Putting Down Roots: Not for the Timid
My husband and I both enjoy gardening, but we typically don’t garden at the same time. Our styles and techniques couldn’t be more polar opposite. I’m a timid gardener: I don’t often trust my own intuition about what plants need, and I usually have an uneasy feeling that a neighbor or passerby will see me in the garden and click their tongue at the inept way I’m doing whatever it is I’m doing. The only time I really hit my stride is when attacking a sworn weed-enemy (I’m looking at you, creeping Charlie!). Once I get going, I love removing weeds. Maybe it’s because weeding is a lot like my day job as an editor—there’s something satisfying about taking the excess (words or weeds) and removing their chokehold on the beautiful, colorful bouquet in the center, whether that bouquet is made of flowers or paragraphs.
By comparison, my husband is a confident gardener. When he looks at our garden, he sees a better version of it in his head, then he somehow knows how to make it happen. His laser focus identifies hostas and grasses that have expanded to thick clumps so that he can divide them up into more manageable plant babies. He digs deep beneath the roots, pulls them out, sticks them in a wheelbarrow, then plants them in their new home in a different corner of the garden.
His physical, visceral attack on the daisies, the brown-eyed Susans, and the coneflowers comes across as almost violent to me. How can you take a shovel, disrupt the earth beneath these delicate flowers, and rip them from their home? How do they tolerate the shock of leaving the cool, damp earth, only to have their roots exposed to the unforgiving sun? Then, after a bumpy wheelbarrow ride, how can they possibly endure having their roots squashed back into a gaping hole before being assaulted by frigid water rushing from the garden hose? I shudder to think of it. I rarely stay to watch. I, the timid gardener, can’t take the spectacle
But is this much different when we humans pack up our belongings and move to a new home, a new city, a new job? We feel exposed and tender and a little bruised, and there are moments when we may feel the shift is too much to bear. But slowly, gradually, our roots repair themselves and start reaching down deep toward the center of the earth, simultaneously spreading our arms out, to embrace our new environment. We discover that the corner of the world where we were planted might have been good for a while, but there are so many other beautiful places to establish new roots. We discover we’re hardier than we think: delicate in appearance, but strong and sinewy where it matters.
It never fails. My husband, the violent gardener, knows what he’s doing. He knows that sometimes the most delicate beings are oftentimes the strongest; who are we to underestimate them? Before long, the daisies, the brown-eyed Susans, and the coneflowers are dancing whimsically in the breeze in their new spot. They stand tall, rising to the occasion of being dressed in sweet-smelling mulch contained by crisp, sharp edging. Heads are faced upwards. Faces are open and smiling. Ready to face this new world.
