I got up early this morning to plant basil. It had been a long time since I had grown anything from seed—the extent of my gardening in recent years had been restricted to tending my potted herbs. But when I found myself in the parking lot of a nursery yesterday, memories of a childhood spent digging furrows in the soil came back to me in a rush, and I decided I wanted to buy something to plant in the ground. Basil seemed a good choice, and brought back its own memories of my mother standing in front of a food processor for hours, making jar after jar of pesto in an effort not to waste any of the once-again-overzealous basil harvest.
Growing up, my father owned a gardening business. He had spent most of his working life as a gardener, first apprenticed to the groundskeepers of wealthy Marin County estates in his younger life, and later finding clients of his own in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our own land was a complex of test gardens which he grew to prepare for planting his current clients’ estates, mixed in with beds which he grew for his own pleasure, perhaps to remind himself of gardens from his early days as an apprentice.
For young me, nothing was more interesting than spending time working in the dirt, preferably alongside my father. I almost chronicle my childhood in terms of the garden. My first words were “dig, dig, dig.” I vividly remember the day when my dad gave me my own garden bed to plant what I wanted in, then took me to the nursery to select the plants I wanted. Among others, I selected an enormous allium called “Big Onion,” which grew a flower stalk as tall as I was and burst into a blue-violet sphere of blooms at the top. To five-year-old me, it was the pinnacle of magnificence.
It was also a lot of work. In retrospect, I’m sure my father spared me the bulk of the labor, but I retain the impression of working hard at pulling up seemingly-endless weeds, making sure to grasp them at the base and pull them up slowly to avoid breaking off their roots and leaving them in the soil. My father, too, spent long hours and hot days working the combination of our land and his clients’. It’s easy to romanticize the garden, but at the end of the day, it’s manual labor—and a lot of it.
It was the harvest, however, that was the most fun. I would all but sprint out into the garden, bucket in hand, to collect pecks and bushels of peaches and shell peas. I would return to the house with my bounty, beaming over the contribution to the family’s well-being which I had produced with my hands. It was a wonderful feeling.
Not everything bore fruit, though. The orchards and vegetable gardens were typically bountiful, but the flower beds, the ornamental trees, and the yew hedges—they stood stately for a time, then grew barren or died altogether in mid-autumn. They were beautiful while they lasted, and often served my father’s purpose of informing him of how these plants functioned in a garden and what the timing was of their flowering and foliating. To me, however, there was always a contrast between those plants that yielded a tangible, gather-able product, and those that did not.
Today, living in the city, I don’t often take the time to remember how these experiences shaped my formative years. The feeling of running my fingers through the dirt, however, reminded me of where I come from. My life is very different today from what it was back then—I spend much more time thinking about the way value is projected onto plants than I do growing them with my hands. As I go forward, however, I am guided by the roots of where I came from. As I gain new perspectives today, I can’t forget the earlier ones I have gained over the years.
And, at the risk of sounding too cheesy, the lessons of my life in the garden are still applicable to my life today. I work, and work hard. In the end, not everything bears fruit, but I still look for value in its existence. Above all, I think that my very first motto was a good one for myself: “Dig, dig, dig.”