The Gardeners Way

Crafting, Containers, and Exquisite Moments

Dear Reader,

April is one of the busiest months for flower farming. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been feeling the need to draw inward, put my head down, and focus on what’s right in front of me.

I’ve been listening to the audiobook version of The Creative Act on my drives to the farm, and so much of the artist’s way feels like the gardener’s way.

It’s full of aphorisms, like: An artist should always stay curious. The work of an artist is never really finished.

The way of the gardener is the same. Like art, a garden is an ever-evolving experiment, always changing, always becoming new.

Salpiglossis seedlings

One part of the book talks about the space between having an idea and bringing it to life. That middle place is where most of the work happens. And that work can sometimes feel like running up a long flight of stairs, head down, unsure when you’ll reach the top.

My current stairway: endlessly broadforking

If winter is for dreaming, April is for doing. It’s the crafting phase, the messy, compost-under-fingernails phase, the stairs.

An artist might follow a formula. Working with guidelines, structure, and containers might be key to getting through the work.

For a gardener, the structure is somewhat built in. There’s a container here, and it’s the season itself. There are real timelines. Seeds outgrow their trays, and the window for sowing and transplanting opens and closes.

Just the other day, I was deep in the work—preparing the new beds for transplanting, going through the motions of shoveling compost, loosening up the soil, shaping the beds, and then planting hundreds of plants: salpiglossis, scabiosa, phlox, nicotiana.

I was covered in mud and tired. I leaned down to rest, and at that precise moment, the sun was sinking—golden light poured into the field, lighting the spring raindrops, making everything shimmer with a kind of impossible clarity. The smell of freshly turned soil, of life breaking down—of dark things, and bright things, and dead things, and light—was heavy in the air. I heard the song of the wood thrush for what felt like the first time in my life, the melody tumbling through the air like liquid pearls, a deep-time melody.

There’s the work, but there are also times throughout it that feel like a secret deposit of exquisite moments¹ like these.

The garden is full of them.

Love,

Rowen

1. A nod to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway