it too. Andrew Peterson has a lovely, natural writing style and is an excellent storyteller (no surprise if you’ve ever listened to his music), and he writes with obvious love for the trees and plants surrounding the places he has lived and loved and for the God who made them.
As I eagerly inhaled his stories, I realized I regret how much of my life I spent feeling disgruntled that I had to be outside, wishing I could be in the climate controlled house. My parents loved nature, and both of them were children of farmers. I reach back through the memories, and I feel all the love, all the joy in my experiences outside with them, but the knowledge they tried to impart about it all has mostly slipped away.
But it’s never too late to learn.
Reading Peterson’s book was delightful because of his stories of trees and plants throughout his life, but also because of the memories they inspired in me, and the questions I am considering. I don’t have a lot of skill with plants or even yet much patience with weeding, but as I care for this piece of land that’s registered under my name, what should I be doing to make it beautiful? What are the simple ways I can take care of this bit of nature which God has entrusted to me? As the last of the most recent snow fades from my yard, I know that while we are still a long way from it, spring is coming. I want to take these questions and these memories onto my land and see what I can have a hand in creating.
