Mud caked on her shoes, wet up to her knees, wearing an absolutely filthy old white gardening shirt and requisite floppy hat.

Mea culpa! Folks, this is me last summer — dragging a heavy, potted bush on my grandson’s skateboard to its new destination (my, what a unflattering portrait!).

Indeed, I go to great lengths in this quest to create my own personal Garden of Eden.

When I garden, I leave tools in my wake (good thing they have red handles which are easily spotted!), empty pots, stacks of spent verdure from crowded beds. It is not uncommon for me to lose track of at least one garden glove which usually, on a good day, turns up under a pile of debris and on a contrary day never turns up. Thus, I have a bucket in the shed half-filled with mismatched gloves. Yup, one can never tell when a spare glove might come in handy! Thankfully, my local hardware store sells great leather garden gloves at a reasonable price.

My closet contains a collection of disreputable garden hats – cloth, straw, all wide-brimmed. Great for sun protection and camouflaging bad hair! But no matter the hat, my hair inevitably becomes decorated with bits of twigs and leaves. After a long day of gardening, the proclivity to bash my head on random objects cannot be disguised. My daughter sighs, “Mom, it looks like you walked into a tree branch again!” Which I did. Ouch.

Single-minded gardeners like me collect all sorts of interesting items to help actualize a personal oasis — decrepit garden clothes, cherished old hand tools brim full of memories, shovels and garden forks and pitch forks, that especially narrow transplanting spade which belonged to my father, repurposed five-gallon paint buckets, rusty wheelbarrows, and even a discarded skateboard belonging to my grandson. Nonetheless, owning all the right implements never guarantees a successful garden. 

In the end, if you would garden well, you must SEE. You must get messy, get in the trenches with your beloved plants, delve deep —
     plunge your hands into the soil
     experience their vegetative lives at eye-level,
     learn their stories, truly see and begin to love those
     dark and secret subterranean realms where miracles happen.

In so doing, you find that soil quality matters.

On my little plot of land in Arvada, I learned long ago that the soil strongly inclines toward — ahem — heavy. A euphemism for pretty darn lousy. Dig deep enough, and you come up with pure yellow clay suited for a potter’s wheel. That any plant will grow in such muck is purely miraculous.

Not so vegetables, which steadfastly refused to thrive in my garden without major intervention, in spite of talking nicely to them and loudly singing classical music out the kitchen window. During my earthy, back-to-basics years, even though I dug in loads of manure and compost, carrots came out of the ground squat and crooked — interesting but definitely weird.  In desperation, one year I contravened accepted practice and dug in several tons of sand to loosen up the clay-based topsoil. It worked! My garden prospered in friable soil and brought forth riotous, exuberant fruit in season.

Over 42 years, my garden has known may faces (a gardener’s prerogative) — developing from mostly grass with a few modest vegetables to commodious double-dug, raised veggie beds and a yard bordered by trees and bushes. Finally, when I embarked upon a full-time career outside the home, my style morphed from veggies to easy-care perennial beds accented by pots full of bright annuals. And — yes! — more bushes and trees. (My son-in-law, who sometimes gets the brunt of planting large, heavy, woody-type items for me, has technically banned me from planting more bushes, but what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him . . . )

Gardening is a fluid pursuit, the gardener attaining beauty not just by order and planning but by solicitude — observing growth habits, skillful pruning, intimate knowledge of root and stem and leaf and bud — plus, for me, a distinctly laissez-faire approach, with the result that my garden looks a bit wild. And I exult in wild!

Foliage intermingles
scarlet bee balm nudges yellow yarrow
splashy pots of geranium and petunias punctuate low-growing sedum
     as it creeps mysteriously under roses
Cool caladium waves in the shadows

Bushes become tall hedges
leafy tree branches arch over lazy afternoon picnics
Ash and hawthorne join crooked fingers overhead
     in intricate latticework

My granddaughter kindly refers to this messiness as my “English garden.” Purposely, I allow perennials go to seed or spread via rootlets. Thus, each year I have a succession of hardy little sprouts coming up hither and thither — between stepping stones, in the grass, among the roses, in the mulch – superabundant LIFE! And I simply cannot waste that heavenly vitality! Jupiter’s beard, lamb’s ear, striped grass, cinnamon vine, valerian, Russian sage, Bluebeard, and — rolling off the tongue! — cerastium tomentosum, commonly known as “snow in summer” (I do love the Latin plant names) – the list goes on. Without fail, every growing season I ply my long-suffering friends and family with pots crowded full of eager gleanings, tiny leaves held aloft in prayerful couplets.

I will never get over gardening.
My father was a gardener.
I am a gardener.

My heavenly Father —
     Jehovah God
Adonai, Yeshua, Lord and Savior
is The Gardener

With an infinite solicitude that conquered my heart –
El Roi saw me
     delved deep in search of my soul
     loved my dark and shabby and secret places
     got in the trenches with me, experienced my life and learned my story
El Shaddai paid the ultimate price
     spent His very life’s blood for me
transplanting me from muck into the richest of soils
that I might become a green tree
planted by rivers of water
bringing forth fruit
in season *

In the Restoration of All Things, I want nothing more than a plot of land – a Garden! – nothing more than to be a gardener.

What better way to spend eternity?

* Psalm 139 and Psalm 1

**Visit my other website – RuachArt.com – where I share my adventures in watercolor.

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,
the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world.”
– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity