Tending

Pic—and tomato garden—by Nik Krushnisky

To tend a garden, one has to stay in place. At least for a season. And I’ve never made peace with that idea. I fear being trapped in place—but also long to be rooted.

Perhaps that’s why I love gardens so much. Not just for the flowers or the vegetable yield, but because gardeners are so invested in their little squares of space. So able to call it home.

I also admire the focus. Even—especially?—when it borders on obsession.

Evidence: the tomato plant above. One of forty—yes, 40—that Nik grew from a package of seeds that he got for making a donation to the labs at University of Florida, where Harry Klee is cultivating tomatoes with real flavour. Planted haphazardly at first, the seeds Nik got sprung up in huge numbers, surprising this first-time gardener. If that had happened to me, in my overwhelm, I’d have let them all die. But Nik tended every one, moving the seedlings from apartment windowsill, to a grow shelf and then to the house that he and our daughter have recently moved into, where he’s created a veritable tomato farm in their small Ottawa backyard.

I got to see it myself this past weekend, when I made my first trip away from home in a year.

Urban farming, Evangeline-style.

A stationary year, in which I produced no garden. This, my friends, is how we know my own garden is still just a fantasy.

And soon I’ll be on the move again.

Later this summer, I hope I’ll visit our daughter Evangeline’s garden, which she’s been coaxing from a neglected patch of yard behind her rented house in Halifax. For the past couple of summers, Evangeline and her housemates have planted a few flowers and vegetables.

But this year, the garden has been Evangeline’s devotion. Every week I get a virtual tour of the latest developments—new plantings, a freshly-laid patio, statuary, something coming into bloom.

The fact that she and her crew have done the work themselves, and on a shoestring, make the results all the more marvellous.

A testament to what tending can do.

In Christine’s garden—still life with boots, book and carrot.

I’d like to say that I’ve never turned to gardening, because I’ve been tending other things.

For years, when I’d look at something once green, and now crisping up on my windowsill, I’d remind myself of the five children who were being fed and clothed, and more or less thriving. But I know lots of gardeners who manage to grow both plants and people.

Like Christine McNair, who has created a place for both kids and plants to blossom, in another Ottawa backyard.

And since McNair’s a poet too, I can’t even blame it on my writing.

Many of my favourite gardens are ones I’ve visited in books. Because the gardeners were writers too.

Like The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, which considers the relationship between gardening and writing, through the life and work of the celebrated American poet, Stanley Kunitz.

I love the simplicity of this single sentence biography: “Throughout his life (1905-2006) Stanley Kunitz created poetry and tended gardens.”

The book grew from conversations between the poet-gardener and the author Genine Lentine, as they walked in Kunitz’s garden in Provincetown, Rhode Island. Marnie Crawford Samuelson’s stunning photographs attest to the effects of Kunitz’s love and labours. It seems fitting that the book itself is a collaboration—given what Kunitz expresses about gardening and life.

After all,
we are partners in this land
co-signers of a covenant.

- from “The Snakes of September” by Stanley Kunitz

In Evangeline’s Halifax garden.

Partnership is also vital to Virginia Woolf’s Garden: The Story of the Garden at Monk’s House.

Calling the garden “Virginia’s” is a bit of cheat, perhaps, since it was largely tended by her husband, Leonard Woolf. Virginia’s diaries are full of references to Leonard digging things up, pruning branches, bringing in apples—usually while Virginia is sequestered in her little writing cottage.

The Woolf’s garden has been preserved by the National Trust, and this book is a lush appreciation of both the garden and the couple’s relationship: Leonard planning, planting and nurturing the actual garden, while Virginia brings the garden to life on the page, becoming its biographer.

“Biography” is the word Daniel Coleman chooses to describe his tribute to the patch of land where he’s found himself staying, after a transient childhood.

In Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place, Coleman considers the land as a being—one with history and character, existing in relationship to the people of this place, now called Hamilton, Ontario. Full of curiosity, wonder and respect, Coleman shares what he’s learned from colleagues and friends from Six Nations, as well as from putting his own hands to the earth. He manages to investigate and explore the place without the language of possession, while considering what it means to him to belong.

For now, I’m a visitor to these gardens—at others’ homes or on the page. Happy to be welcomed, and to appreciate what I can in the moment that I’m there. Maybe those are the gardens that suit me best—the ones I can carry with me, as I go.